Q. Is it possible to create my own screensavers without all this programming effort?
A. Yes, but with limitations/costs
Most screensaver designers are for displaying a series of bitmaps on the screen or video with lots of different transitions and effects. However, the following designers are more orientated towards a more complex screensaver.
Fandango provides a very powerful but easy to use interface to create a large variety of screensavers. Over 20 different examples are provided along with graphics and sounds resources. Fandango allows the control over foreground, background and sets of actors. This allows lots of different sprite based animations to be done along with text and shape based animation. The examples are both imaginative and informative and the tutorial is easy to follow. The screensaver comes with the ability to do a preview in a web page and several examples are available on their web site. Fandango is produced by Digital Workshop the makers of Paint Shop Pro. As of Feb 2001 the Fandango web site is of a poor quality but this should in no way reflect on the quality of this tool for creating screensavers.
An example screensaver with rotating dice in a starfield pattern.
Source
Code Zip file containing AVI file and FDG file. N.B. You will need
to select the dice actor and re-load the AVI file.
Setup A setup file generated by Fandango which will install the single DICE SCREENSAVER.SCR file
Screensavers constructed with Fandango may have problems with multiple screen setups
This kit allows you place text, images and sounds on the screen and position them as you desire. It also has a wide variety of transition effects for the images and text.
If you find this too limiting then you can use MindWorks, ANIMAL scripting language which allows a much wider range of features. I think this is summed up quite nicely in the manual:
Applets written in ANIMAL can do things like play sounds, display pictures, draw lines, rectangles, polygons and other shapes, display text, manage simple animation and do the usual string and mathematical functions that programs are usually called upon to deal with. ANIMAL lacks pretty much all the complicated aspects of more disturbing programming languages ANIMAL will not require that you have even a cursory understanding of memory allocation, handles, pointers, hooks, callbacks, thunks, segments, sectors, structs, headers, resources or floating point numbers.
The Mindworks kit is free to evaluate but without the appropriate key you will not be able to create screensavers which will run on other people's hardware.
There are no runtime costs associated with the kit, for more details see the MindWorks site
This package provides the facility for sprite animation on a static background. A lot of the AfterDark screensavers work on this principle. There are several good example savers and a tutorial. The animation you can do is quite sophisticated without being difficult to use. For example you can mask characters so that they do not blot out the backdrop (like transparent gifs) and this can then be used as a collision mask for the moving sprites.
A cut down version for producing only After Dark Modules is bundled as part of the Twisted Screensavers and Afterdark Games set.
The draw backs of this package are it is not suited if you want to do something other than sprites, the size of the files generated is quite large and now compatibility issues with newer operating systems.
Other screensavers builders are available from Screen saver jungle.
