t3d - clock using flying balls to display the time
Time 3D is a clock. It uses flying balls to display the time. This balls move
and wobble around to give you the impression your graphic workstation with its
many XStones is doing something.
t3d uses mouse and keyboard to let you fly through the balls. Hit
S to speed up, A to slow down, Z to zoom in and
X to zoom out. Use the left mouse button to rotate to the left
and the right mouse button to rotate the view to the right. Use the
middle mouse button to change the optical axis and the moving
direction. Q will stop you.
- -display host:dpy
- Specifys the display in the usual way.
- -geometry WxH+X+Y
- Sets the size and location of the t3d window.
- -move factor
- Modifies the direction move of t3d. The clock looks 30 degrees*
factor to the left and to the right periodically.
- -wobble factor
- Modifies the wobbling (sounds nice :-) of t3d by multiplying the default
deformation of the clock with factor.
- -nice factor
- Renices t3d by factor because t3d uses your process time. The
default renice factor is 20, so you can't do anything wrong with not
renicing t3d. If you want more speed, you should set nice to a smaller
value.
- -minutes
- Shows one small ball for every minute, instead of one for every 2.5
minutes.
- -mag factor
- Changes the magnification of t3d. By default, t3d uses a 200x200 window. A
factor of 2 means, it will use a 400x400 window.
- -cycle period
- Sets the moving cycle to period seconds. By default, this value is
10 seconds.
- -wait microsec
- Inserts a wait after drawing one view of the clock. By default, t3d waits
40 ms after each drawing. This helps you to keep the performance loss
small.
- -fast precalc_radius
- t3d uses bitmap copy to draw precalculated balls. You can specify the
radius in pixels up to which t3d should precalculate balls. t3d will set a
useful range by itself using the magnification when it is started.
- -colcycle
- Draws cyclic the color scale used for the balls in the background instead
of the normal black.
- -rgb red green blue
- Selects the color in RGB color space of the lightning spot on the balls.
All the other colors used for balls or -colcycle are less intensive
colors of the same hue and saturation. All values in range of 0 to 1.
- -hsv hue value saturation
- Selects the color in HSV color space. hue is in degrees from 0 to
360, all other values in range from 0 to 1. It gives nice but rather
unpredictable results, if you use a saturation of e.g. 2. Try it at your
own risk.
- -hsvcycle speed
- Rotates the hue axis every 10 seconds* speed.
- -help
- Prints a short usage message.
Bernd Paysan
Email: bernd.paysan@gmx.de
Acknowledgement to Georg Acher, who wrote the initial program displaying balls.
Copy, modify, and distribute T3D either under GPL version 2 or newer, or under
the standard MIT/X license notice.
T3D is not related to T3D(tm), the massive parallel Alpha--based supercomputer
from Cray Research. T3D's name was invented in 1991, years before the project
at Cray Research started. There is no relation from T3D to Cray's T3D, even
the balls surrounding T3D on some posters weren't an inspiration for T3D. I
don't know anything about the other way round.
The programming style of T3D isn't intented as example of good
style, but as example of how a fast prototyped demo may look like. T3D
wasn't created to be useful, it was created to be nice.
There are no known bugs in T3D. Maybe there are bugs in X. Slight changes in the
T3D sources are known to show these bugs, e.g. if you remove the (int) casting
at the XFillArc x,y,w,h-coordinates...