Michael's Screensaver

A (growing) collection of screensavers made by yours truly.

Live Demo | Download

About

A screensaver app written in Rust, using wgpu for rendering, and egui for the config GUI

Currently, it consists of 3 screensavers:

• Snow - A couple of hills, with snow slowly falling.
• Balls - Balls Bouncing off of each other and off the screen sides. Highly configurable, with different color modes and presets. Turns out, that this is also a pretty decent gas simulation (since the balls follow the same rules as gas particles)
• 3D Model - A 3D model simply spinning and bobbing up and down. the apple and the shark models are made by me, and the third one is taken from the hit detective game Disco Elysium

Usage

Any Ol' Web Browser*

• Go to https://mhanak.net/screensaver
• Enjoy

*Any browser** that supports WebGL

**I know WebGL doesn't work on Chromium on Linux by default

Windows

• Download the michaels-screensaver.scr file from the Releases section on the right
• Once downloaded, right-click the file -> Install
• Done!
• If you want to configure it, either do it through settings, or right-click -> Configure

Linux

To Play With It

• In the directory you have downloaded the binary run:
  • ./michaels-screensaver - to run it
  • ./michaels-screensaver --help - for the list of commands (also tells you where the config file is located)
  • ./michaels-screensaver --config -for the config GUI

To Use as an Actual Screensaver

• ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
• Try this script (I may eventually build that into the screensaver)

macOS

• does not and probably never will not work as an actual screensaver. as far as I know macOS handles screensavers differently, and even if I did figure out how to do that, I do not have a device I could test it on.

Building

Native

cargo run --release - the compiled binary should be somewhere in the target/release folder

Web Assembly

wasm-pack build --target web --release - the generated folder pkg together with index.html and index.css are needed for the web version. ./serve.py (or python serve.py) - run it locally (with cache disabled)

to do both on linux run if wasm-pack build --target web --release; then ./serve.py; fi

Configuration

Other Than the configuration GUI, you can configure the screensaver in a couple ways

Config File (native)

the config file is located in C:\Users\UserName\AppData\Roaming\michaels-screensaver.toml on Windows, or ~/.config/michaels-screensaver.toml on Linux

# contents of default_config.toml

#avaliable screensavers: snow, balls, 3d_model
screensaver = "balls"
fullscreen = true

[snow]
snowflake_count = 7500

[balls]
speed = 0.1
count = 10000
size = 0.05
#random - a random color, it changes when balls bounce off of each other
#color - a flat color.
#temperature - makes it so the color's hue depends on a given particle's velocity. may impact perfromance
#infection - one ball is chosen, it has a different color to every other ball and it is infected. ever ball that touches an infected ball becomes infected itself. after all balls get infected a new one is chosen
color_mode = "infection"
color = "#ff00ff"
#makes it so the opacity of a ball is dependent on the ammount of balls in the surrounding regions. if the region size is lower, the contrast will be higher
show_density = true
#used for the density color mode. the determines what density is considered "high"
target_display_density = 10.0
#for optimisation's sake, the space is divided up into regions, of which the size depends on the ball size, and this value. increase this value for spare simulations, decrease it for dense ones
#do not decrease it under 0.5, otherwise the simulation will start glitching
#if you want to learn more look up "spatial hashing"
region_size = 1.0
#whether the balls should slow down/speed up if the average speed is higher/lower than the configured speed.
correct_ball_velocity = true

[3d_model]
#avaliable models: apple, shark, kim_kitsuragi
model = "apple"
model_scale = 1.0
spin_speed = 1.0
bounce_speed = 1.0
bounce_height = 0.2

URL Parameters (web)

The parameters are converted into a TOML and then loaded as standard config, because of that every value visible above can be changed through the url (some of them, like fullscreen are ignored in the web version). the screensaver parameter should always be before all the screensaver options.

The parameters should be structured like so:

https://example.com/?screensaver=screensaver_name&parameter1=value&parameter2=value

so for example https://mhanak.net/screensaver/?screensaver=balls&size=0.1&color_mode=color&color=%23ff0055&show_density=false gets turned into such TOML file:

screensaver = "balls"
[balls] # this gets added because of the previous line.
size = 0.1
color_mode="color"
color = "#ff0055" # '#' was encoded using  %23
show_density = false

keep in mind that as long as this project is in development, there is a chance that the way it handles URL parameters may change, breaking created links in the process.