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XPac - The Afterlife PacSaver
Version: 1.1 (2001-06-04)Released: 2000-09-23 (first release, version 1.0) Type: Screensaver License: Freeware Platform/OS: Win9x/NT Requires: DirectX Size: 218kb
Screenshot 1, blue sense
Download:
Note! There also exists a version of this screensaver with square Pac's instead of round ones! :) This version is somewhat confusingly named "XCap - It's Square Cheese In Millions From Mars!" (or simply XISCIMFM). This version also allows you to use a background image in the screensaver by placing a file "XCap.bmp" in the same directory as the screensaver. You can have both XPac and XCap installed at the same time without any troubles.
Installation:
Description: The screensaver is based loosely on swarm like ideas of chaotic interference in a rieman sphere (and quite obviously also on the paclife algorithm). The saver runs fine under Win9x/NT and requires DirectX. Next follows the background history of the XPac (this text can be found in the help file included with the download).
Version History:
Troubleshooting little pacs: Problem: The Load/Save feature doesn't work under win2000. Solution: I'm aware of the problem but haven't been able to look into it yet (not having win2000 installed). Afaik the default settings still work and the screensaver thus runs, but only in default, you'r not able to modify settings (thus effectively elemenating all the fun with the saver). XPac - A story of chaos and monkeys Pacs are Among Us! This isn’t a normal PacLife tutorial, it is also a story of the monkeys of Nepal and how they came to discover the Pac, and most important of all, you’ll finally find the answer to what role Mr. Arnold Schwarzenegger plays in all of this! :) a Foreword This isn’t just a screensaver, it is a tool made by a mortal human to give himself some Godly powers, the power to control the life of a little Pac civilization. Be prepared, for this mortal human will now share the secret of the power with YOU! With just a little knowledge of how Pac’s live and breed you will be able to create PacLife algorithms were zillions or only a few Pac's cap around the screen ("cap" is the official term for "when Pac’s walk", really it is just the word Pac mirrored, but it fulfils the goal of describing a walking Pac, to provoke some difficult thoughts, how does a Pac really move? I have no clue; they seem to mostly just move their mouth to go forward). Well, I suggest you first try out the predefined algorithms, of which a description of the three most famous follows, but first some history. The birth of the Pac - the saga begins This is the story of the first and original PacLife algorithm - invented by a couple of monkeys in Nepal. The story - as all good stories - begins where it ends, in a holy cave in Nepal. Some monkeys were sitting in a holy cave in Nepal eating bananas, as they were eating one of the monkeys shouted out loud, he had noticed that little chewing formation left in the banana after you have taken a bite of it (sort of looks like a "C"). Well, these highly sophisticated monkeys quickly realized this was something utterly fantastic. They went on to carefully make a drawing of the chewing shape made in the banana, they realised they had invented the slightly bent line, the shape looked quite silly though so they went on to straighten out the bend, and with that they had transformed their discovery into the now famous 90 degree angle (kind a looks like a "V", but tipped over on the side, like this "<"). Things still didn't seem quite right, the shape still looked plain right silly, things were looking dark for the monkeys, they had felt so sure that they had found that path that will lead to eternal bliss, but now... they were lost. But then, out of the dark... stepped, Arnold Schwarzenegger and picked up one of the steel pens the monkeys had been using to draw with, with his incredible strength Mr. Schwarzenegger bent the pen into a half semi-circle shape, he placed the shape on the paper with the tipped over "V" and said, "I'll be back"... Well, my friends, the Tibetan monkeys are still waiting for their saviour to return and open the path to the land of eternal bliss for them. They know for sure that this magical shape their saviour completed for them will unlock the mystery of the path to eternal bliss for them. And when they have found the key, only then, will their saviour be back to guide them along the path. The mystical shape looked something like "(<"... or like in a popular modern twist, ":)" The Original PacLife Algorithm
As the monkeys started to unravel the mystery of the shape, which they had come to call a "Xpq" (after their interpretation of their saviours name - they were never formally introduced, unfortunately, or fortunately as they might then have felt somewhat confused about their saviour, was he real, or just an actor), and they pronounced it "Pac". ---the spell was formulated as: Give me 10 Pac’s and 2 Whirls. Give these 10 Pac’s an Initial Strength of x + y... Let x be the so-called Green Level, the strength level below which a Pac is considered weak and dying. But, thought the wanderer, the initial Pac’s should always be healthy little entities, so thus the initial strength should always be at least equal to the Green Level. But, hmm... the wanderer thought, lets make the initial strength of the Pac’s a little more random, so add a number y to x that is somewhere between 0 and 1200, and lets call that max value of y (which in this case was 1200) the Birth Strength! The wanderer then continued with his spell: Lets give these Pac’s the ability to procreate, this will be weird if nothing else thought the wandered, let's simplify things (i.e. "PG-13" things), when the Pac has eaten the little food thingies (which henceforth will be known just under the generic title of "Food" or "Foods") the Pac should give birth, "Spawn", a number of children. Let's call the number of foods the Pac must’ve eaten before giving birth for the "Spawn Level", and the number of children spawned at this level for "Birth Spawns" (from, birth spawns z number of Pac’s). The wandered was now worried about how he could ensure that there would always be food available for the Pac, he had noticed that his magic wasn't strong enough to provide this cute little entities with eternal life, it seemed they lost strength whenever they moved around, and only gained strength when resting or eating food. So he invented the "Whirls" (well, actually he invented - or at least mentioned - them at the beginning of the spell, foresight I guess?). These Whirls move around in the Pac's universe, these Whirls are also known as "Sources" (a term, not as commonly used in Pac associations), which comes from the fact the Whirls are sources of Food, Food which the Whirls deposit at a common generic interval (the wanderer called this generic interval for "Food deposit gap"). But the Food the Whirls deposited had a slight defect, they lost strength as time went by and would dim in brightness until forever lost in darkness, the strength of the food would be at max when it was just deposited by the whirl (and a Pac that eats a just deposited Food will gain lots of strength from the Food), the wanderer decided the strength of the food at the deposit time would henceforth be referred to as the "Food max strength". Realising that if a Pac has the ability to eat and grow strong, the Pac should also have the ability to grow bigger, to become a Mega Pac! The wanderer decided that a Pac has qualified to become a Mega Pac when its strength reaches above the "Mega Level" (but as soon as it looses strength it is disqualified as a Mega Pac)! So to summarize, the wanderer’s spell was formulated as:
He also made some mental notes of the following things:
The initial strength of any spawned Pac is formulated as A Pac is dying when green, healthy when yellowy, and strong when Mega. Thus the values of the corresponding levels must be of the interval Green Level < normal < Mega Level To ensure all these conditions were met in all future PacLife algorithms, the wanderer wrote in a couple of fail safety checks into his magic, just in case anyone wanted to play around with the algorithms. These fail safety checks would ensure that the basic rules of the life of a Pac would henceforth always be followed. If any laws were broken the magic would shout out a warning to the person formulating the spell. The wanderer also added an extra fail-safe setting to the Pac Civilization; he called it "Max Entities Allowed". This would be a kind of birth control variable (:)) to avoid complete chaos (that might use up a computers all memory and hang it). No matter what the PacLife algorithm would say, no more Pac entities could inhabit the Pac Civilization than the "Max Entities Allowed" variable said. He sat this option to a default value of 5000 (which a pIII-450 with moderate RAM should be able to handle). The wanderer left the fail safe value open to anyone to change at his own risk (after all, nothing dangerous could happen if to many Pac’s were spawned and placed in the Pac Civilization simultaneous, things would just run terribly slow if thousand of Pac’s were to be spawned every second, possibly causing all available memory to be used up and forcing a reboot), he felt sure all PacLife algorithm creators would quickly realise the value of this check. (A wanderers extra note: If you have a fast computer with lots of RAM, try writing an algorithm with 5000 initial Pac’s and see if your computer can handle that setting without being terribly slowed down, if it can, you can safely raise the value of this variable). The wanderer was fascinated by the genius of the monkeys to simply flatten a sphere so they could place their Pac's on it without them falling of the world! He made some additions to the idea though, he decided that when a Pac walks of the left edge of the flat world the Pac would by magic appear on the other side of the world (as if it was really walking on a sphere, this is also known as stereographic projection, the Pac’s are in reality walking on a Riemann sphere). The wanderer left in an option to return the Pac Civilization to the original monkey setting though, where the Pac's just got stuck at the edge of the world and had to change direction (he called this setting... ! ... "Wrap Edges"). As a final touch he added some magic to the Pac Civilization so one as a God could see the life strength of each Pac and the number of eaten foods for each Pac (this number would though be reset at the spawn level). It seems The Original PacLife Algorithm peaks at around 190 Pac’s and averages around 150 Pac’s (turn on the blue cloud and check!). This was the story of the birth of The Original PacLife Algorithm, and I told it to you in my own words as I was told it by my teacher, who in turn told it to me in his own words as he was told it by his teacher and so forth for generations back to the birth of the Pac. The wanderer then proceeded to hand over his magic wand to the monkeys before finally leaving... what happened next, well... The X-Pac The monkeys being handed this magic wand directly went on to play around with the Pac Civilization and formulate a PacLife algorithm of their own. The first thing they did was to manage to kill off all Pac's but one single loony little one... This Pac would though happily cap around the screen (until eventually dying, as no food sources was available)! The Storm And then came the Storm, the monkeys had learned the skill of how to write a PacLife algorithm and managed to write one where there would be a large number of initial Pac’s that proceeded to spawn each other until there would be so many Pac's in their civilization that the food was just not enough for them all... At that point some Pac’s would die, but as that happened there would again be enough food for the Pac's to eat and the population would grow again, and die again... They found that their Storm always peaked somewhere around 870 Pac’s, and at an average lay around 840. And in conclusion... Mr. Schwarzenegger has not yet returned, the monkey’s, who by now have evolved into monks, decided to go to Hollywood instead to see their saviour. Mr. Schwarzenegger according to a recent newsreport is in a hospital after having being beaten up by a gang of mad monks in an arcade hall (witness report the monks were screaming, "you killed PacMan!!!", or something to that extent). A PacMan machine was later reported stolen from the same arcade. The monks are today living happily ever after in paradise, which reportedly turned out to be their holy cave, reports also has that pacish sounds can be heard from the cave at nights.
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Well, as the monkeys started to unravel the mystery of the shape they came up with a wonderful idea, they flattened a sphere and placed little paper clipouts of the Pac's shape on the flattened sphere. They then started throwing bananas at this image and jumped up and down shouting like mad monkeys. A wanderer who was just passing by the monkeys holy cave felt sorry for the monkeys and with the use of his magic wand formulated a logic spell that he put on the Pac shapes, which then stared to move, started to LIVE!
