New Master Dream: Stars
by Neil Banfield
Thursday, December 4, 2008 by Island Dog | Discussion: WinCustomize News
The latest Master Dream on WinCustomize is an especially cool one. Stars by Neil Banfield is a new dynamic .dream featuring a background of “stars” moving toward you. You can adjust many of the setting including the size and speed of the stars, and you can even apply your own background to the stars. Being that this is a dynamic .dream, CPU usage should be very minimal.
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Reply #2 Thursday, December 4, 2008 10:08 AM
Reply #3 Thursday, December 4, 2008 6:44 PM
Great job, Neil.
Reply #5 Friday, December 5, 2008 1:41 AM
HG_Eliminator adds this to his christmas list..
Reply #6 Friday, December 5, 2008 3:39 AM
Hehe, I was going to email Neil about allowing us to pick our own sprites, haha.
So now I've bought it and found the images to swap out...muhahahahaha! 
Reply #7 Friday, December 5, 2008 5:36 AM
So, Mighty Programmer Neil! 
I am now testing a technique I've used in visual effects using this awesome dream and it's working quite nicely! Before I reveal it, I wanted to know how easy would it be for you to add...
A ) a random rotation checkbox, so that each sprite/triangle/polygon. It doesn't need to be animated over time, just setting an initial rotation from 0-359 degrees would be enough for my needs. But I'm sure some people would LOVE to see this animate as a random speed slider, hehe.
and/or
B ) being able to draw randomly from a directory of images (of the correct format, of course). This would allow me to have a series of randomized images so that each one wasn't identical (part of the reason I want to randomly spin everything above). You'd have to cache these in memory, but they're small and the effect would be worth it, I believe. As a bonus, once in memory, they could probably be animated via page flipping but that might be too much bookkeeping for you to track internally.
Combining the two would allow me to do almost everything I am thinking of for this cool trick.
If you would like, I can email you more details and examples privately to show you what I mean. 
Reply #8 Friday, December 5, 2008 8:49 AM
Excalpius: It would be best if you mailed me.
Reply #9 Saturday, December 6, 2008 12:30 AM
Will do. 
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Reply #1 Thursday, December 4, 2008 9:53 AM
The screenshot does NOT do this dream justice. It is so friggin' awesome!
In addition to the crazy cool settings that wblinds created with a bit of hacking you can work your own crazy stuff into it.
Here's what I was playing with earlier: