Mac Client Release Notes

http://electricsheep.googlecode.com/files/electricsheep-2.7b24.dmg

Open the DMG then double click to install (requires OSX 10.4 or better).  It should select itself as your current screensaver, and also put an icon for the application on the desktop.  If not, open the System Preferences / Desktop & Screensaver and choose "Electric Sheep" from the list on the left (not "ElectricSheep" without a space, because that's the old version).

If you have trouble, see the help page.

Misc

Couple things:

I noticed with this version, b24, my "playcounts" have reverted to zero. I mean, either that or it's not reading the logfile or whatever, correctly - it's saying "Played for the first time" for things I know I've played many times before, such as sheep #244.05157. The weird thing is, after having installed it yesterday, it's not even saving the fact that I've played certain sheep *since* then. So something is off here. My prior version was b22; I'm running it on a Mac.

Secondly, I like to choose when to send my fan into overdrive, not have ES kick in everytime the lappy is inactive; thus I've chosen a very lo-CPU screensaver -- I mainly these days run ES in standalone mode. So... when I install ES, I would call this a bug, the fact that the ES installer doesn't check to see if I already have it installed - I think it should, and then if I do, *leave alone* my pref of having a different system screensaver. In other words, *don't* set ES as my default screensaver. (but for peeps installing ES for the *first time*, then *do* set it as default screensaver, since, well, they're newbies, bla bla, that's kind of expected behavior, etc.).

Lastly, is there a better method of reporting bugs / enhancement requests than making posts here, or is this the desired way of doing so?

Thanks again! -- Oh, ps, I just read the release notes more completely - it didn't put an app alias on my desktop.

if you turn off rendering it

if you turn off rendering it won't use much cpu.

There was a change in

There was a change in handling play count for b24. Now the play count is generation based. Also the playcount file name changed so therefore you see it reset. If you want to continue to use old playcounts built up until now, you can do so by renaming "~/Library/Aplication Support/ElectricSheep/content/playcounts" file as both playcounts.243 and playcount.244. Like that you'll have your existing play counts back.

Also when all play counts are reset to zero. The zero times played sheep (all in your case) have priority playing, therefore first you'll see "first time" sheep played and if one of them connects to already played one, you'll have different play count displayed. This could be sparse. But by renaming the file above, you should get rid of this situation.

For the installer issue, yes you are right, we should ask about setting the screen saver as default. But by itself it is difficult to say if a user intentionally set the screen saver to something else. We are presuming that if somebody launches installer of Electric Sheep he/she wants to see how it works, therefore we set the screen saver for him/her. You have still the choice to not to install the screen saver by unchecking the package in custom installation options. You'll have only the app installed. But I'll see what can I do about the default-screen-saver-setting user confirmation.

2.7b24 released

Change Log:

+ added generation number to playcounts file.
+ hides cursor even when itunes is the active app.
+ moves status displays to lower left corner and improves them.
+ do not crash when median Level is set at 100.

2.7b22 released

thank you daniel! changelog:

1) fix loop detector and improve variety of sheep played.
2) improve and expand info overlay (F2-4).
3) fade in at beginning.
4) add config file setting for the MedianLevel (see below).
5) add timestamps to the log.
6) don't render with all cores, leave one for display.
7) fix installer bug for just one user.

You can now set the MedianLevel in the config file. This is a value from 1-100 which controls what percentage of the flock is selected to be played. It excludes the sheep with the highest playcounts (if you set this at 80, the default, then the 20% of the flock with the highest playcounts are not played). The ranking is recomputed every 20 minutes.

I would recommend setting this lower than the default. We are still experimenting with this feature, but my current guess is if you have a full 2GB flock then 15 would be good. If 1GB then 30, etc. If you mess with it please let us know what happens.

Standalone Mac app: Y-height (off by 10 pixels)

I just noticed that the default height of the window of the standalone app is off by 10 pixels. When the standalone app launches, the window is 800x14. Except... the titlebar of the window is 24 pixels, not 14... So, if the aim is to start the app off with a window whose aspect ratio is 'right' - and whose size is the actual size of the movies... well, it's off by 10. It should be 800x24.

Which leads me to a feature request. At least in the Mac standalone app (if not when running as a Mac OS X screensaver) - can there be an option -- even a hidden one -- to maintain aspect ratio, at all times? This would allow me to drag-resize the window, while keeping the aspect ratio constrained. Would also make the Toggle Fullscreen command add in pillarboxing if running on a 16x9 or 16x10 aspect ratio display. Or, in rare instance, add letterboxing if running on a 'portrait display'. If this is implemented (first) for the standalone app only, and not the screensaver - the preferences UI could be kept clean by making this pref take the form of a command-line argument like:

    defaults write org.electricsheep.standalone preserve-aspect-ratio -boolean YES
    defaults write org.electricsheep.standalone preserve-aspect-ratio -boolean NO

Sorry, I am not sure I

Sorry, I am not sure I understand. 800x14? When the standalone application starts, it should have the 800x592 content size, exactly as the size of the rendered sheep. If it is not, it is a bug, but I believe it is set correctly.

How did you calculate the 800x14 size?

About the aspect ratio, I think it will be implemented in the future releases as the general option for application and screen saver as well.

Typo.. and my mistake

Ah, sorry, I meant to say 614; obtained with a simple AppleScript command, using System Events' UI scripting due to standalone app's lack of intrinsic AS support:

    tell application "System Events"
        get size of window 1 of application process "Electric Sheep"
    end tell


And... right you are -- my bad! Minus the titlebar, which is 22 px tall, the window content height is 592, exactly the height of the rendered sheep, as it should be - as you point out. I started off on a faulty presumption, which was that the sheep were in 4x3 aspect ratio, thus 800x600... I trust there's some programmatic explanation for why they're 4x2.96 (800x592).

In any case, re: user option to specify preservation of aspect ratio - whether by pillarbox/letterbox, or by cropping - glad to hear that's still in the works.

Thanks again :)

592 is 0 mod 16 which helps

592 is 0 mod 16 which helps the compression a bit.

prerelease 2.7b21b

http://electricsheep.org/pre/electricsheep-2.7b21b.dmg - the logo screen popping up is hopefully completely fixed. Even in the case where corrupt sheep tries to be played and fail. No more wrong logo screen should appear.

kernel panics fixed?

in the latter versions my macbook got random kernel panics which got backtraced to either the screen saver eninge itself or flam3-animate. I'm running this version right now and there hasn't been a panic in 25 hours.

prerelease 2.7b21a

http://electricsheep.org/pre/electricsheep-2.7b21a.dmg two bug fixes: * “no sheep” screen with logo should not appear randomly anymore * black frame should not pop up in the middle of playback anymore not very well tested yet, please let us know if you try it and especially if you experienced one of these problems if it helps.

Sheep do not release screen

After installing the new version, I can enter my username and password to unlock the screen, but the last image from Electric Sheep stays on the screen. I have no way to get to my screen content and did a hard reset of my Snow Leopard-MBP twice. Any thoughts?

Same problem - no display refresh

I had the exact same problem, no other screen savers showed this issue. No crash logs or console reports indicating hung process. Seems to have gone away in 2.7b21b

You did not have the same

You did not have the same behaviour with older version? What is your computer, system version, etc.? Does it quit eventually? By crash or something?

Hardware/Software regarding screen release issue

The previous version worked fine for me, I never had any issue. I have a MacBook Pro which is about 2 1/2 years old, the latest Snow Leopard version with all patches applied, now fancy software installed, no manual changes of settings which are not supported by Apple. I waited several minutes for the screen saver to quit, but nothing happend, no disk activity. There was no animation, just the last image from the screen saver. I have no idea if it crashed, as I have no sshd running at this time to check things out.

Do you still remember what

Do you still remember what was the last version which worked for you? I don't remember changing anything which can cause your problem. Can you try that other screen savers work as expected? Maybe it is something to do with system itself. I tried it on my configuration and it works as it should. You can also try to install the last version 2.7b21a and test it again.

2.7b21 released: - expanded

2.7b21 released:

- expanded waiting time after sheep download failure to 10 minutes (was 10 seconds). Now we are nicer to download server.
- fixed unwanted repeated downloads of the same sheep.  this is an important bug fix, users of all previous versions should upgrade!

- added information of sheep playcount into playing sheep information overlay (F4)
- added timestamp to log entries
- fixed issue where Debug Log setting were not properly read from configuration file
- added config file settings.player.MedianLevel (0-100) controls how many sheep get shown based on how often they are played.  setting it lower makes the current set of sheep smaller.  sheep that have been played the most are not played.
we skipped b20 to synchronize with windows version numbers.

Bug Report: Not working from ~/Library/Screen Savers

I like to have my screen savers in my home directory's Library/Screen Savers directory, but when I moved the Electric Sheep saver from /Library/Screen Savers, the it wouldn't run.  [Moving it back fixed the problem, but I'd still prefer to have it in ~/Library/Screen Savers for future versions]

After you move your screen

After you move your screen saver to ~/Library/Screen Savers, you must go to System Preferences and reselect it. Did you do that?

Otherwise please answer the spot's questions below...

what were the symptoms?  can

what were the symptoms?  can you be more specific than "wouldn't run"? what version of the OS and client do you have?  thanks.

2.7b19c released

Thanks to our developers and testers we have a new release for Mac.  Changelog since v2.7b17b:

- multiple display support added
- the multiple display support has two modes (which can be set in
Options... dialog):
+ Shared - every display render the same sheep
+ Individual - each display renders its own sheep
- option for Logging Debug Messages and Quiet  Mode is added
- Option to switch VBL synchronization (Vertical Blank) On or Off is
added. This Option allows visually smoothing down animation on some
machines.
Attention! When On it can considerably slow down rendering on
configuration with more than one display. Please switch it Off if you
are in this case.
- Next sheep to play is now calculated in bacground. Should not
disrupt animation even on configurations with lots of sheep
- Download status overlay now displays more precise information about download
- display FPS" status overlay is more stable and 'fps' instead of 'hz' is used
- handling of transparency in PNG images on PowerPC machines is fixed
- Seamless playback falls back to Normal one if no closed loop is
found. A message gets displayed when this happens.
- Display mode is now set to Piecewise cubic by default
- Frame rate is not divided by two on some machines anymore
- The full screen mode in standalone application can now be exit using
ESC key as in other Mac applications
- The downvoted sheep are deleted correctly now. It can take time to
be really deleted but they will be.
- Voting and downloading is now implemented without blocking so the
exit from screen saver is much snappier. The times where you need to
wait to exit screen saver should be gone.
- OpenGL rendering is made faster, smoother and less encumbered
- Maturity of sheep is set to 1 (was 3). In reality it makes newly
downloaded sheep show themselves once with the highest priority and
after that behave as others. Before, each newly downloaded sheep was
shown 3 times with highest priority causing playback to start with the
same sheep annoyingly often in some cases.
- Option to use all available processor cores when rendering is
removed. This was causing an important processor load and overheating
of some machines (the option is just removed from the GUI you can still access it by editing the config file)

- Reorganized Function keys shortcuts - F1 is now help overlay, F4 is now display status
- Fixed multiline text display in status overlay
- Changed introduction screen to be static image instead of movie
- Improved display of remaining time. It dynamically count down remaining minutes or seconds
- Added connection errors to download status overlay
- Fixed issue where sometimes partially downloaded sheep movies were considered as complete
- Improved display of sheep ID to contain starting zeros
- Fixed memory leaks which happens when playing with left and righ arrow keys (Moving forwards and backwards in history)

- add attribution image and add a config setting to turn off attribution
- Silent Mode option renamed to Quiet Mode
- reverted next-frame waiting code. It should be now more stable and faster on some machines. Was broken since version 2.7b18

 

Just wanted to say that everything is working perfectly.

I downloaded the packs from Archive.org and had 5GB of new sheet in moments using wget, and simply copied them in. I'm surprised I've only rendered 4 frames, but since it is only using 1 core [it is winter now, so more cores would be fine ;)] I suppose the tradeoff is nice.

Dual Dual Core Xeon 2.66Ghz Woodcrest, 12GB Ram, ATI Radeon 1900XT 512MB ram 10.6.2 no issues whatsoever.

Honestly congrats on the standalone and the screensaver. I just love working with the standalone along side my other work. I'll be seeding the two torrents for a couple weeks I hope, although anyone could really just get wget and queue up all of the files on archive.org & be a good neighbor by not overwhelming their services. There was a previous comment about the packs on Archive.org being old, but the files on Hotfile when combined together with The Unarchiver [simple] were of the same size.

A note about the log on OSX, however. It would be much easier to watch it in action if it was writing to a log directory that Console.app watches. Having a log in the Application Support directory isn't a huge deal, but Console is where I looked first just to see how it was handling.

I sort of have a question about the ElectricSheep.cfg that I did not find in the wiki.

-- Table: {6}
{
["nickname"]="rayrayisforever",
["save_frames"]=true,
["user_url"]="",
["totalFramesRendered"]=11,
["enabled"]=true,
["all_cores"]=true,
},
}

Although the option was taken out in the new beta, I had it selected in the old beta I had installed for only half an hour. Is there a way to re-enable all_cores, or is it just skipped? The winter is the time of the year I can really use my Xeons to the max :) I dislike not feeling like I have contributed much!

I'm a linux Sysadmin by trade, and usually I have my own server with 2-3TB of bandwidth. As soon as this becomes possible, I would happily like to donate bandwidth for your tracker/sheep without all of the annoyances of those free services. If at the very least, I would be able to have the Linux server always seed torrents available to all.

As soon as I get another job, I'll be donating and hopefully learning how to implement built in bittorrent with the OSX program. I've always wanted to do something neat like that.

rayrayisforever

raymondabril.com wordblog pixelblog Podcast

The all_cores setting is

The all_cores setting is ignored completely in the last version.

and in b19c and later

and in b19c and later releases, the setting is respected but you can only turn it on by editing the config file directly, there is no UI for it.

another prerelease: 2.7b19a

http://electricsheep.org/pre/electricsheep-2.7b19c.dmg

- fixed potential crasher when exiting screensaver
- the intro screen should be now really the static image with text (wasn't in b19)

EDIT: 2.7b19a2 fixes installer bug when there's a space in the user name.

2.7b19c changelog: - fixed

2.7b19c changelog:

- fixed issue where attribution image was not shown on Mac and add a config setting to turn off attribution
- Silent Mode option renamed to Quiet Mode
- reverted next-frame waiting code. It should be now more stable and faster on some machines. Was broken since version 2.7b18
- all_cores option is honored again. The UI is still hidden. Configuration file should be edited directly if this option is needed

Dual monitor support...

...is back and works perfectly. You are indubitably a genius.

thank you -- in this case

thank you -- in this case it's Daniel Svoboda who is developing the mac version and deserves credit.

I just upgraded from 2.7b15

I just upgraded from 2.7b15 to 2.7b19a and was really hoping that the display glitching issue I've had for the last few versions on several MacBook Pros would be fixed, but until wasn't :-(. However, in reading the release notes for 18 I tried setting the VBL synchronization and it seems to have fixed it!! Many thanks to the developers for their efforts.

 

note this hasn't been tested

note this hasn't been tested as much as usual because we are in a hurry, so we really need to hear back from you if it works or not and any problems.  thanks to daniel for getting it out right away in time for our holiday push!

http://electricsheep.org/pre/electricsheep-2.7b19.dmg

- Reorganized Function keys shortcuts - F1 is now help overlay, F4 is now display status
- Fixed multiline text display in status overlay
- Changed introduction screen to be static image instead of movie
- Improved display of remaining time. It dynamically count down remaining minutes or seconds
- Added connection errors to download status overlay
- Fixed issue where sometimes partially downloaded sheep movies were considered as complete
- Improved display of sheep ID to contain starting zeros
- Fixed memory leaks which happens when playing with left and righ arrow keys (Moving forwards and backwards in history)
- Other small improvements and fixes.

prerelease with dual screen support

please let me know if you try it and what happens. thanks to daniel
for his hard work:

http://v2d7c.sheepserver.net/electricsheep-2.7b18b.dmg


Here are the release notes:
- multiple display support added
- the multiple display support has two modes (which can be set in
Options... dialog):
+ Shared - every display render the same sheep
+ Individual - each display renders its own sheep
Note: It is first version of multiple display support so it is not perfect.
- option for Logging Debug Messages and Silent Mode is added
- Option to switch VBL synchronization (Vertical Blank) On or Off is
added. This Option allows visually smoothing down animation on some
machines.
Attention! When On it can considerably slow down rendering on
configuration with more than one display. Please switch it Off if you
are in this case.
- Next sheep to play is now calculated in bacground. Should not
disrupt animation even on configurations with lots of sheep
- Download status overlay now displays more precise information about download
- display FPS" status overlay is more stable and 'fps' instead of 'hz' is used
- handling of transparency in PNG images on PowerPC machines is fixed
- Seamless playback falls back to Normal one if no closed loop is
found. A message gets displayed when this happens.
- Display mode is now set to Piecewise cubic by default
- Frame rate is not divided by two on some machines anymore
- The full screen mode in standalone application can now be exit using
ESC key as in other Mac applications
- The downvoted sheep are deleted correctly now. It can take time to
be really deleted but they will be.
- Voting and downloading is now implemented without blocking so the
exit from screen saver is much snappier. The times where you need to
wait to exit screen saver should be gone.
- OpenGL rendering is made faster, smoother and less encumbered
- Maturity of sheep is set to 1 (was 3). In reality it makes newly
downloaded sheep show themselves once with the highest priority and
after that behave as others. Before, each newly downloaded sheep was
shown 3 times with highest priority causing playback to start with the
same sheep annoyingly often in some cases.
- Option to use all available processor cores when rendering is
removed. This was causing an important processor load and overheating
of some machines.

Multiple monitors not working

No luck -- only get a display on the main screen.  Have played with settings but does not make a difference.

10.5.8

Mac pro 8 core

2 x GeForce 880GT

3 monitors (all detected in 2.7b17b)

Can you please confirm that

Can you please confirm that you are using really the 2.7b18b version? Also can you please confirm that the check box setting the screen saver playing only on main monitor is not inadvertedly set in System Preferences? I don't see a reason why it should play only on one monitor. The code is just not there anymore.

Update - now working

Suddenly started working -- both secondary screens came on without making any changes to settings.

I did have a slow internet connection for a while today, may have slowed downloads, but it's strange the main screen was working.

In some cases old version is

In some cases old version is still active, when you replace it by newer one. I think this is what happened. Anyway if it happens again during the life of b18b, please let me know, maybe we really have problem. Thanks.

Can you please confirm that

Can you please confirm that you are using really the 2.7b18b version? Also can you please confirm that the check box setting the screen saver playing only on main monitor is not inadvertedly set in System Preferences? I don't see a reason why it should play only on one monitor. The code is just not there anymore.

daniel rules

just installed 2.7b18. i'm definitely happy to have my dual monitor support back... thanks a ton, daniel!

if it helps, i'm running a mac mini with osx 10.6.1 - 2ghz intel duo with 2gb ram.

dual monitors worked perfectly with both mirrored and individual displays.  i noticed the inidividual was a little choppy for a bit, but i think that was a memory problem... so far so good!

notifications?

also is there any way to get notifications of releases?  an rss feed or anything?

thanks for the report broox.

thanks for the report broox.  your membership in this drupal gives you a subscription to the email list (unless you decline it or turn it off in your preferences panel).  releases are announced there.  what you just got was a prerelease.  after more testing and more work (and after we have a windows release to go with it), it will go out on email.

Glad to hear it! Thanks.

Glad to hear it! Thanks.

Multiple monitor support not present?

I've downloaded 2.7b17b and installed multiple times, removing the previous versions each time, and installing both just the screensaver and the standalone app, but no matter what I do, I only get a choice of which of two monitors to display the sheep on in the Options dialog. What I'd like is for the sheep to display on both monitors simultaneously.

Is there something I'm missing?

cheers... -Adam

my mistake, it should be

my mistake, it should be 2.7b18b.  it's fixed now, please try again.

2.7b18b

It still says 2.7b17b on the download page. What version is it?

i didn't change the download

i didn't change the download page, this is a prerelease.  the link is at the top of my post above.

thanks.

thanks.

so did it work?  i've had 150

so did it work?  i've had 150 downloads but 1 report.... the point of prerelease is to figure out if it's good or not!

It works great I have tried

It works great I have tried everything but multi-mon.

 

next and previous sheep works even better than it did in the old version.

 

thanks for the great work best release yet

new mac client release

Hi Spot,

Do you have an ETA on the new mac client release?

2.7b17b

This one sets the current screensaver, 2.7b17a had a problem with that.


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