** SS Aquarium 2.0 & MAT Settings SUGGESTION BOX ** - Page 3

memilm · 03-21-2003, 02:01 AM

How about some option to start more sessions of the SSA with saved settings in windows modus, as example to have 4 aquariums on your desktop all with another settings.

Steven J Lowe · 03-22-2003, 12:44 AM

I keep seeing this about "mat" What does this mean?

Reichart · 03-22-2003, 12:47 AM

MAT is Marine Aquarium Time (features a crystal in the tank, with a clock, and a calendar).

MAT will be out ina few weeks.

We do plan to allow people to set up multiple screen savers, with differnt settings.

Steven J Lowe · 03-22-2003, 12:52 AM

Thanks for that. So how would i get mat? Is it a seperate download?

Steven J Lowe · 03-22-2003, 01:11 AM

Sorry about last post! Did not read your last post fully(Avaliable in a few weeks) It is a bit early in the morning for me!

)

Panthera · 03-26-2003, 01:17 PM

Hmm.. how about.. the option to change the background.. like your choice of MUDDY GREEN

(my fav) or the dark blue. Or something like that

memilm · 04-03-2003, 03:50 AM

I like to start the saver in window mode.
Are there some parameter to append to the aquarium.scr oder MA2.scr to obtain this?
Is there a way to save the last position and widht/height of the SSA windows?

feldon34 · 04-03-2003, 11:06 AM

All coming in a future version of MA2.

Tiny Turtle · 04-03-2003, 03:42 PM

Just thought I'd share how the settings panel look on my MA2 1600x1200@Large fonts/Large Icons XP setup:

It's way better than in the first MAT where some fish were unselectable, but still a bit unpolished.

/Tiny Complaint

Reichart · 04-03-2003, 03:49 PM

Originally posted by Tiny Turtle
Just thought I'd share how the settings panel look on my MA2 1600x1200@Large fonts/Large Icons XP setup:

It's way better than in the first MAT where some fish were unselectable, but still a bit unpolished.

/Tiny Complaint

We disagree that it is not polished!

Our icons are a fixed size, the UI is also a fixed size, designed to always operate at 640x480, so that no one is ever prevented to change settings.

Your resolution has nothing to do with what you are seeing. You have the ability to change your system font, which scales everything. And you changed yours to large, which I do also. Microsoft does not ensure symmetry, so the sliders pop up.

We could make the icons smaller, but that would not be fair to the other 99% of people that don’t change their font.

However, we might do something in the future that find a medium between the two. Such that if the requester detects a low resolution, it scales the functions down.

Tiny Turtle · 04-03-2003, 04:46 PM

Fair Enough.

Tiny Re-polish

P.S.
Question from someone who does not know more programmming than his VCR (some say that's advanced programming

):
Do the fish have to be icons? It seems to me that if they weren't they wouldn't be affected by this Ms factory installed bug. Perhaps (i.e. probably I'm overlooking something?

feldon34 · 04-03-2003, 07:17 PM

We tried having the fish in a list. The 10,000,000 Aquarium users who are not Icythyologists complained.

Tiny Turtle · 04-04-2003, 01:22 AM

I meant do they have to be Icon files? There must be other image formats useable in programs. When I play a game the cars/monsters/whatever don't change in size just because I choose large icons.

/Street

feldon34 · 04-04-2003, 03:14 AM

Having spent the last 3 days working on Visual Basic, I can tell you that the Microsoft tools are SOOOOOOOOO limited it's not even funny. They give you ~15 settings for a feature and then hide another 75 and make you jump through hoops to use them.

So what you ask, just arbitrarily switching from fixed-size icons to auto-rescaling bitmaps, is a nightmare.

Games do not use any ActiveX/Common Dialog Controls, they just paint on the screen what they want. You'll notice no 2 interfaces are the same. You'll notice also that it takes months (or never) for International versions to come out and there are many other things we take for granted in these dialogs that have to be written manually.

I'm not really sure what you are requesting. You have those monstrous scroll bars and title bars and text, and then the regular size fish. Do you want the fish scaled up, or shrunk down?

Tiny Turtle · 04-04-2003, 03:41 AM

Sorry 'bout the Ms tools.

Scale up/down: Well, if I only had those two options: – Scaled down I guess. But it would be easier to increase the window width a bit (Still have 640 pixels to play with, right?)

This is no big issue for me. It's just that I really haven't "tweaked" my Windows – just checked a checkbox which was supposed to make stuff easier to read. I'm assuming there are at least *some* other users in the world that have that checkbox checked, which would mean that others are seeing the exact same thing as I do.

As for the monstrosity of my title/scroll bars – that's a side effect of the fixed icon sizes in Windows. Am a bit unsure if I can edit the size of those in XP without a 3rd party program... (Go XP

)

/Calle

feldon34 · 04-04-2003, 04:49 AM

MA2 could ignore the system scrollbar width and force 15 pixels or whatever. But that makes it LESS flexible.

Tiny Turtle · 04-04-2003, 05:38 AM

Yeah, I see.

BigScreen · 04-18-2003, 09:30 PM

(reposted from the SereneScreen Aquarium Wishlist thread, by request)

This is a feature request that I've been thinking about since I first installed v1.0 in December.

If you have the lights set on "Automatic" they change pretty quickly. While I can imagine it wouldn't be very exciting to have a dark fish tank as a screen saver, I would be interested in controlling the speed of the light transitions.

One bothersome thing with many screen savers is that they are so frenetic and unpredictable, that you end up catching them out of the corner of your eye when you're working on something else at your desk. That's one of the things that I like about having an aquarium as a screen saver, very calming motions, nothing wreaking havoc in a frenetic fashion.

Making the lighting transitions go slower would prevent the quick change that happens when it switches from light to dark to light again. I guess the effect I'm looking for would be one if you're right there, you don't notice the change, but if you walk away and come back in a couple of minutes, the aquarium would have changed.

I know this is minor, but if it's possible, it would be nice to have. Maybe a slider or a entry field where you could specify the duration of the transition of light to dark and from dark to light.

As long as I'm suggesting...

Any way we could get the ability to set the minimum light setting for the "Automatic" setting? This way, if the tank is "dark" you could see more than just a silhouette of the fish. In my experimentation, about two arrow clicks up from black was about what I was thinking of.

Just in case you thought those ideas were from out of left field, how about making the background brightness change with the time of day? At Noon, it would be brightest, and at Midnight it would be darkest. Of course you could go overboard and calculate time of sunset and sunrise based on the system's current time and time zone settings...

Lacking these features, I just have my light level set manually, so that's why this isn't a big deal, but this is the suggestions thread...

Reichart · 04-19-2003, 09:24 AM

All good ideas.

We have them already on the list, and one day will get put in.

05-04-2003, 05:12 PM

I know it's been a while since anyone has replied on this forum, but maybe Reichart or Jim Sachs will see this eventually. I'd really like to be able to move the starfish around, especially for it to be able to crawl up the aquarium glass rather than just testing the bottom of it with one or two arms (rays?).
This is probably a crazy and impossible request, but how about something that would allow me to change the size of the fish a bit? I suppose you'd probably just have to add more fish, right? I know these are juveniles whose size is based on a 200 gallon tank. I guess I just want more of a good thing

say, bigger fish with fewer in the tank at one time?

03-22-2003, 12:44 AM	#42
Steven J Lowe Blue Angel Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: UK Posts: 45	I keep seeing this about "mat" What does this mean? Steven J Lowe

03-22-2003, 12:47 AM	#43
Reichart CTO Prolific Publishing Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Maui Posts: 423	Deffs MAT is Marine Aquarium Time (features a crystal in the tank, with a clock, and a calendar). MAT will be out ina few weeks. We do plan to allow people to set up multiple screen savers, with differnt settings. *Reichart...* , CTO, Prolific Publishing, Inc. Come visit us Prolific Publishing, Inc.

03-22-2003, 12:52 AM	#44
Steven J Lowe Blue Angel Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: UK Posts: 45	Thanks for that. So how would i get mat? Is it a seperate download? Steven J Lowe

03-22-2003, 01:11 AM	#45
Steven J Lowe Blue Angel Join Date: Feb 2003 Location: UK Posts: 45	Sorry about last post! Did not read your last post fully(Avaliable in a few weeks) It is a bit early in the morning for me! ) Steven J Lowe

04-03-2003, 03:50 AM	#47
memilm Registered Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: germany Posts: 259	Start Parameter? I like to start the saver in window mode. Are there some parameter to append to the aquarium.scr oder MA2.scr to obtain this? Is there a way to save the last position and widht/height of the SSA windows?

03-21-2003, 02:01 AM	#41
memilm Registered Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: germany Posts: 259	How about some option to start more sessions of the SSA with saved settings in windows modus, as example to have 4 aquariums on your desktop all with another settings.

03-26-2003, 01:17 PM	#46
Panthera Hygenius Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Sunny California Posts: 1,638	Hmm.. how about.. the option to change the background.. like your choice of MUDDY GREEN (my fav) or the dark blue. Or something like that

04-03-2003, 11:06 AM	#48
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	All coming in a future version of MA2. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

04-03-2003, 03:49 PM	#50
Reichart CTO Prolific Publishing Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Maui Posts: 423	Originally posted by Tiny Turtle Just thought I'd share how the settings panel look on my MA2 1600x1200@Large fonts/Large Icons XP setup: It's way better than in the first MAT where some fish were unselectable, but still a bit unpolished. /Tiny Complaint We disagree that it is not polished! Our icons are a fixed size, the UI is also a fixed size, designed to always operate at 640x480, so that no one is ever prevented to change settings. Your resolution has nothing to do with what you are seeing. You have the ability to change your system font, which scales everything. And you changed yours to large, which I do also. Microsoft does not ensure symmetry, so the sliders pop up. We could make the icons smaller, but that would not be fair to the other 99% of people that don’t change their font. However, we might do something in the future that find a medium between the two. Such that if the requester detects a low resolution, it scales the functions down. *Reichart...* , CTO, Prolific Publishing, Inc. Come visit us Prolific Publishing, Inc.

04-03-2003, 04:46 PM	#51
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	Fair Enough. Tiny Re-polish P.S. Question from someone who does not know more programmming than his VCR (some say that's advanced programming ): Do the fish have to be icons? It seems to me that if they weren't they wouldn't be affected by this Ms factory installed bug. Perhaps (i.e. probably I'm overlooking something? Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

04-03-2003, 07:17 PM	#52
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	We tried having the fish in a list. The 10,000,000 Aquarium users who are not Icythyologists complained. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

04-04-2003, 01:22 AM	#53
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	I meant do they have to be Icon files? There must be other image formats useable in programs. When I play a game the cars/monsters/whatever don't change in size just because I choose large icons. /Street Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

04-04-2003, 03:14 AM	#54
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	Having spent the last 3 days working on Visual Basic, I can tell you that the Microsoft tools are SOOOOOOOOO limited it's not even funny. They give you ~15 settings for a feature and then hide another 75 and make you jump through hoops to use them. So what you ask, just arbitrarily switching from fixed-size icons to auto-rescaling bitmaps, is a nightmare. Games do not use any ActiveX/Common Dialog Controls, they just paint on the screen what they want. You'll notice no 2 interfaces are the same. You'll notice also that it takes months (or never) for International versions to come out and there are many other things we take for granted in these dialogs that have to be written manually. I'm not really sure what you are requesting. You have those monstrous scroll bars and title bars and text, and then the regular size fish. Do you want the fish scaled up, or shrunk down? "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

04-04-2003, 03:41 AM	#55
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	Sorry 'bout the Ms tools. Scale up/down: Well, if I only had those two options: – Scaled down I guess. But it would be easier to increase the window width a bit (Still have 640 pixels to play with, right?) This is no big issue for me. It's just that I really haven't "tweaked" my Windows – just checked a checkbox which was supposed to make stuff easier to read. I'm assuming there are at least some other users in the world that have that checkbox checked, which would mean that others are seeing the exact same thing as I do. As for the monstrosity of my title/scroll bars – that's a side effect of the fixed icon sizes in Windows. Am a bit unsure if I can edit the size of those in XP without a 3rd party program... (Go XP ) /Calle Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

04-04-2003, 04:49 AM	#56
feldon34 Forum Administrator Join Date: Dec 2000 Location: Rock Hill, SC Posts: 10,938	MA2 could ignore the system scrollbar width and force 15 pixels or whatever. But that makes it LESS flexible. "Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed. Everything else is public relations." - George Orwell "If voting changed anything, they'd make it illegal." - Emma Goldman

04-04-2003, 05:38 AM	#57
Tiny Turtle is pleased Join Date: Mar 2001 Location: Stockholm, Sweden Posts: 7,365	Yeah, I see. Thanks to Morgan, Tiny Snapshots is up and running again with "Tiny Järvafält" as the latest addition – Go have a look and tell me what you think. "We knew the world would not be the same. A few people laughed, a few people cried, most people were silent. I remembered the line from the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad-Gita. Vishnu is trying to persuade the Prince that he should do his duty and to impress him takes on his multi-armed form and says, 'Now, I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.' I suppose we all thought that, one way or another." /Robert Oppenheimer on witnessing the first thermonuclear detonation in history.

04-18-2003, 09:30 PM	#58
BigScreen Registered Join Date: Mar 2003 Location: Wisconsin Posts: 59	(reposted from the SereneScreen Aquarium Wishlist thread, by request) This is a feature request that I've been thinking about since I first installed v1.0 in December. If you have the lights set on "Automatic" they change pretty quickly. While I can imagine it wouldn't be very exciting to have a dark fish tank as a screen saver, I would be interested in controlling the speed of the light transitions. One bothersome thing with many screen savers is that they are so frenetic and unpredictable, that you end up catching them out of the corner of your eye when you're working on something else at your desk. That's one of the things that I like about having an aquarium as a screen saver, very calming motions, nothing wreaking havoc in a frenetic fashion. Making the lighting transitions go slower would prevent the quick change that happens when it switches from light to dark to light again. I guess the effect I'm looking for would be one if you're right there, you don't notice the change, but if you walk away and come back in a couple of minutes, the aquarium would have changed. I know this is minor, but if it's possible, it would be nice to have. Maybe a slider or a entry field where you could specify the duration of the transition of light to dark and from dark to light. As long as I'm suggesting... Any way we could get the ability to set the minimum light setting for the "Automatic" setting? This way, if the tank is "dark" you could see more than just a silhouette of the fish. In my experimentation, about two arrow clicks up from black was about what I was thinking of. Just in case you thought those ideas were from out of left field, how about making the background brightness change with the time of day? At Noon, it would be brightest, and at Midnight it would be darkest. Of course you could go overboard and calculate time of sunset and sunrise based on the system's current time and time zone settings... Lacking these features, I just have my light level set manually, so that's why this isn't a big deal, but this is the suggestions thread... Scott J. Publisher of The BigScreen Cinema Guide

04-19-2003, 09:24 AM	#59
Reichart CTO Prolific Publishing Join Date: Nov 2001 Location: Maui Posts: 423	All good ideas. We have them already on the list, and one day will get put in. *Reichart...* , CTO, Prolific Publishing, Inc. Come visit us Prolific Publishing, Inc.

05-04-2003, 05:12 PM	#60
klyntun Guest Posts: n/a	Another 2 cents worth I know it's been a while since anyone has replied on this forum, but maybe Reichart or Jim Sachs will see this eventually. I'd really like to be able to move the starfish around, especially for it to be able to crawl up the aquarium glass rather than just testing the bottom of it with one or two arms (rays?). This is probably a crazy and impossible request, but how about something that would allow me to change the size of the fish a bit? I suppose you'd probably just have to add more fish, right? I know these are juveniles whose size is based on a 200 gallon tank. I guess I just want more of a good thing say, bigger fish with fewer in the tank at one time?