My goldfish periodically die.
 

I leave Goldfish Aquarium running as my wallpaper using Backlight. Periodically, my fish "die" -- they stop swimming and just drift motionless in the water. Very eerie. Usually, stopping and starting the screensaver through Backlight fixes the problem and then the fish are fine for a few days.

Any ideas or should I just learn to live with it? I've had MA or GA running as my wallpaper for the last three or so years and only recall seeing the problem since I got my G5.

If you overfeed them this could be a problem.

I don't think I've ever run the product for days continuously as you are doing. I need to use my computer before the screen saver has run that long. It is possible that some counter wraps around to the negative end of the spectrum. Are you limiting the frame rate to something sensible, like 60 fps, so there is CPU for your work?

Are you using tank rotation or the same tank continuously?

(Really, this is Polcamilla)
 

For some reason, the login is acting wiggy (probably doesn't like Safari) so I can't log in as me.

The framerate is set at 40 and I don't cycle the tanks. I've had Marine Aquarium and/or Goldfish Aquarium running as my wallpaper for as long as I've had a Mac (since 2002 or so). Dead fish have never been a problem with MA and to the best of my recollection weren't a problem with GA until I upgraded to the G5.

Before the recent flurry of software updates, the computer was up for 35 continuous days. The fishies did get periodic breaks, though, as my husband sometimes left the machine logged into his account. I *hope* they don't swim silently in the background when another account is in use.

Try turning on tank cycling and select at least two tanks to see if that solves the problem please. It will tell me where the problem lies.

Backlight would be in control of whether or not the fish run when a user is not in the foreground.

Alright, I'm cycling between tanks now and have been for 2 or 3 days. I'll let it run a couple weeks and let you know. So far, no dead fish (but it usually takes longer than 2-3 days anyways. It'd be nice if I knew how long of a life expenctancy my fish have, but I don't). One thing I have noticed that seems to be new is that occasionally the fish I can see behind my windows start to flicker (very rapidly vanishing, reappearing). Bringing up the Dashboard or doing any other Expose-ish thing makes them stop, though.

(I know, you're just going to post back and tell me to stop abusing my fish, but they *look* happy when they're not dead/desperately trying to teleport to other tanks! Plus, the kids love them!)

Dead again. :(
 

Okay, I just sat down to the computer again to find the fish all dead. So tank cycling didn't help.

Okay, thanks for doing the experiment for me. I'll put it on the list of things to work on for that product.

Hi, Polcamilla... This is Goldfish Aquarium's artist & animator speaking.

When you say the fish "drift motionless in the water," could you be more specific? Like:
Are the fins & tail still reacting to small currents?
Does the fish overall move slightly up and down & left and right?
Do his eyes stop darting? Do the plants and bubbles still move?

All of these answers will help track down the problem.

Thanks!

-- Eric Daniels (aka Dan E. Schneider)

Hrm....I'll have to check next time they bite it. I'll have to admit, I haven't been too quick to study the effect when it happens because it's so eerie that I'll hurry to restart rather than look at it. We had an actual fish (given to us by our Sunday school class - argh!!) die on us a couple months back and it looked almost the same. The fish was motionless, eyes wide open (obviously), drifting slightly in the current.

I'll take a look next time and narrow down a bit better what's moving and what isn't.

Let me try to duplicate this
 

I have a dual 2Ghz G5 and also run backlight 2.0. Let me activate GA 1.0.2 version (you ARE running this version?) and if the fish die, well then we'll know if it's because you overfeed your goldfish or not! I never feed them, they can find their own food - that is why Jim Sachs won't put more fish in there - 'cuz there wouldn't be enough natural food in there to go around .... ;)

- John

Hrm...actually, I just checked and I'm runnign GA 1.0.0. What's in the update?

Anyways, since I last posted they died again (twice, actually) and I looked closely. There is NO movement in the mouths, fins, eyes, or plants. The fins look distorted and blockly (like some of the bad 3D rendering you see in cheap video games). There is still a shimmer in the water and an invisible current that causes the completely motionless fish to drift (usually until they hit a particular obstacle, then they just bob there). One of the times this happened, all 3 fish driftly slowly to the top of the tank and stayed there.

John - The Goldfish program isn't mine, it's Eric Daniels' baby (see 4th message back).

Polcamilla - This appears to be a Mac-only problem, so a screen capture of what you are seeing might help Jim O'Connor track down what is happening.

Running in a window
 

I wasn't able to find what's new, but to the eye GA 1.0.0 and 1.0.2 appear to be "feature consistent."

BTW I won't be wanting to run GA under Backlight 2 because it locked up my system - black screen, fans running full tilt - so I am running GA in a window instead.

- John

Wow, it locked up your computer?

It's taxed mine on occasion (fans running on full, but only since 10.4.6 came out) but I can't recall it causing any serious lockups like that.

Macs are really finicky, I guess.

My G5 has been a bastion of stability. The kernel did not panic in this example, and the display was dim, and I could not wake up the computer. I may have a power saving feature enabled that conflicts with Backlight 2.

BTW what tank do you have that puts your fish to sleep? They like vegatation. Also what screen resolution and graphics card? I run a 22-inch Apple Cinema Display at 1600x1024 millions of colors off an ATI Radion 9800 Pro mac special edition with 256 Meg vram. The fans of the G5 speed up noticably when GA runs on this.

- John

Tank: Medium planting with foreground lights up, background lights low, and sound, bubbles, and debris off.

Screen: 23" Cinema HD Display running at 1920x1200 and millions of colors.

Graphics card: GeForce 7800GT
VRAM: 256MB

Do we know how long the Goldfish have to run before this problem shows up?
It SOUNDS like you are running into a bug we fixed with 1.0.2 which fixed a problem properly terminating threads (which cause us to use up our alotment eventually), since the fish animation takes place on threads then this is likely the problem.

Did he spawn six threads or only five?
 

So if I understand this correctly, if we're running a pre-1.0.2 version of Goldfish Aquarium, then we'd see the thread count increasing over time in Activity Monitor? I just launched GA 1.0.2 and I see three threads. Holding steady ....

- John

Typically the fish run 4-6 days before dying. How do I check for the number of threads they've generated? Also, how do I get 1.0.2, to see if that fixes the problem?

Use the Force
 

You can display the number of threads in the Activity Monitor program located in the Utilities folder of your Applications folder. To home in on the Goldfish Aquarium application just type a few characters of the application name into the filter.

The actual v 1.0.2 application can be downloaded from the force^H^H^H^H source here

- John

GA 1.0.2 is the current download from the LifeGlobe site.
You can use the activity monitor to look for the number of threads.
The threads would be zombied when the Screen Saver panel would spawn new aquariums for the preview and the "test" mode and each one would create 2 threads which would then not be terminated.
Polcamilla, the test to see if this is the problem is pretty easy -- turn off the "use multiple CPUs" preference. Then we don't thread at all.

You must groan every time you see a new post from me.
 

Alright, I turned off the 'use multiple CPUs' option and let it run again for a while. The fish again died and I carefully examined the Activity Monitor and didn't see an abnormal number of threads (and *none* for GA specifically, but that could be a function of how it runs as a screensaver).

I let them stay dead for a while and noticed a couple interesting things:

1) When the actual screensaver came on, *those* fish behaved just fine.
2) The "dead" fish in my wallpaper did bob about a bit (as I mentioned before) and would occasionally flicker and change from having the mouth completely closed to completely open. This makes me wonder if they're not dead, but somehow running extremely slow (and halted) relative to everything else. Shimmers still run across the plants, rocks, etc. at a normal rate while the fish are dead. It really just affects the fish themselves and the plants.

By the way, I keep giving updates simply because I find it interesting. Occasional dead fish resulting from using GA in an unapproved way aren't a big problem to me. I'm amazed at how responsive you guys have been, but if it's a choice between getting GA 2.0 for Mac out or banging your heads against your desks over my dead fish, I'd rather you spend the time on GA 2. :)

The screen saver is probably running in a completely separate process from the desktop, so it would get a fresh and clean environment.

Well, I sorta have an idea now for another possible cause, but I don't think I'll try to explain it.

Thanks for the update.