A Guided Tour of Stardock DeskScapes

Microsoft released Windows Vista with a whole new graphics engine that is 3D accelerated.  Because of that, all kinds of cool visual effects become possible. One obvious thing that became possible for Microsoft to do was to allow users to optionally have animated wallpaper.

Now, like normal (1 frame) wallpaper, animated wallpaper could be pretty obnoxious. But if done right, it would simply take static wallpaper to the next logical step.

So Microsoft developed a new feature for Windows Vista Ultimate Extra called Windows DreamScene.  When it came time to get tools and content, they came to Stardock.  Stardock's graphics design team (Stardock Design) for the animated wallpaper and our desktop enhancement team for the tools.

This is where Stardock DeskScapes comes in.  We developed Stardock DeskScapes to extend Windows DreamScene in certain very important areas:

Feature	Windows DreamScene	Stardock DeskScapes
Plays .MPEG and .WMV content as wallpaper
Plays .DREAM content as wallpaper
Supports Triggers for changing animated wallpaper
Supports Dynamic (non-video) content
Supports author credit in dialog
Is Extensible
Requires	Windows Vista Ultimate	Windows DreamScene
Price	FREE (with Windows Vista Ultimate)	FREE (for users of Windows Vista Ultimate)

To be clear: Stardock DeskScapes extends Windows DreamScene. It isn't a replacement for it. You have to have Windows DreamScene installed first to use Stardock DeskScapes. 

Taking Windows DreamScene one step further -- Stardock DeskScapes

As we developed the animated wallpapers for Microsoft we became very experienced in how to make it so that it was subtle and use less CPU (there video encoding and then there is video encoding).  We also came up with our own wish list of things we felt users would want. For example:

DeskScapes Enhancement #1: Authors getting credit

DeskScapes allows author information to be displayed and that info can be linked to your website.

The first thing about DeskScapes -- there is no program to run. Once it's installed, your regular Windows wallpaper manager in Vista is simply extended to support .DREAM files. You don't have to do anything else.

When you click on a .Dream file, the title and author information comes up.

By contrast, Windows DreamScene on its own, as cool as it is, doesn't display author info. So no one knows who created the cool animated Aurora default in Windows DreamScene (Stardock Design created it incidentally)

DeskScapes Enhancement #2: Dynamic Wallpaper

This image is being rotated on the fly in 3D in total smoothness

World rotates in real-time (which is very slowly actually)

Modern video games generally don't use pre-rendered video anymore. That's because modern video cards have the horse power to do amazing things.  Most reviewers haven't talked much about this but the Windows Vista desktop IS A 3D SURFACE. It simply looks like previous versions of Windows. It's as if they took the Quake 3 engine and made the game look like Windows.  Seriously. 

That means you can do some pretty cool stuff with it...such as dynamic animated wallpapers.

My screenshot here is pretty lame but we've got earth rotating, snow/rain (based on weather -- there's probably a sunny one but we're in Michigan) ones, fish swimming, lava lamps, etc.  All are in various states of development. Obviously, it does take more work to make a good looking dynamic wallpaper but the results can be really cool. As they get finished, we'll be releasing them.

DeskScapes Enhancement #3: Triggers

Based on time of day your wallpaper can change.

Triggers are another way of saying that if a certain condition is met, then do something. Stardock DeskScapes lets .DREAM files have triggers. For instance, IF time is morning, then play wallpaper A, IF Time is afternoon, play wallpaper B and so forth. It's not that huge of a thing but something that wasn't hard to do that we think enriches the experience.

Summary

Probably the key thing that Stardock DeskScapes does is extend Windows DreamScene to support the .DREAM format. You don't need DeskScapes to play video (MPEG or WMV) content as your animated wallpaper. But consider this -- which will be easier to find in a year from now to use as your animated wallpaper? Googling .DREAM or Googling WMV?

If it's .DREAM you get all the advantages I mention above plus you know it's designed to be an animated wallpaper. And it costs nothing to create them (use DreamMaker) and nothing for Windows Vista Ultimate users to use them.

We'll be providing additional free content on Dream.WinCustomize.com over the coming weeks, months. Essentially, we created a host of high quality, high definition video content for the Microsoft project and Microsoft chose some to distribute and we kept the rest to distribute.

We hope you have fun with this and that as time goes on, more and more people will come to find that animated wallpapers are pretty nice.  While the concept of them isn't new (lots of people/developers have hacked at it for years), the key thing about Windows DreamScene / Stardock DeskScapes is that you get to have your cake and eat it too. When perfected, you'll have it without any performance or usability drawbacks. It'll be like the static wallpapers of the present except with more frames.

So the steps are...

1. Get Windows Vista Ultimate
2. Download Windows DreamScene
3. Download/Install Stardock DeskScapes
4. Start enjoying .DREAMs!

Have fun!