Christmas Gadget Blast From The Past: Realistic Animated Christmas Snowflakes

The inspiration for Winter Snow

Wednesday, December 19, 2007 by Zoomba | Discussion: WinCustomize News

Winter Snow, a new premium Dream by Neil Banfield has been selling incredibly well, making it one of our most popular dreams released to-date.  Watching flakes of snow drift down your desktop and collect on your start bar is very soothing and really sets the holiday mood on your PC.

But did you know that it was inspired by a DesktopX Object from 3 years ago?

Realistic Animated Christmas Snowflakes is a DesktopX Object by GreenReaper that turns your desktop into a literal flurry of action.  Completely free to use, it requires DesktopX and we suggest using IconX or hiding your desktop icons for best performance.

One of the best things about this DX Object is you can customize the flakes and other images & settings easily.  Don't like snow?  Cover your desktop in gently falling Winkys!

Realistic Animated Christmas Snowflakes is a great holiday skin to take for a spin, even after all these years!

15 Reply 14 Referrals
PixelPirate
Reply #1 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:10 AM
Damn, is it 3 years ago I did that little snowfella for GR?

GreenReaper
Reply #2 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:24 AM
Yes, it really is . . . seems like just yesterday! It's held up well.

cavalierex
Reply #3 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:30 AM
Vista really needs good dynamic snowfall, like this one on the Mac: SnowFall.

The Vista Ultimate Team let us down again... they could've easily pulled something like this together.


Pugboy
Reply #4 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:39 AM
It looks cool, but I can't run it The boxes don't show up.

GreenReaper
Reply #5 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:41 AM
If you are on Vista and are an Object Desktop user, make sure you have the latest beta downloaded from Stardock Central.

Might also be worth trying to run:
regsvr32 "C:\Program Files\Stardock\Object Desktop\DesktopX\SDCtrls.dll"
from an admin command prompt

Unfortunately with the new compositor it may not work as well on Windows Vista as it has in the past on XP. Under ideal conditions most computers should manage 500 flakes or so - 50 is a sign that there is something slowing it down, most likely in the graphics pipeline.

Pugboy
Reply #6 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 11:44 AM
I don't get the subscription, so that is out. I also tried the reg thing, but it is still brokey.

SirSmiley
Reply #7 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 1:13 PM
IMO GreenReaper's Object is an excellent example of good scripting.

Pugboy, did you click on the snowman?


CarGuy1
Reply #8 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 3:03 PM
50 is a sign that there is something slowing it down

Ya think?  That does explain it though, since that's about what I got on my Vista system with a 320mg 8800gts video card. It also took about 50% of both cores on my AMDx2 5000 CPU.
I bought the Winter Snow dream and it ran perfect so I gave up on Snowflakes.  

Pugboy
Reply #9 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 3:07 PM
Yes, the boxes show up as white rectangles instead of inputs.

SirSmiley
Reply #10 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 3:17 PM
Yes, the boxes show up as white rectangles instead of inputs.


Check to make sure the stardock controls are registered.

HG_Eliminator
Reply #11 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 3:17 PM
I went to another desktop snow making Program as I too was having problems running Realistic Animated Christmas Snowflakes. It would lag out and drop to 0 flakes one second then go up to 50. 140 was the max it would run. My AMD 64X2 4200 with 4 gig 400 mhz ddr, ATI 1600pro with 512 meg V card and "Gaming stripped" XP OS, should run it quite smoothly. I run very few processes/services so it's not a resource issue. when the CPU commit was over 70 % to Realistic Animated Christmas Snowflakes, the PC became slow and unresponsive. Eventually it would relinquish the CPU back to what ever I opened, but it took it's time.. after playing with the settings a few days I gave up..

Pugboy
Reply #12 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 3:34 PM
Registered the SDCtrls.dll, but it still doesn't work.

Leo the Lion
Reply #13 Wednesday, December 19, 2007 5:42 PM
Yep, I had the same situation as HGE describes. I had to drop it and I'm using Richard's DX snowflakes which whilst not the same, work flawlessly

PixelPirate
Reply #14 Thursday, December 20, 2007 4:10 AM
And might I just add that with this little handy app for Mac, you can run your screensaver as a wallpaper: http://www.nwwnetwork.net/software.php?app=wallsaver

With Snowfall you can set your own desktop background and have the snow fall on top of it, so basically it's like having a dream on OSX.

Although...yes, it does slow things down a little running a screensaver as wallpaper, I'm on a powerful Powermac here at work, so I don't notice it that much.

raidersforlife
Reply #15 Thursday, December 20, 2007 9:15 AM
I'd like to thank GreenReaper for releasing this...I break it out every winter since I don't get much snow where I live now (TN, grew up in northern Iowa) and I miss snow. Thanks!!!

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