I'm surprised nobody's made a thread about this before, but is there anyone out there who knows anything about screensaver integration in Windows?

It would be nice to have TPT open up in fullscreen with HUD disabled (so no interaction, not even the menu bar at the bottom) on a given save ID, set of IDs, or a local simulation file.

One problem, of course, would be the aspect ratio, but that could easily be solved by giving users a choice to stretch, cut off, or fit to screen without ever changing the monitor resolution.

You could integrate this with a script that generates a simulation file right before it is loaded as a screensaver, for example to show an electronic clock that always shows the right time. Or there could be a "persistent" mode where the simulation is written back to disk right when the screensaver is closed, for instance to count the cumulative time in inactivity. All for style of course :)

What do you think about this idea?

ChargedCreeper:

Screen savers in Windows are exe files renamed to scr as far as I know. Certain args are passed to the scr executable for configuring the screensaver, and for launching it.

 Oh, right. Now I seem to remember how screensavers worked.. you copy them to System32/SysWOW64 and then call rundll32.exe desk.cpl,InstallScreenSaver yerfile.scrthen Windows will call /p (to show the screensaver in the selection dialog box, given a handle number), /c (to show the config), or /s (to show it fullscreen). Very barbaric if you ask me, but screensavers don't really need their own API and as such don't really get much attention.