Mac Client Release Notes

http://electricsheep.googlecode.com/files/electricsheep-2.7b34.dmg

Download, 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).

Recent versions have a bug where if you run the app before the screensaver starts, it fails.  This should be fixed in the upcoming v2.7b34 but until then you can use one of these workarounds:

 

  • Set the content folder manually to the "~/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep" folder. There is only a pain on 10.7 where the ~/Library folder is not visible by default in Finder so regular users can not select it easily.
  • Or remove the "~/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep" folder manually (again problem with invisible Library on 10.7) then run screen saver at least once.

 

If you have trouble, see the help page.

2 display's

im un able to get it to go on my 2 display's

if you can help contact me at dutcher.leland@gmail.com

2.7b34 released.

2.7b34 released.  changelog:

 

 

- fixed issue where launching standalone application before screen saver just after installation corrupted content directory path and subsequent download attempts were failing on low disk space. - blacking out non-primary monitors during full screen mode in standalone application can be now set in preference dialog. - fixed issue where attribution image would have mixed up color palette. - fixed possible stutter in some rare cases - some other minor improvements.
- plus all other fixes shared with Windows version

 

Stand alone mode will not open

I am running a 2.4 Macbook Pro with 10.5.8 OS. When i click on the electric sheep icon in applications i get this message " The application Electric Sheep quit unexpectedly." It works great as a screen saver using system pref's and waiting for it to come on. But stand alone mode does not work. I also have a 2007 Macbook Pro that it freezes on in system pref's test. Can anyone help me with these two separate computing issue's? Thanks

Can you tell us, what version

Can you tell us, what version of screen saver and application you run?

The problem with standalone application is maybe related to the wrong 64-bit build. Can you please try to check "Open in 32-bit mode" in Finder Info dialog for the application and try to run it again? It would be officially fixes in the next beta. If it doesn't work, can you please send me the crash log to dasvo [at] planeta [dot] cz?

On the 2007 Macbook Pro, do you use Little Snitch program? If not, can you try to compress/remove/rename the ~/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep folder and try running the screen saver again? There is maybe a corrupted sheep in your content folder. In the past it could happen, it was fixed later on, but maybe some old files could cause the freeze.

Thank you, Daniel

I have the exact same problem.

Only my MBP's a 2.5ghz (last release before unibody), also still running 10.5.8 - probably virtually identical machines.  The screen saver and application are the latest version, downloaded today.  Checking the 32 bit mode box fixes the problem and makes it run, for me.

No sheep!!!

I can not get sheep to work on my screen saver at all help

to run on desktop background

/System/Library/Frameworks/ScreenSaver.framework/Resources/ScreenSaverEngine.app/Contents/MacOS/ScreenSaverEngine -background

heard on twitter by razorfrog http://twitter.com/#!/razorfrog/status/33264284750323712

2.7b29 released

changelog:

- added auto-update using Sparkle framework (update download works in preference pane and standalone application)
- updated flame3-animate tool to the newest version 3.0.1
- improved handling of sheep-to-download list (list.xml) in some rare server overload situations
- fixed issue leading to possible dead-lock when skipping to next sheep using right arrow
- fixed issue where cursor was not hidden in full screen view in standalone application
- added missing Edit menu in standalone application (Copy & paste is possible again)
- possibly fixed the rest of the "frame tearing" issue. Now the animation should be "seizure" free on all supported machines, even on iMacs.

... and these other modifications from Windows version are included as well ...
- fixed authentication
- 50/50 random choice delete oldest sheep vs most played
- do not go to half speed on battery power
- no sheep are deleted on low disk space (put a warning on the F2 page instead)
- read flock recursively from folders under mpeg folder.

Thank you Daniel and our whole dev team!

not downloading

I've tried downloading and installing twice on my new MacBook Pro, but each time it displays "Low disk space, downloading disabled, no sheep downloaded yet, this should take less then a minute but might take several hours". The program works fine on my older Mac, but even waiting several days I can't get it to work.

You need to free up some disk

You need to free up some disk space. Delete some other files.

But I have plenty of free disk space!

I have over 280 GBs of free space and its still says that for me as well. Any other ideas of what could be causing this or how to solve the problem? I want some sheep in my life!

the solution is described

the solution is described here

Your Sheep not working ?

Downloaded and installed everything perfectly and My sheep weren't working!? So, then I went into the options for Electric Sheep in Screen Saver in System Preferences, and changed display mode to normal. It does not work for me in either linear or piecewise cubic mode. I figure it has something to do with my 6+ year old iBook G4 mac and graphic card. Hope this helps some of you out.

2.7b28 released

changelog:

1) new playback algorithm is the default.
2) lots of polish in UI and network behavior.
3) avoid CPU conflict (disable rendering if another process is active).

Music listening sheeps

Hi Scott, a huge thank you to you and to the community for this wonderful piece of art. A question\suggestion if I can, is it possible to add the possibility to "listen" to the played music and harmonize the rendering according to it?

you are very welcome, glad

you are very welcome, glad you like it.

something is definitely possible. :)

Problem running Sheep on Snow Leopard

Hello, Iam rather new too sheep. When I first Installed it worked, but wouldn't show any variations of the design. It would just show the same two screen saver overs and over again. So I waited a day, for more sheep to be downloaded. It didn't change. I then thought that if I rated the sheep, by pressing the arrow keys down, since I was getting sick of seeing the same sheep, it would show me different sheep. It instead removed all sheep, and said that I had to download some. Any idea,what the problem is. I am running the snow leopard operating system on an imac. Thank You, James

get some sheep packs.

get some sheep packs.

2.7b27 released

http://electricsheep.googlecode.com/files/electricsheep-2.7b27.dmg

this has the new configuration options to control playback evenness as described http://electricsheep.wikispaces.com/Config+File+Settings

For example, try setting AutoMedianLevel to true, PlayCountDecayZ to 50, NormalInterval to 60, and RandomMedianLevel to true. Or some subset of these. We are very interested in hearing what works for you.

There are a bunch of improvements to the status overlays.

it also fixes a bug when "avoid sheep played most often" is on "never" causing no sheep to be played.

unable 2 play sheep

i have dowloaded and installed the sheep and a flock and it wont play can u help???? im using a mac

Exactly what and where did

Exactly what and where did you install it? And it won't play how? Can you be more specific please?
Can you write example of one .avi file, where it is installed and how it is named?
All files from flock should be named as "XXXXX-YYYYY-ZZZZZ-TTTTT.avi" and should be installed at:

"/Users/<your username>/Library/Application Support/ElectricSheep/content/mpeg"

unless you specified otherwise in your Options... panel.
Hope this helps.

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.


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