Enhancement requests
 

Goldfish Aquarium has already given me many hours of enjoyment, and I have a few enhancement requests I'd like the developers to consider.

(1) Provide the user with tuning options over some performance-impacting areas such as texture quality, motion of the plants, and please re-instante the "optimize video memory" like Marine Aquarium has.

(2) Increase the resolution on the plants and those big rocks, they look a bit fuzzy to me.,

(3) Fish should cast shadows upon the bottom at the very least, even if they are blobs. It's not very realistic right now.

(4) In the GA application, as you drag the resize handle, the dimensions do not update, you have to let go of the window. Please update the field in real time as the user adjusts the window size to the desired setting.

(5) How about putting in a little plaque in the tank, and let the user select either some text or an image file? That would be so freaking cool! Please?

1) We pulled the "optimize video memory" because the models in Goldfish have way too much transparency for this to work. Too many odd artifacts. They could be solved but it would increase the memory bound nature of the program.

2) Talk to me in a couple weeks. ;)

3) Shadows are an entirely new ball of wax. Not out of the question, just not something that will come without a HUGE increase in computation.

4) Hmm.

5) You mean a goldfish version of Marine Aquarium Time 2/Logo?

snip

5) You mean a goldfish version of Marine Aquarium Time 2/Logo?

It's not clear to me if the Marine Aquarium Time 2 Logo allows the user to specify their own image and/or text, but it it does, then something like that would be cool. Seeing as how Goldfish Aquarium is still in Beta, it would be quite nice for you to include that kind of feature.

I'm picturing a little plaque (submerged) with a face whose contents can be adjusted in a "Plaque Tab" in the preferences. Type in some text, drag an image here, that kind of thing.

Rock on!

The windows version of MA Time allows user created logos. The mac version does not. I'm guessing that the two products will remain separate, Jim may have a definitive answer.

MAT2/MAL for Mac will arrive, someday, I hope.

more Mac improvements...
 

as far as Mac-specific functionality...

i agree that more fine-tuning would be lovely. would it be possible to have a setting to enable FSAA if your graphics card supports it?

rather than cycle through selected tanks, i would like a checkbox (below "cycle...") to randomly select (or start with) a tank when the screen saver kicks in.

the cycling of fish is a little inelegant...i had no idea that setting even existed until i noticed my fish had discovered quantum teleportation and were popping in and out of my screen! perhaps fading out/in of the fish? or replacing them in the same location as their predecessors?

you could also spruce up the "Register" screen a little. it's like a blank canvas :)

Re: more Mac improvements...
 

We are looking into that. It is probably the only new thing (other than fixing the UI to reduce tech support questions) that we are considering at this point.

And maybe this one. :) Basically, a check box to ignore the currently selected tank a start randomly from one of the checked tanks?
Would you rather have 25th century fish or ghost fish or shape shifting fish? They all seem pretty scary to me.

No promises. I have to ship this thing SOMEDAY. :)

Re: Re: more Mac improvements...
 

exactly. actually, it wouldn't necessarily exclude the "cycle" check box...if you had both checked, it would start with a random tank and cycle from there.

i don't know. the "popping" effect freaked me out enough the first time i saw it...:p

Another enhancement?
 

Since we're making a wishlist here...

...would it be possible to have a little slider that allows you to control the SIZE of each of the fish? It drives me bonkers that some of them are huge and the 'feeder' fish is so tiny that I worry about him getting lost.

I know it's a nitpick, but looking at uneven fish bugs me.

(P.S. Just thought you'd appreciate knowing that my spouse babysat two girls, aged 4 and 6, the other day that hadn't been over to our house in MONTHS. One of the things they insisted on doing while they were here was watching the fish on the computer!)

Feeder fish?

Freida. :)

:)

...poor Freida... She gets no respect...

Folding@Home
 

Thanks for the gentle reminder. I have not been diligent in running my Folding@Home program. These dual 2Ghz G5 CPUs might as well do useful work overnight!:TU:

Sweet! Finally, a fellow folder on this forum! I noticed you're not on a team... Care to join 2630? Please? :D

Yeah, that would Rule!

You made it! :) Nice to see you here buddy, welcome to my other home!

(I posted a request in the TR forums for my teammates to help me get John to join our team...)

Edit: BTW, I started this thread some time ago but it didn't get much attention...

Team 2630 0wnz!
 

Thanks for the invitiation to jointeam 2630 of the Folding@Home project. It's nice to be wanted. You now have a dual processor 2Ghz G5 on the team :cheers:

w00t, w00t! Thanks! :D You'll be one of our few Mac folders, glad to have you, I hear those G5s really tear though the work units, it'll be interesting to track your progress... :) Also, make sure you stop by the forums over there and say hi, great bunch of folks... Oh, and don't go switching to any of those Mac teams on us... ;)

Outstanding! Folding is a great thing, and folding for 2630 is even greater. Stop in our DC forum and talk some trash. We love it! We got this guy named Leor, he can talk it.....

They know of Leor, I pointed them in the direction of his pigeon thread... :TU:

getting a little off topic here :)

Whoops
 

Honorable Administrator,

Apologies, we are not a wee bit off topic, we are way off topic. We'll take further discussions to the folding forums :contract:

Best regards ...

- John

PS What are these fish looking for? Answer - their shadows (hint to Jim)

Hey---I like Freida. She's very much in my tank by choice! But she does look like a feeder fish (also, I always forget the fish have names, which is dumb since every goldfish I ever owned had a name).

At the risk of both A) sounding ignorant and B) starting up a discussion that belongs elsewhere... could someone give me a one-sentence description of what the heck "folding" is? I assume it has something to do with molecules, but... teams!? I'm lost.

*cracks knuckles*

Here it goes:
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project run by Standford University with the goal of discovering how protiens assemble or fold as part of an effort to cure various diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson’s which occur when protiens assemble incorrectly or misfold.

Not bad for a first draft... Check out this thread for more info, I won't post anymore here...

..and the teams mentioned are groups of people competing with other groups over who can crunch the most data.

that helps clarify things (sometimes the most obvious zips by my radar). :) maybe the admin can move these last 4 posts over to the spare cpu folding thread and add "Folding" to the thread title if doc agrees -- just a suggestion, would never think of hijacking/rewriting someone's thread title... ;)

Contact me
 

OK drfish we need to talk. Please email me at johnblommers AT mac DOT com so we can avoid further off topic posts here, because .....

I've marshalled my hardware (500Mhz G4 Mac, DP 800Mhz QuickSilver Mac, 2.63Mhz HP Pavilion Red Hat 9 box, and my DP 2Ghz G5 Mac) to the folding project and managed to claw my way to postion 822 with 155 work units.

But Judas H Priest! You, drfish, are in position 3 with 9516 work units! TheJuggernaught is in first place with 16447 WU.

Please email me on how I can improve my rank on the team and how to participate in team 2630's discussions.

And Oh Most Honorable and Patient Moderator thank you for your continued indulgence with us Folders :TU:

PS to Jim, these fish are still looking for their shadows

John check the coffee house, drfish started a thread there about folding, discussions are more than welcome there. :TU:

They can look all the want. No shadows in these fishtanks.

That's what I told them!
 

Well, these fish are really nice looking, but they're not very bright:dunce: I mean if the shadow is not right beneath 'em, then it's not anywhere! Are they Hollywood fish maybe?:artist:

You can tell a fish, but you can't tell 'em much.

To the fish :cheers:

Feature request
 

Hi everyone.

Just wanted to repeat the request to be able to get a random tank out of those that are checked each time the screensaver is activated.

But what I really wanted to ask is if it would be possible to add a "Petrified Wood - Medium Planting" tank, like there is with the rocks? I really like the "Petrified Wood with Plants" tank but my Mac seems to struggle with all those plants!

By the way, just updated to Mac OS X 10.3.7 and have noticed better frame rates with GA!

Cheers.

Rob.

Goldfish will get some attention again soon, and I'll see about these two things.

That's good to hear
 

Hi Jim, I miss the excitement that surrounded the initial GA release! It's good to hear that GA will get more attention soon.

Happy New Year!

Release it just like that, I'd buy it. ;)

I don't have a mac, but since the Goldfish thread for windows hasn't moved since my last post ages ago, I'll make some requests.

I have to say, shadows over pebbles will look really good if done correctly. And if a fish passes over another fish, a shadow would also have to be created on that fish underneath as well.

However shadows to me aren't as important as "more fish". The jagged edges on the plants that sway should be corrected.

Mouth movement is one of the only things which doesn't look realistic yet.

Have the larger goldfish pick up or try to eat pebbles and spit them back out.

Have the fish rest more often.

Also, goldfish tend to follow each other around constantly. Maybe have some chase each other for a few seconds making that a random occurrence.

My last suggestion includes some pre-programmed events which occur randomly to surprise the viewer as did the Johnny Castaway screensaver long ago. OK, maybe that is asking too much. But it would be fun.

I know I can think of more, and more will come.

You have a great product. And it is the most realistic fish screensaver so far next to Jim Sachs.

Keep up the good work. :)

It has been posted before but I can't find it right now: the jagged edges will completely disappear if you enable Anisotropic (Texture) Filtering.
Most 'modern' graphics cards and chipsets support this without it having a big impact on your systems performance.
In my case (ATI 9100 IGP chipset) all I had to do is open the Desktop control panel, click on the Direct3D tab, set AF to 4x and remove a checkmark so it would be the standard setting. It's probably a bit different on NVIDIA cards but shouldn't be that hard to find.

Interesting with a PC features discussion in the Mac thread. Moderation?

Turn about is fair play. :) As long as it doesn't get too bad.