GasLight 0.32

29^th January 2005.

Installation

Drag & drop "GasLight.bundle" into the "Library/iTunes/iTunes Plug-ins" folder in your home folder. If the iTunes Plug-ins folder doesn't exist, create it. Alternatively, you can make the plugin available to all users by putting it in the matching folder path at the top level of your hard disk.

Restart iTunes, and select the plugin under the Visualizer menu. You can access the options panel through the top right Options button, which appears in the iTunes window while the visualizer is turned on.

I make no guarantees that this won't break iTunes, your Mac, your car, or your cat. Numerous people have been using it without problems so far. Then again, maybe you're special...

GasLight is free for non-commercial use. If you want to encourage me to continue updating GasLight, or to produce more nifty stuff for OS X in the future, consider donating a few bucks through my website. The remarkable lack of donations so far means that you could be contributing a sizable percentage of my profits simply by donating the price of a beer :)

Configuration

While running GasLight, you can hit 'h' for a list of commands you can use. These allow you some limited control over GasLight's settings - for example, toggling Autopilot on and off, or generating some random new settings.

However, the bulk of GasLight's configuration is done in the Config Window. This gives you a range of parameters to play with, controlling colours, zooming effects, glows, and so on. Best thing to do is just experiment and see what you can come up with. Alternatively, just turn on Autopilot, sit back, and relax.

Technical Notes

A graphics card that supports pixel shaders (or more specifically, GL_ARB_fragment_program) isn't required, but it will make things look a whole lot nicer. The default presets are created with pixel shaders in mind, too, so they'll look real ugly without.

Cards with the necessary shader support include:

• ATI Radeon 9600 and above
• nVidia GeForce FX
• nVidia GeForce 6800

GasLight uses shaders to give softer glows and richer colors. Here's a sample of 3 presets - the top half is running on a card without shader support, the bottom half with.

OS X 10.3 / Panther is required. It won't work in 10.2 due to extensive use of OpenGL's PBuffers, which were only introduced in 10.3. I could maybe rewrite things to support 10.2, but it would be unpleasantly slow, and given the small market, I really don't think it's worth it.

Epilogue

Thanks go to the guinea pigs on the ArsTechnica forums for helping to test GasLight out back in the days when it was known as SSSpectrum. Especially of note are for his wonderful work on the icon and titling for GasLight, and pbrice68 for the name suggestion.

Any suggestions / bug reports / compliments can go to jon@steelskies.com. I'd welcome any comments on how to make things better / more intuitive.

Product Homepage

Version History

0.32

• No more crashes on corrupt saved data (hopefully...)
• Added an About box.

0.31

• Threaded rendering - better control over CPU usage, and more FPS (particularly on dual processor machines)
• Rendering updates / improvements. Things shouldn't run stupidly fast on high-end machines now
• Import / Export presets (see the Manage Presets section of the Config window)
• Better support for older cards (extremely limited, but at least it won't crash now...)
• Misc. fixes, memory leaks, and so on

0.27

• Proper fullscreen resolution settings. GasLight will now detect all supported resolutions.
• Added keyboard controls. Hit 'h' for details.
• Autopilot mode is much improved - it shouldn't swamp the screen with white quite so much now.
• Misc. tweaks and fixes

0.25

• Added Presets Edit window, for deleting and renaming presets.
• Numerous under-the-hood rendering changes. Things should be a little faster now
• Fixed crash on opening presets window
• Updated preset versioning - old presets will be lost
• Tweaked a large variety of other things which I've long since forgotten about

0.22

• Fixed crash on duplicate preset names
• Updated preset versioning - old presets will be lost

0.2

• Added support for saving & loading presets
• Improved glow effects for non-pixel shader cards. (i.e. it's no longer a totally blinding wash of color)
• Extra configuration options - display orientation and zoom rotation.
• Misc. bits and pieces

0.1

• First public release

GasLight and its contents Copyright © 2005, Jonathan del Strother.