I threw together an XScreenSaver module that is API-compatible with Shadertoy. My thought was that this would be a good way to pull in a bunch of new savers, since the cool kids don’t write C any more, they just write GLSL. There are some problems with that plan, though:
The default license on Shadertoy is CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 and the vast majority of uploads there use that, but since that prohibits commercial use (the “NC” part) it is not an open source license, is not compatible with the MIT/BSD license used by the rest of XScreenSaver, and is probably also incompatible with the licensing terms of every OS distro. So I can’t include those.There’s no way to search on Shadertoy and filter by license terms, to find ones that might be compatible.There’s no way to email the author of a shader, because email is for old people.This is where someone’s going to suggest, “Instead of including the code with XScreenSaver, why not instead have the end user enter the URL and have the saver download it from the site in realtime and then run that”, and while I hate that idea for other reasons that should be obvious, it doesn’t matter because Shadertoy has their Clownflare proxy configured to specifically make that sort of thing damn near impossible. I’m not getting into a countermeasures-escalation fight over this.Possibly that would be less bad if the XScreenSaver end user had a Shadertoy account and was logged in, but “you have to create an account before you can run this screen saver” is so stupid that I hope we can just never speak of that idea again. No, just no.
Anyway, all that being said:
I would like to see your favorite Shadertoy links that would make good screen savers.
Prefer ones that do not require large static assets, e.g., big images as input;Prefer open source licenses, but even if not, I’ll take a look;Audio input and output are not an option.
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