Is it possible to make screensaver with Unity?

Build & Deployment
1

I like to build some 3D screensavers with Unity. I don’t need user interaction, maybe some data retrieved from Internet.

Is this possible? Mac and/or Windows?

Thank you

2

(I think) not at the moment. However, such a publish option makes perfect sense at probably will appear in some future version.
Windows note: actually a screensaver can have interaction with the user, just that usually they don’t. In fact, a screensaver is just a program; with some options so that in can be previewed in the Display Settings. Even something like Word could theoretically be a screensaver :slight_smile:

3

I just wanted to bump this old thread because it would be awesome if Unity had the option to publish screensavers.

I realize that the wiki explains how to create make a Mac screensaver from a Unity execuatble… but making screensavers for Windows is a different beast. The main problem is that there is no way to read command line parameters while in the Unity runtime. This means you can’t tell if the screensaver is being ran in preview mode.

4

You used to be able to turn a Windows .EXE into a screen saver by simply renaming it to .SCR but I’m not sure what would be involved now a days. I started to look into doing this with a Unity standalone a while back but didn’t get anywhere. Has anyone successfully done this? If so, how?

5

the other option i thought of it actually writing a small screensaver prefspane that launches the unity player in fullscreen mode (based off current screen res). the player could live in the prefspane bundle, so would be fairly transparent to the end user. Something along the lines of what this does:

http://www.themcdonalds.net/richard/software/appStartSaver/index.shtml

But again none of these approaches I would recommend for a commercial product, for one both methods don’t allow screen locking, and are mac only.

Cheers.

6

I’m actually experimenting with something like this in my spare time.

I’m using Cocoa and the ScreenSaver + Webkit frameworks to just load a local page that embeds Unity or Flash. WebKit does all the work really.

When I have more time to work on it and package it properly, I’ll share the result.

7

that approach is what is available on the wiki. and in my opinion not very robust. one the user will need the plugin installed to use it and two it doesn’t protect the web-player very well. so for a commercial product someone could just open the package and remove the web-player and html file and do what they want with it.

Cheers.

8

You should look at “Creating Screen Savers” on the Unify Wiki at http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_Screen_Savers

9

You can still do that (rename .EXE to .SCR) but the problem is that Unity built .EXEs can’t read command line parameters, which means that the screensaver )the .exe) cannot determine if it should be running in Preview, Configuation or Normal mode.

10

Has anyone noticed that the “Creating Screen Savers” article on the Unity Wiki no longer works? … I think it is a (Snow)Leopard issue.

http://www.unifycommunity.com/wiki/index.php?title=Creating_Screen_Savers

11

Annoyingly close to getting this to work.

I packaged up a windows standalone exe and data folder using molebox and if I rename it to have a .scr extension then it runs when you double click it and runs full screen no problem (just set that as the default when building it) it even runs in preview mode when setting it as the screen saver, but when it actually runs for real it says the data folder is missing. Same thing happens even if I don’t wrap it up with molebox. Windows must do something weird when it executes it.

12

just a guess:

execution folder for screen savers is c:\windows\system32 ? even if you browse is from elsewhere on your disk?

does placing the whole .exe/.scr and datafolders in windows\system32 solve your problem?

siggi

edit:

tried it with an exe from my own projects.

  • copied both exe and data folder to windows\system32
  • renamed the .exe to .scr
  • renamed the data folder exactly to what the error message complained (should be something like [YOURFILE]~1_Data, note that blanks are removed, all letters uppercase)
    → worked fine :smile: (preview and real)

P.S. I’m using XP

1 Like
13

Ah didn’t think of that, so yes I put both the .scr and data folder in system32 but I didn’t think to rename it as in the error message. Doh! cheers.

14

Annoyingly on Vista changing the name makes it work for real but not in preview where it still wants the long name. Meaning you need 2 copies of the data folder… well at least it kinda works.

15

What also works is just naming it Data, downside to that is you can only have one in there. I guess the other option is to make sure the short and long names are the same all uppercase and less than 8 characters.

1 Like
16

Yup, using 8 character dos names seems to work for both preview and real. Cool beans.

17

brave new world :wink:

even some “new” windows7-features work on good old DOS-basis

greets siggi

18

I’ll have to test it on windows 7, you never know that might be different again.

19

I was also getting the plugin not installed message in the Unity wiki screensaver (OSX) even though Unity was installed. I think possibly it’s because the screensaver’s html page is a highly stripped down version and it perhaps wasn’t compatible with the latest webplayer?

Anyway, if you grab the sourcecode version of the screensaver from the wiki, you can overwrite the html file with the one generated from your new Unity application. You just need to be sure to change some things - copy the css style from the tag, remove the

title and the footer which links to downloading the plugin. Also you need to make sure the name of the unity file in the html file is the same as your actual unity file. In the wiki screensaver’s html file it used saver.unityweb instead of saver.unity3d. It’s okay to use .unity3d so long as the html file has that as the extension, AND you modify the screensaver framework’s Objective-C code to reference the appropriate file name and extension. It gets kind of annoying when you’re testing a new screensaver during development, to have to keep renaming whatever.unity3d to whatever.unityweb.

Works for me, on Intel Mac 32-bit Leopard.

20

Sorry to bump this again.

I’m getting a “not compatible with this system” error when trying to use the wiki (MAC) files.

I changed the HTML inside the package (just renamed my html to saver.html so it can find the .unity3d file instead of .unityweb file)

when double clicking the Unity Screen Saver.saver it installs a saver in the systempref plane but immediately says it not compatible with my OSX 10.6…

can anyone smart redo (i think) the binary file in the package…?