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Escape GL v2.0- by Chris Wenham
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In my office, 4 pairs of eyes have leveled themselves upon my monitor and linger there while the lunch break ticks to a close. I'm hanging around just beyond the limits of their field of vision to gloat for two more minutes before I walk back in, sit down, and type in my password to deactivate the screen saver. Rich, bubbling envy dies away in the background for another afternoon while everyone gets back to work.

If you haven't seen Snow Storm Software's Escape GL in action, well pity on you then, because this screen saver that hooks itself into OS/2's Lockup mode will make you feel like you've momentarily swapped an SGI machine in place of your humble desktop. Its collection of 3D animations, rendered through OS/2's OpenGL libraries, pour, swoop, and roll onto your screen with vivid splashes of color and some really eye-gluing animation. There ain't no namby-pamby Flying Toasters in this package.

Animation speed is not bad on my AMD K6-200, with some of the modules needing to be scaled down in size or quality before they animate smoothly enough to be satisfying, but it's pretty clear that this virtual Pez dispenser of eye-candy is not meant to be run on 486 class machines or slower. In fact it probably wouldn't be that worthwhile on low-end Pentiums either, unless you don't mind small views and jumpy movement. But being OpenGL it lends itself to the possibility of hardware acceleration in the future, should any such beast ever materialize that comes with OS/2 drivers.

Escape GL installs with the usual IBM Installation program and puts a copy of its icon in your Startup folder, where it will run minimized in the background until you activate OS/2's Lockup, or pull up its control panel to try out some of its modules in test mode. To make it act like a screen saver that switches on after a couple of minutes of nothing-going-on, you'd open the Properties for the desktop (right click, select 'Properties' from the menu) and adjust the settings you find on the 'Lockup' tab. Escape GL needs Lockup to be running in full-screen mode and with auto-dim switched off. You can then set the time-out value in minutes on the same page. Make sure you check page 3 and set the password too, or you might find yourself with a Reboot situation on your hands. <g>

Either way, if you activate lockup manually or automatically (I have lockup assigned to a keyboard combination with the help of Object Desktop), Escape GL will always kick in as long as its program is running in the background. Close Escape GL and Lockup behaves normally (and boring) again.

Now for the good bits: The animations! Escape GL comes with about 40 different modules, some more interesting than others, but all of them independently configurable, to be added or removed from the Random-Selection pool as you wish. To save time, I'll only talk about, and provide a few screen shots for my favorites.

Roller Coaster (JPG, 29k) is my absolute favorite, and it's not hard to see why. At the highest quality level, this loop-de-loopin' coaster has a big red and blue frame with a gorgeous fog effect that makes the background slowly fade, as if you were taking a ride in the early, misty hours of a spring morning. This one also takes serious number-crunching power to get beyond anything but a 1/3rd scale view at that quality level, but by golly is it fun to watch! Perhaps it's modeled after a real-world coaster somewhere and maybe it's straight out of the programmer's imagination, who knows. Dropping the quality down to level 2 will give you a nighttime ride (sorry, no lights from the rest of the fair) but is more easily displayed at larger scales.

The next is Magic Carpet (JPG, 10k) an example of OpenGL's ability to pick a random bitmap from your C:\OS2\Bitmaps directory (or any other you specify), and use it as a texture-map on its many shapes and contortion experiments. Magic Carpet appeals to me for some reason because of its steady flowing, rippling of the 'carpet' (such a shame we can't show animation in the screen shots). Escape GL will randomly cycle through the bitmaps it finds in whatever directory you've given it, at whatever time interval you set for it. This applies for all of its bitmap-textured modules. What's interesting is that Escape GL can support any image file format that Warp does (you ever tried loading a .JPG file as your desktop background? Well you can. Yeah you thought it was limited to .BMP, didn't you?) If you add support for other formats, such as the MMOS/2 plug-in that's available to support PNG files, Escape GL will be able to read and use those too.

Galaxy (GIF, 7k) follows true to form with the idea of aptly named modules, rendering a display that, at full-screen (which isn't so bad since it's not as heavy on the ol' CPU), will make any blue-blooded Sci-Fi fan like me giggle and crawl up into a fetal position. A gracefully slow performance, this galaxy has a hub that spews out a bright and speckled, two-spoke stream of stellar matter, like a rotary garden sprinkler in slow-mo.

Freeway is one that you might find yourself watching for a while (no screen shot here, since Freeway doesn't look like much without the animation, and I wasn't quite able to capture one that looked any good at all). It simulates speeding down a freeway at night, with blue and red meridian lights streaming under you and emerging in the near distance. Whoever is driving the car can sure hug the curves though, since this freeway has more twists and turns in it than one of those Crazy Straws you used to drink your soda from.

VRML (GIF, 24k) is the module with hidden treasure, for sure. It's capable of reading VRML 2.0 files and displaying them in full OpenGLory. Escape GL comes with a few sample ones, but you can go out there and grab your own from the net if you want to. It's this VRML rendering engine that Snow Storm Software repackaged inside a Netscape plug-in and called Voyager (see this month's First Looks column). This module can't do much more than display and rotate the objects described in the files, but some of them are quite colorful and striking. This is surely better than those silly photo-slideshows. <g>

The last module I'll talk about in detail is Chrome (JPG, 4k), another example of texture maps at work here, but this time instead of being wrapped on to the object, they're being reflected off it. A chromed cube spins and rolls on the screen, reflecting an imaginary wallpaper off its shiny surface. The effect can be quite hypnotic at times, maybe even surreal.

For most of the modules, when they're not viewed at full screen (and if you have the computing power to do that for most of these number-munchers, you must work for the Department of Energy), they can be set to bounce around the screen with a click on the "Floating window" checkbox in each module's properties. Unfortunately the calculations required to make this bouncing effect also slow down the rendering even more. So if you like smooth motions you might just want to leave them centered.

And for those who are curious, a short ice-cream list of some other modules ready for you to discover are: Asteroids (no spacecraft to shoot at them with, though), Blob (ever watch that scene in Star Trek VI where the blobs of Klingon blood are floating in zero-G? Yeah, like that), Campfire, DNA, Droplets, O-Rings (didn't we see these in Superman 2?), Paper Airplanes, Shark Tank and Twister. More than enough to waste several hours of office productivity time exploring.

Escape GL makes use of DIVE for displaying its creations, so make sure you have a video card and drivers capable of handling this. The program also seemed to suffer from a few instability bugs, it crashed a number of times after taking screen shots of it in action, and a few times when browsing through the various modules and tweaking their settings. However, the problems aren't really show-stopping, and once configured and left to sit quietly in the background it behaves itself nicely.

* * *

Escape GL 2.0

by Snow Storm Software
MSRP: US$25

Chris Wenham is the Senior Editor of OS/2 e-Zine! -- a promotion from Assistant Editor which means his parking spot will now be wide enough to keep his bicycle and a trailer.


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