Blue Matrix screensaver (and howto)

[Sight Unseen]

Everything on my PC is blue. I started putting it together right around the time I first saw Avatar, and then the reason for it being blue changed completely, I sort of dedicated it to my love of the Na'vi I guess, idk. Well, the GTK theme came together, I installed 4 blue LED 120mm fans in the PC, and I went crazy and used like half a bag of blue LEDs from digikey replacing LEDs on my monitors, computer, optical mouse, keyboard, xbox (*grumble* smd, lots of work), router, switch, server, speakers... the list goes on. The one thing I needed was a decent blue screensaver that has lots of movement, because my TV is Twist Nematic LCD based, and will get imprinted with whatever is displayed on it for more than about an hour. So a slideshow of Neytiri was out of the question (burn in... but mostly parent disapproval because they think Neytiri is basically softcore pron ...anyways) I have to lock my screen with it.

So something subtle... The Matrix. Not Avatar based, but decent anyway. Then I went a step further... The Matrix, In Blue. So I got the source for xscreensaver-5.10 from the site and started reverse-engineering.

Keep reading... I'm getting to the code. If you want to do this, go ahead and download the source here and untar. http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/xscr...er-5.11.tar.gz

xscreensaver includes two different versions of "The Matrix", but I am Interested in the 3D one, glmatrix, with camera rotation and a few other goodies. So after a few hours, I found that the color of the screensaver is controlled by 2 different things.

The file ./hacks/images/matrix3.xpm is split into the textures for the matrix glyphs. and is a color .xpm at 512x598, with no transparency. Now I know what you're thinking. Just alter the color of the image in GIMP/Photoshop/Whatever and you're done! Yes, that's one of the steps, switch the blue and green channels using your favorite image manipulation software (I use the GIMP).

It's more complicated than that. Since the image has no alpha channel, the code is really clever. It takes the value for the green channel and uses it for alpha. If you were to compile the source code right now, your glyphs would be almost invisible.

In the source file ./hacks/glx/glmatrix.c, this action is directed by this code:

rpos = 0, gpos = 8, bpos = 16, apos = 24;

for (y = 0; y < xi->height; y++)
for (x = 0; x < xi->width; x++)
{
unsigned long p = XGetPixel (xi, x, y);
unsigned char r = (p >> rpos) & 0xFF;
unsigned char g = (p >> gpos) & 0xFF;
unsigned char b = (p >> bpos) & 0xFF;
unsigned char a = ~g;
g = 0xFF;
p = (r << rpos) | (g << gpos) | (b << bpos) | (a << apos);
XPutPixel (xi, x, y, p);
}
}

In the bold lines, change "unsigned char a = ~g;" to "unsigned char a = ~b;", and "g = 0xFF;" to "b = 0xFF;"; save and exit. That's it. a 2 character change, and now the code uses the blue channel value to control alpha when loading textures into graphics ram instead of green.

now for compiling, you know the drill.
sudo apt-get build-dep xscreensaver
cd into the source
./configure
make
hold breath
sudo make install
drink some kind of cold beverage

Results: (not in full screen here, it will be full screen when installed)


All this was done in Ubuntu Lucid 10.04, amd64. If anyone wants it, I could upload a precompiled binary and source code to go with it, but that would be a tad overkill for such a small change.

[Patrice Maire]

Very cool!!!!

[Loverofnature]

can i get this matrix screensaver in Mac/windows?

[Human No More]

Impressive, I like blue

I'll have to take a look at it and see if I can get it to work in windows when I'm a bit less tired.

Edit: quick look later and I doubt it... I'll put it on my Linux install though, not that that really gets that much use

[Eltu]

Ubuntu ftw.

[stdout]

Originally Posted by Eltu

Ubuntu ftw.

Isn't it great I'll have to reinstall Windows to play Crysis again, but for the foreseeable future it'll be Ubuntu exclusively on my PC

As for the screensaver, once I've learned C I'll take a look at the code myself.

[X.,.Pandora.,.X]

well....i was going to do it, but idk half of what you posted...

[Sight Unseen]

Originally Posted by X.,.Pandora.,.X

well....i was going to do it, but idk half of what you posted...

If you use linux and have a dual core processor, i have the linux equivalent of exe's if you want them, premodded.

[Gunny]

^^ditto! hahahahaha went right over my head pretty much XD

[Sight Unseen]

I just found a similar, really, really similar tutorial here. It appears someone beat me to it. (note the date)
The Matrix Is Blue | Lalit Kapoor I tried doing it this way first, but on my 6500k monitor, the glyphs still looked rather green because the green channel is still the brightest in the texture file. In addition, green still controls the alpha channel, which may cause problems later. If you wanted your glyphs, say, hot pink, you would replace the alpha = green line with some simple math to find the average of all three rgb values, and use that for alpha. You can also do some crazy things with the xpm file, like changing the characters to binary, chinese, etc. Just adding some thoughts to this old tutorial.

Also you'll notice I posted a comment there. Oops, 2010, not 2011. No edit button .