Eisenbahn-Bildschirmschoner-Wiki

The Traffic Screensaver

The concept behind the Traffic Screensaver is quite simple: small vehicles move their way across the screen.

The Traffic Screensaver is “programmable” - a configuration file, called a “Timetable File” defines the trains, their movements and animations. One can make up trains from various individual coaches, wagons and locomotives; determine their movement on the screen (a simple runby, a stop, stopping and reversing, changing locomotives, coupling on new wagons, etc.); and can even call animations to run during the course of these movements (raising and lowering pantographs, opening and closing doors, etc.).  The syntax allows for the random selection of vehicles or the specific repetition of certain vehicles. One can superimpose pictures on top of one another (to change logos or to add loads to freight wagons), change the colours of a picture, mirror pictures or individual parts thereof  - all of which simultaneously and with little effort - and thus expands the variations possible on the existing array of vehicle pictures. One can determine transparent areas in pictures and can also use foreground and background picture or compose these from multiple other pictures.

The program is not limited to controlling the pictures moving across the screen: it can do much more.  It has functions for collecting, organizing and saving vehicle pictures.  The program can use pictures in the following formats:

• Resources in Windows-Binary-Files (.exe, .dll, .scr) in 16 or 32 bit format.
• GIF files - only static files, not animated ones.  Transparent and interlaced graphics are supported.
• BMP and DIB files - 2, 16 or 256 colours, standard and RLE encoding. The 16, 24 and 32 bit colour formats are also understood, but each picture can only contain a maximum of 255 different colours. Traffic can use the special BMP files for the BahnLand program from Hans-Martin Hebsaker.
• TVL files - a Traffic-specific file format, which stores picture files in libraries, which are compressed to save file space. A large quantity of tiny, uncompressed files takes up space on a hard disk even when they are small files; with the FAT16 file system this is even more of an issue.  The TVL files make the most efficient use of hard drive space.  Even files saved in a compressed format such as GIF still take up more space than the same data in a TVL file.
• JPG files - only for background pictures.

A comprehensive, detailed description of the program and all of its functions is still being developed, but even without this most users will quickly be able to get up and running with Traffic.  It is quite simple to use the default Timetable File, to browse the Stock List's collection of vehicles or to edit or add to the technical descriptions of vehicles in the Stock List.  The menus are available (at present) in Hungarian, English and German.

The sections of the Reference Manual that deal with the descriptions of the syntax and semantics of the Timetable File commands as well as the Modification commands for pictures have been completed.  There are detailed descriptions of procedures, which one must no longer find in other documents.   This is an encyclopaedic, reference manual type description, not intended to be used as a “how to” manual. However, there is a separate chapter entitled “How to write a timetable file” that covers the most important and commonly used commands and parameters. It is illustrated with numerous examples of how to program the most important parts of the Timetable file.

There are two versions of the Traffic screensaver: The “full” version contains a number of commands for organizing the collections of pictures, for working with picture collections and for managing one's own pictures.  The “small” version uses less place on the hard disk, and its menus have fewer options.  If you only use existing vehicle collections, then this version is sufficient and more suited to your purposes.  Both versions possess the main basic functions.  Of course, with the “small” version you can also edit pictures and add new pictures as well as edit the Timetable File.

Even without the program one can view the list of pictures contained within it (the Vehicle-List) on Zoltán Szabó's homepage ( http://traffic.ini.hu), which he has assembled from various sources and maintains when not working on the program's coding.

One can download individual pictures from this collection of vehicles.  The pictures are in GIF format and usually compressed in ZIP files.  If you want to use the MM&MM-Bildschirmschoner program, you can download the pictures in BMP format, however these versions do not contain any animations.  One can download individual pictures from the .dll and .scr files, however, only the freeware versions from the demos are available. The current full version of the MM&MM-Bildschirmschoner can be purchased from the web site of the authors directly: Eisenbahnsoftware von Martin Mayer and the pictures from the NiMo-Extension Kits can be purchased from Nikolaus Mohr.

The author would like to thank:

James McDonald, who assisted in the translation of the many program texts and descriptions into English and also corrected and expanded them,

Zoltán Iván, James McDonald, Attila Sólyom, Pierre Noël Rietsch, Péter Halász, Marc Le Gad, Kris van de Putte, who all tested the new version and suggested new functions.

The installation files were created with Jordan Russell's Inno-Setup-Programm.

The timetable editor is based on the CodeMax control from Barry Allyn.

The TVL and STB file compression is based on the zlib compression library created by Greg Roelofs and maintained by Jean-loup Gailly.

The GIF picture handling is based on the giflib library created by Eric S. Raymond