Electric Sheep Screensaver

The new version of the electricsheep screensaver has been released! It's been developed on Ubuntu with gnome-screensaver. The new version is 800x600 instead of 640x480, and uses much better video compression as well as all sorts of new variations.

Electric Sheep is a free, open source screen saver created by Scott Draves. It's run by thousands of people all over the world, and can be installed on any ordinary PC or Mac. When these computers "sleep", the screen saver comes on and the computers communicate with each other by the internet to share the work of creating morphing abstract animations known as "sheep". The result is a collective "android dream", an homage to Philip K. Dick's novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?.

Anyone watching one of these computers may vote for their favorite animations using the keyboard. (Note that voting is disabled on the linux client until we get a gnome-screensaver patch. You can still vote via the website.) The more popular sheep live longer and reproduce according to a genetic algorithm with mutation and cross-over. Hence the flock evolves to please its global audience. You can also design your own sheep and submit them to the gene pool.

This thread describes how to get the screensaver on your machine:

http://community.sheepserver.net/node/51

The attached script will download the source code and compile it on your machine.

You can see the beta server's status at

http://v2d7b.sheepserver.net/cgi/status.cgi

2.7b12 print standard deviation of play counts if debugging. add electricsheep.desktop.kde from javajazz. add play_evenly preference to reduce playing of most played sheep. fix bug of rescanning the local cache too often. add "-cache 8192" options to mplayer because some newer versions require it when reading stdin (suggested by Alien Bob aka Eric). Fix memory leaks and remove hacked version of ffmpeg (thanks David Leverton).

2.7b11 Keep track of how many times each sheep is played, and delete sheep that are played most often (instead of using simulation to estimate). Each flam3-animate process should use only one thread. Change copyright from Draves to Spotworks LLC. Fix to work with xscreensaver: prevent mplayer from disabling xscreensaver. Print bad text if there is a parse error.

2.7b10 delay fork of mplayer by 300ms to make startup more reliable. repeat 2x instead of 3x before breaking a simple infinite loop. download immediately if there are 2 or fewer sheep in the cache. to select sheep for deletion, randomly half the time delete the oldest sheep instead of the most-played according to simulation.

2.7b9 - change default nickname to empty string to protect user privacy, instead of broadcasting USER envar. add a button to the preferences dialog that tests the current network settings (including if the user/password account is valid). use 20th percentile instead of median for deletion limit, ie protect
fewer sheep. remove cvs version strings. follow http redirections vi -L option to curl. enable basic authentication (the user/password refers to the drupal on the sheep server). put the client version into the URL for the help page.

2.7b8 - Multiple monitors are now better supported, and a big client fix that allows a much larger variety of sheep to show up during the animations.