In addition to supporting multiple screens, this has many bugfixes and usability improvements including on-screen help (press F1), history, fewer on-screen errors (press F2 to see them), and better security.
It works fine if you have a single screen, and works well for many dual-screen users, but does seem to have some performance issues and may even crash:
http://electricsheep.org/pre/electricsheep-2.7b20f.exe
Please let us know what happens if you try it good or bad. Include your operating system, your graphics hardware, and your display setup in your comment.
Thank you to our developers and everyone who submitted bug reports!
what's news?
f will preview on multiple
f will preview on multiple screens (vs e).
Working good... mostly
Hey thanks so much for this dual monitor release! My 22" widescreen monitors never seemed so beautiful and engaging.
Anyways, I'm running Windows 7 x64 on an older Athalon 64 x2 (2.2GHz Dual Core), with 4GB of DDR-333 RAM, and an ATI 4670 graphics card.
Both monitors are setup in expanded desktop in Windows and I set up electric sheep for clone mode. I like seeing the same sheep twice instead of two different ones at once... it's better eye candy!
I still cannot connect to the server to download new sheep. I've been using just the sheep packs for quite some time now, and although 5GB of sheep is a lot I could always use more. I know there were some server issues a while ago, are those still prevalent or am I getting the no connected error for some other reason?
Also, is there any plan for expanding a single sheep across BOTH monitors? I can do this manually right now if I run ES from the dialog box and expand the window across both monitors but it is not as professional as an integrated solution.
Anyways, thanks for all the hard work everyone, ES is so close to being perfect.
glad to hear the dual-screen
glad to hear the dual-screen is working.
about downloading, what do you see if you press F2? it should work.
I can't remember the exact
I can't remember the exact message, but it was an error connecting to server sort of message (It didn't say anything about using a free one)
I was also having problems getting the screen saver to start on an idle system, it ended up being a problem getting ANY screen saver to start. I'm not sure what I did to fix it, but its working now. Since it started running as a screen saver and not just from the configuration dialog, it has been connecting to the server.
A few things I have noticed:
1) EDIT: Nevermind. It seems voting on sheep makes sheep download faster/connect to server faster/less waiting between downloading sheep.
2) The first night that I ran ES overnight everything seemed to be working I even rendered 15 frames! However, since that night I have not rendered a single frame.
3) Is ES working even if I have my monitors blank? I turn ES on after 1 minute and blank the monitors after 30 minutes (Computer in the bedroom). Will I be downloading/uploading sheep and rendering frames with blanked monitors?
4) Thanks so much for ES. Now with dual monitor support I can say life is good. If only I could get ES to run as a visualizer in Foobar2000.....
new mac prerelease
2.7b19a2
fixes bug where the installer crashes if there's a space in the user name.
yey!
logged in-- yes!
runs ok-- yes!
installer pops up some weird obtuse message asking me to cancel/retry/ignore -- only ignore did the trick but everything seems fine.
only problem: slow. :( and my machine's not horrid:
ran old version fine.. ?
1) make sure you have the
1) make sure you have the latest drivers, and if that doesn't work then
2) try turning on DirectDraw in the advanced settings
but the installer error is pretty disturbing, it really should not happen. what was it?
got the latest
got the latest drivers.
directdraw had little to no effect, perhaps even making it a bit slower. other ideas?
installer error-- i couldn't reproduce it. second install went without a hitch. but it was a very weird error. it happened in the visual c++ redistributable section. the dialog that appeared did not give any details except that it was related to the prerelease version. didn't say what the error was. perhaps related to http://community.electricsheep.org/node/257 which seems to suggest it has more to do with my end than yours.
outside of the issues raised above and though i am a BIT bummed about the slowness, i am elated to see some new sheep in the flock. thanks again, spot!
you are welcome. i am
you are welcome. i am surprised that DD mode doesn't do it for you. i would like to investigate -- could you turn on logging, let it run for a second, and then send it to us? thanks.
Mac dual screen: immediate crash
The v2.7b19a standalone app crashes immediately after launch; the System Preferences.app crashes as soon as the Electric Sheep saver is selected.
Running a Mac Pro quad 2.93 GHz, ATI Radeon 4870, dual 24" displays (1920x1200 resolution), Mac OS X 10.6.2.
The crash report shows the following (excerpt):
Exception Type: EXC_CRASH (SIGABRT)
Exception Codes: 0x0000000000000000, 0x0000000000000000
Crashed Thread: 3
Application Specific Information:
abort() called
Love this screen saver, hope you can fix it. :)
P.S. The version info on the "Electric Sheep.saver" bundle says 2.7b15, rather than 2.7b19, which is what it says on the installer package.
P.P.S. Both standalone app as well as screen saver do work fine on my second user account with administrative privileges, which my normal account doesn't have. Deleting the preferences didn't change anything about that, nor did giving administrative privs to my normal account.
What was your last Electric
What was your last Electric Sheep screen saver version installed? The bundle version must be 2.7b19 (maybe even 2.7b19a if you download the latest installer). Maybe the installation did not go well, can you try to reinstall? Maybe delete manually the old Electric Sheep.saver and reinstall?
Isn't it even possible, that you have two Electric Sheep.saver installed on your machine? One in /Library/Screen Savers and one in /Users/<username>/Library/Screen Savers? Can you check that?
Thanks.
The last version before the
The last version before the current one was probably 2.7b15. If it's really important I'll check backups once I get home.
As I like my screensavers in ~/Library/Screen Savers I moved it there (from /Library/Screen Savers/) after installation, so I'm pretty confident I don't have two versions installed. I also tried manually extracting the Archive.pax.gz from inside the installer package.
Here at work the bundle displays the right version (v2.7b19a), and the screensaver works wonderfully. Maybe I did something stupid at home after all, despite the double checks. I'll try again once I get home. Cheers for the help!
It is possible that we have a
It is possible that we have a bug in installer when installing over older version, despite my tests.
Can you please pay attention to which steps you'll take when you'll retest it at home? Just to have some reproducible sequence leading to the problem?
Thanks.
Fixed
Back at home, the bundle shows the correct version number in the Finder's get info window. Come to think of it, it may have been a caching problem with Path Finder, at times it doesn't display the file system content totally up-to-date (I ran Disk Warrior over all partitions to make sure everything is in order).
The proper version number also shows in the Desktop & Screen Savers preference pane. Still, as soon as I select it, the System Preferences crash. I then removed it from ~/Library/Screen Savers (and also the standalone app from /Applications), downloaded it again and reinstalled the package normally, into /Library/Screen Savers.
It still crashes for my usual (non-admin) account, and still works fine for my admin account as well as a fresh (non-admin) account I created for testing purposes.
As the problem lay with my account I searched for "sheep" in my home directory, and found the culprit. For some reason I had a dead alias at ~/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep. As soon as I removed it, the preference pane wouldn't crash any more, and it would create a folder there instead.
So we can say that it works?
So we can say that it works?
Yes, it works
Apologies for the late reply, I was away for a week.
Yes, it works wonderfully on a single display (I assume dual screen support isn't implemented in the Mac version yet).
Thanks a lot for your work.
dual-screen should work with
dual-screen should work with this prerelease.
Windows dual
opteron 1222 dual core (3.4 gig?), 8 gb ram, vista 64, geforce gtx260. Dual screen monitors, 21" w and 19".
The screensaver window just pops up on the larger screen in the upper left hand area. Hasn't shown up on the second monitor. Will be upgrading to win7 soon so this may be a moot point. Love the program btw.
thanks. in your advanced
thanks. in your advanced settings what do you have for "Display Monitor" and "MultiDisplay Mode"?
EDIT: download the new version b20e first.
reinstalled
reinstalled v.b20e. That was the one I was using in the first place, figured a fresh install would do it. Advanced settings for Display and multidisplay are 1 (as the tooltip said for two monitors) and multidisplay mode is set to Individual (for a different sheep on each monitor) Ive tried shared and single mode and still i can't get two monitors working, even with the same image.
Forum tag, you're it.
Linux
Thank you for good news.
I'm running sheeps dual-desktop at work. I use linux there, so I hope you bring this finally to this platform too...
Currently 2 separate sheeps run on separate screens... How will dual-desktop support differ from this setup?