Pipes Screensaver
Pipes Screensaver Gif

Carl Moser, Emma Price, Cleophas Kalekem, Jeremy Garcia

A golden oldie, the 3D Pipes screensaver, also know as 'The plumber's nightmare' was included in most Windows versions until Windows XP. The original purpose of a screen saver animation was to prevent the burning of an image into the phosphor inside the. The pipe/maze screensaver /r/all. Posted by 3 years ago. I've spent way too much time just switching the pc on and wait till the screen saver would. It is an easetr egg with 3D Pipes screen saver. Change your screen saver to 3D Pipes(OpenGL). Click Settings 3. Change the settings to Multiple Pipes, Traditional joints, with Mixed joint type. Set the resolution to max. Watch Every now and again, a teapot is displayed instead of the normal ball joint at the corner of a pipe. I've read a thread which asks how to get the 3D pipes screensaver on Vista. I understand it, I have a Vista and two XPs. Only one problem, I can't find 3d pipes.scr. It's supposed to be C: WINDOWS system32 3d pipes.scr, but it isn't there. But it has to be, because It's my screensaver. Pipes.sh was originally created by Matthew Simpson and posted to the Arch Linux Forums in early 2010. It was also later posted to Gist released in the public domain. In 2015, the MIT License was added and the Pipeseroni collective was formed to maintain pipes.sh.

Overview

We implemented a screensaver in C++ using OpenGL based on the pipes screensaver. View or download our code here.

Goals

Pipes Screensaver

This project was created for our Software Systems course. For this project, our team was interested in implementing graphics using OpenGL and C++. Creating a screensaver that was 3-dimensional and changed over time seemed like a perfect way to improve our skills and create something enjoyable for everyone.

Background

Going into this project, half of the team had not used C++ or OpenGL before and the other half had a reasonable amount of experience. Most of the background research that was done in preperation for this project consisted of online tutorials to get all of the members comfortable using OpenGL and a lot of experimentation with example code. The primary outcome of this research was knowledge of how OpenGL creates and displays objects and how it allows objects to change over time. We also learned a lot about how OpenGL programs tend to be structured and which functions act as the building blocks for their programs.

Here is an example of how we used some of the GLUT library opengl functions:

Implementation

Overview

Our pipe screensaver is created with a pipe that grows incrementally around the screen. Once it grows to contain a certain number of pipe units or it cannot grow any more (because it would hit itself otherwise), it stops growing and remains on the screen while more pipes continue to grow. After SOME pipes are created, the entire screen resets and it starts building again.

For example, this is how we implemented our reset function:

Map Creation

In order to grow the pipe, we first needed to create an environment for it to grow in. This took the form of a three-dimensional matrix of integers that was slightly larger than the screen. The map with all of the edges marked as 1 and everything within marked as 0. All places within the map that contain a pipe are marked with an integer according to the direction that the pipe should be facing.

This is the constructor map function:

Pipe Generation

Our pipe is made of a dequeue (double ended queue) that contains vectors representing coordinates where the pipe has been. The pipe begins at a random point and from there it grows according to the timer function. Each time it grows, the pipe randomly chooses a direction to go in and creates a new coordinate which is pushed onto the pipe dequeue. It also changes that point in the map from 0 to 1-3 (based on the direction the pipe should be facing). After this, a for loop goes through the pipe coordinates to draw and rotate a cylinder at each point.

Pipes Screensaver Gif

Our pipe coordinates are contained in a dequeue because pipe growth is determine only based on the previous value in the pipe dequeue. Our pipe coordinates are housed in a vector because they do not need to change after they are created.

This is an example of the code that we used to generate our pipe:

Once the pipe has reached it’s limit all of it’s coordinates are added into a deque containing all of the coordinates that have been generated this round and the “current pipe” coordinates are cleared. This allows us to continue generating new pipes while still displaying old ones.

This change over happens here:

Error Checking

When the pipe randomly chooses a direction to grow in, it must first check to see which surrounding coordinates are available. It does so by taking the last coordinate in the pipe queue, and checking the value of the surrounding x, y, and z directions. If that direction is available (is 0), it will add that direction to a vector of possible directions that the growing pipe will choose from. The direction vector contains 10 times as many options to continue growing in the direction that pipe is currently pointed, which mimics the choices made within the Actuall Pipe Screensaver. If this feature were removed, error checking and pipe generation could be combined to simplify the code.

Pipe Coloring

In order to get each pipe to be a different color even while another pipe was growing, we used a deque that contained a vector of red, green, and blue values from 0 to 255 for each segment of the pipe that was created. Red, green, and blue are global variables that are first initizialized with randomly selected values. These values are the RGB values for that each segment of that pipe and are pushed onto the deque containing the colors. When a new pipe begins to grow, the RGB values are randomly assigned agained and will hold for the rest of that new pipe’s segments.

Results

The following video is an example of our pipes screen saver in action.

While many screensavers for Windows are distributed as an installation program that takes care of placing the screensaver file(s) in the proper locations on your computer, and sometimes even opening the Screen Saver Settings panel automatically afterwards, others are shipped as a so-called 'ZIP archive' and require a few extra steps on your behalf.

What is a ZIP archive?

A ZIP archive, recognizable by the .zip extension, is a file into which one or more other files are packaged. You can compare it to a cardboard box that can contain any number of items that fit into it. Putting things inside a box makes it easier to move them around, and the same goes for a ZIP archive: by downloading one ZIP file, you are also downloading the files it contains.

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Other benefits of ZIP archives include compression, allowing the archive to be smaller than the sum of its contents, and the possibility of protecting the archive with a password.

How to open a ZIP file

Windows has built-in support for opening and unpacking ZIP archives, so you should not need a third-party application. However, if double-clicking on a ZIP file for some reason does not show you the archive's contents, consider downloading and installing the 7-Zip u