I'm loving Electric Sheep a lot so far. My only complaint really is the fact that it seems it spends most of its time transitioning between sheep. As soon as it gets to a sheep it's BAM! transitioning again. Only occasionally does it stop at one long enough to let you view it. While the transitions are quite fascinating sometimes I wish it would just stop so I could see some of the sheep.
I have it set at 3 loops in options and I'm running it at 60 fps. My hardware is dual 9800 GT's (Nvidia) with an X9650 (Intel) quad core processor factory over-clocked @ 3.67 GHz and 8 GB's of RAM running on Vista Ultimate 64x.
Over-muscled maybe? But I see the setting in options for multi-core and it's checked so the developers have foreseen this. I have tried turning the fps down. Default was at 23. 20-30 is bearable but still noticeably slow. 15. No thanks. 60 is smooth like butter and I love it.
Anyone else have an answer for this? I hope so. Regardless, I'll be using this for a long time to come I expect and as soon as I can find a new job out here in the middle of nowhere USA I will certainly be donating. Awesome program and best screensaver I have seen (and it's even free to boot!?!?!?) :) Gotta love it! Now if only I could get it to sync to music like in media player or winamp cuz this beats the socks off those too.
I have some theories about this
I have some theories about why this happens, as I have experienced this problem too, and was quite infuriated by it.
First of all, go into your config file (c:\program data\electricsheep\xxx.cfg) and change PlayEvenly from 100 to 0. PlayEvenly skips over more watched sheep for more even distribution, and it does so via transitions. On another note, if you have deleted your sheep before, deleting the playcounts file in the content folder should help a bit.
I believe another reason is that transitions are sometimes automatically downloaded before the sheep they transition from/to are, so you end up going straight through the transition or having it jump right to another transition.
I also noticed that if you delete a sheep via downvote, the transitions to and from the sheep aren't deleted, so that's a problem too.
My solution is to turn off the automatic download and download sheep manually from the server page without downloading any transitions, which completely eliminates the problem. If you want transitions, you can hand-pick those too so you only have ones for sheep you have.
Hope I helped.
Interesting.
Editing the .cfg does not work. It will save any changes but as soon as I run ES it automatically reverts any changes made. Lame? Indeed.
I was looking through the mpeg folder and viewing the .avi's in media player and it does indeed appear to largely consist of transitions (or edges). Now, I don't want to completely eliminate them, of course, so the question becomes how to make it behave the way it SHOULD in the first place?
Seems more like a programming problem because in my mind it should just KNOW to go from loop to edge to loop to edge automatically. So why doesn't it? Perhaps the problem lies in the fact that they are all contained in the the same folder? It should be that the program says to itself "OK, I'm playing this loop right now. Now I'm going to decide what loop to play next. OK, I just figured that out so now lets select the corresponding edge that leads into that loop." Wash, rinse, repeat.
I don't want to delete my transitions but then again I would like it to work correctly. Input from the developer?
EDIT::: Ok, figured out the .cfg problem. I was changing the file with the settings menu still open and it occurred to me to try it with it closed. I enabled seamless playback and set PlayBackEvenly to 0 (PlayBackEvenly does appear to be the biggest culprit in repeated edge playback). That seems to have helped a great deal though it does still occasionally play more than one edge in a row and sometimes doesn't even load a transition and goes straight to another loop. Still, could definitely use a little work on that count.
Edge vs loop quantity
It makes sense that there are many more edges than loops. If there are 2 sheep, there is the possibilty for 2! or 2 edges (a 1:1 ratio of loops to edges). If there are 3 sheep, there will be 3! or 6 edges (1:2). If there are 10 sheep, there are 3,628,800 possible transitions from one to another. If you actually had all possible edges for each loop and each sheep plays for 10 seconds, there would be a probability of seeing a loop about onece every 1000 hours. (Halve these edge numbers if the server is smart enough to not do a b->a edge if there exists an a->b edge). Looking at my collection of 2348 sheep, it seems like the server does indeed moderate the number of possible edges. Maybe simply by stopping production of them when the loop is archived.
It seems like the rational thing to do if you don't like edges is to delete them manually.
You can try making sure
You can try making sure there's only a few transitions from and to each sheep.
Or you can do away with transitions altogether.