Winamp-Batmud Overlay
This is a technique first described by Bahumat a while back for enhancing the visual appeal of a Windows mud session. He lost his guide to doing it in a hard drive crash, so I dug through my gigs of log files till I found the method he discussed. The effect might be a little distracting for party leaders, but might make life a lot nicer for bored party members. It requires a recent version of Winamp and a fairly respectable processor to handle the visualizations. This technique works best with a black mud background with white or gray text.
- Start a mud session.
- Start playing some music you like in winamp.
- In Winamp, go to Options -> Prefrences -> Visualization, select Advanced Visualization Studio and start it up.
- Detach the visualization window. The button to do this will probably be near the upper left corner.
- Click on the menu button for the visualization window. It should be in the far upper left corner. In Window Settings -> Opacity, set the window's opacity to a level you like. 30% is pretty reasonable if you want to still be able to read a mud's output without too much effort.
- Right click on the winamp icon in your task bar and uncheck Main Window. This should leave only the visualizer window visible.
- Enlarge the visualization window to cover the entire screen except the task bar. It should snap to the screen and taskbar edges.
- Right click on the winamp icon and select "Always on top"
- Select your mud session from the taskbar. You should now be able to type commands in normally, even as the screen is overlaid by swirling colors and music.
- If you think this guide needs some clarification or can't get this to work, feel free to send me a tell in BatMUD or email me.
Example Picture:
Wishlist
There are three primary things that I'd like to be able to do with this that I don't know how to accomplish.
- Turn off the borders of the visualization window, since they don't bring anything cool looking to the edges of the effect, and only serve to obscure whatever they are covering.
- Be able to make the mud's text fully opaque, to reduce the level of distraction this effect causes a slight amount.
- Be able to do this with winamp's video window. Finally a safe way to robot torch 1000! Zmud allows one to set window opacity, but it doesn't seem to work with animated content, such as a movie, or even the same visualization technique given above.