Some amazing features of this VIRaptor (guessing it's a Falcon?) screen saver:
It is 12.3 Megabytes installed
It took 10 years to write and has been beta-testing for 2 years.
Given the professed amount of development time, the registered version is, what should be, a very reasonable $10.
I hate to be a cynic, but when people start by bragging how many years they've been developing something and then fail to deliver the goods, it just makes it worse on themselves. Now granted, I was only able to test out the demo. The final version is supposed to have "flight" controls so maybe my enjoyment would be increased significantly with the registered version.
That said, let's go into what I tested. The demo version has a fixed camera that spins around endlessly, following the location of the bird. 90% of the time, the bird is very far from the camera and is but a few pixels in size, even when run at 1024x768 with 16-bit color.
More surprising, was the complete lack of realism in the bird's movement. It was never affected by updrafts or downdrafts and never did anything other than flap its plasticy wings up and down. There was clearly no skeletal structure at work. It just boggles the mind that there are 10 years of effort in this thing. You never got to see the face of the bird or any kind of closeup except once or twice in 5 minutes of watching. The closeup revealed that the texture of the bird was hand-made, not photographed, and showed very little detail.
There are good screen snapshots here:
www.qflux.net/screen33.html
The majority of the time that you are watching the demo, you are looking up at the solid blue sky (no clouds at all) and seeing the black, silhouetted underside of the bird.
Inexplicably, the wooden platform you are standing on is more detailed than the bird.
The only explanation I can think of for why VIRaptor consumes 12.3MB of hard drive space is possibyl the 360 degree background panoramic photograph. Indeed, this must be a high-resolution texture because if the bird is close to the camera and much of the background and wooden platform are in view, the framerate drops from a smooth 60fps to an ugly 12-15fps of choppiness.
I don't bear bad wishes towards anyone, and the price of the screen saver is pretty reasonable at $10, a steal if these guys have really been working on it for 10 years. But I think VIRaptor will have some pretty tough competition when Jim gets rolling on Sachs Aviary (Bird Sanctuary) a few years from now.
I think the movement of the fish in Sachs Aquarium are already more realistic than VIRaptor's bird movements and Jim says the Aquarium physics model is but a draft of the final and he has much more detail planned.