Bad Apple but it's a Windows virus
A high-performance (I've never seen anything like this run in realtime before) rendition of Bad Apple, using Windows windows as the video surface.
It's not actually a virus, but it is reminiscent of the viruses of old that were more of a nuisance than anything.
Video demonstration:
Why is it so performant?
DeferWindowPos
- even the most naive of projects can go from 1fps to 15fps by using this wonderful batched API instead ofSetWindowPos
.WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW
to remove the taskbar entrySWP_NOREDRAW
when moving/resizing windows- Optimised code that only shows/hides/moves windows that need showing/hiding/moving
- Rust is blazing fast, don't you know?
Could it be faster?
I suspect that choosing which windows to move/resize, such that each is resized as little as possible, can increase performance - currently, the windows are just used from largest to smallest, which can result in some location jitter as they fit into different indexes.
Future work
All of these I have done already in small tests, but they're both difficult to make performant (copy dialogs are particularly slow), and difficult to arrange into a pleasing display.
- Spawning
MessageBoxA
windows and taking their handle (thus avoiding the need to replicate the layout ofMessageBoxA
for each version of Windows you run on) - Spawning Vista file copy dialogs using
IProgressDialog
- Arranging windows in rolling sine waves, circles, etc
All of these I have not tried yet, but would be great additions:
- Water physics using hundreds of scroll bars
- Basic hard-body physics between windows
- Error noises synced with the audio (could just pre-render...)
- Notification bubbles
- Windows in the taskbar to show text (if the user has large taskbar buttons enabled)
- A large variety of error messages to delight the user with
Building and such
Should be fine to just cargo build --release
.
Look at bad apple.py
for the pre-processing to take an input video and turn it
into boxes.bin
, a space-optimized representation of the window bounds for each
frame. The script is jank, don't come complaining.