My wife's hard drive began making funny noises and slowing the whole computer to a snails pace last month. First opportunity for me to test the cloning caddy that cost £50. Worked perfectly and the new drive booted as soon as plugged in. All university and other work safe - whew! Well worth the money and the only caveat is that the new drive must be of equal size or larger than the original for the cloning to work.
Andy

Re: starfish on glass -
This is probably a bigger job than I'm willing to take on right now. When I went to the 3D background, I had to allow the fish to come forward past the actual front glass of the tank, in order to minimize collisions. If the starfish were on the glass, fish would be passing through it all the time. Last night I did a few experiments with extending the front glass forward a few inches, but the stretching of the gravel was quite apparent.

I'll keep thinking about it, but it's unlikely to make the cut for this release.

harris,

Perhaps a choice of different start positions for the starfish is not asking too much. I experimented with this some time back.....

If you want to start off with him nearer the centre of the tank, you need to try these Registry 'StarfishPosition' settings....

StarfishPosition REG_BINARY cf 07 ef 3f 31 a7 66 c0 b3 c9 97 3e

Note that these StarfishPosition setting numbers MUST be entered in the Registry only whilst the starfish is absent from the tank.


So....

If we were to ask Jim nicely ;) - He might give us the left, centre, and right positions you suggest. :)

Edit to the above:-
I don't think it is now necessary to change the StarfishPosition setting whilst the starfish is absent. The starfish does not now revert back to the left of the tank. - You can change the setting whilst MA3 is offscreen, and it will restart from your chosen new position.

Cliff - for that to work, I'd need to create a couple more starfish 'corrals' - boundary areas. Otherwise, he'd crawl right through the other objects. This is not impossible, but not trivial either. I'll look into it.

Off-topic, of course, but:

You're welcome. (and hoping Quickbooks can be persuaded).

Now, please consider a system backup solution that would work when, some day, your hard drive just simply quits working at all without warning.

an "all settings back to default" button
multiple bubble columns
a new critter

Pat - can't you just use CTRL-R to reset the settings?

Jim,
You've delivered. Sit back, relax, look at the sky! I'm sure everybody on site could allow you a week before nagging for the next 'improvement', 'adjustment', 'addition', etc.
Andy

I don't mind adding something else if it's easy. Once I decide to make it the official 3.3 version, then the Cast of Thousands must go to work creating the installer, the myriad language translations, the iPad and iPhone versions, the Android version, etc.

Deleted by original poster.

"the official 3.3 version"
Never really expected to hear that!
Is there still a possibility of other "critters"?

So happy that you enjoyed this. Think of all the smiles out here in MA world!

Michael

OK, something is weird here Jim. I got my new laptop today and have installed MA3g on it and now I am back to static featherdusters again. :(

I'm just running it as an exe.

Jav - Just a plain, single-monitor laptop - no weird hardware?

Yeah, running a nvidia GTX 780m, on 7 ultimate.

I've been looking to see if I could figure out any problem from running as an exe but I can't find anything so far.

That shouldn't affect it. Does the single featherduster move normally in MA3.2?

Hmm, good question. I just checked and you are correct, now the single duster in 3.2 is static as well.

How about the other moving background objects like the swaying Gorgonia or Sea Fans?

Everything works fine.