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IDEA: Maya Paint effects screensaver randomizer

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Mighty Pete:
This screensaver is a excellent free one that is actually worth downloading. The problem with it is you cannot set the paint brush to random every time it runs. It uses the same paint brush now. I'm wondering if it would be possible to set it up so that can happen. A custom loader. The force of the paintbrush can be random just not the actual brush

You can get the screensaver from here. It's spyware free.

http://decentdownloads.x-istence.com/software/MayaPaintEffectsScreenSaver.exe

The Maya Paint Effects Screen Saver is based on the Paint Effects technology in Alias|Wavefront's Maya 3D animation package. The screen saver will fill your computer screen's idle moments with a large variety of natural and not so natural effects. Cover your screen with flowers, pretzels, vines, galaxies, feathers, copper pipes, or any of the other fascinating presets provided. Expand your palette even further by downloading additional presets.

mouser:
do you have a url for a page describing the screensaver?
can you configure it to use different pain brush strokes? from commandline or from screensaver configuration setting?

Mighty Pete:
Well unfortunately you need to install it first to get the link, But I did and I now have the link.

http://tinyurl.com/cgv76

Now it wants a log in. I used bugmenot to get.


login
Login details for www.alias.com

Account #1
    auser123
    123456


Now the good news is it stores the setting in a file in /windows/system32 called MayaPESaver.prf
It's text

Now all that would have to be done is download the extra effects from that site and set it to all of them renaming the .prf files so they don't get overwritten then make a custom scr wrapper to rename one from the list and start up Maya Paint Effects.SCR

Think they would have thought of this already.


Now you'd only have to make two prf files really, I could add the rest to the file and upload them if you want.

As long as I could edit the list to add new ones.

mouser:
yea, this is exactly the kind of approach i was thinking of.

now the problem with creating a loader for the .scr is that for example, you would be messing up the screensaver configuration system, which would no longer be able to configure the screensaver properly (since it would be trying to configure the simple loader).  though this is still definitely a possibility.

first things first,
the idea of randomly replacing the configuration file seems like the way to go, and a general solution that could be useful for other things
so we can imagine a simple commandline tool, whose job was to maintain a list of alternate configuration files and which would simple overwrite a main one with contents of one of the others.

so for example RandomFileVersionReplacer.exe
with a config file that looked like
 BASEFILENAME
 ALTFILE1
 ALTFILE2
 ALTFILE3
 ...

so you would use in your case
 C:/windows/system32/MayaPESaver.prf
 C:/windows/system32/MayaPESaver_myversion1.prf
 C:/windows/system32/MayaPESaver_myversion2.prf
 C:/windows/system32/MayaPESaver_myversion3.prf

and this commandline tool when invokes would simply choose of those 3 and overwrite contents of MayaPESaver.prf with it.
simple enough and general purpose enough that it might find use elsewhere.

now the second part you would need is some way of triggering that command appropriately..
there might already be some tool to let you run commands whenever the screensaver runs.. that might be one solution, though it would probably require running some app in the background at all times..

Mighty Pete:
Well I was thinking .exe as a .scr kind of program. a new exe file that appears as the screensaver it runs, starts up renames the files and then starts up the real screensaver program.

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