User Guide - Starfish v2.2

Starfish is intended to be a simple and fun program. Most people will just want to jump right in and play with it.  By all means, do so.

If you want to know the details of how a particular function works, here's a guide.

Installing Starfish

Double click on the installer file you downloaded from the download page.  It should be named something like "starfish_win32_v2.2B_setup.exe". Follow the brief instructions on the screen, and Starfish will be installed for you.

Main Screen

Go / Stop button

The simplest way to use Starfish is to start the program and click Go. The text on the button will change to Stop, and Starfish will start creating a new pattern, a process that may take anywhere from 1 second to 10+ minutes, depending on your machine's speed and the image settings. A small view of the image in progress will be displayed in the box on the right. You can interrupt the process by clicking Stop.

Save As... button

The Save As... button allows you to save the current image file (if there is one) anywhere you like, with any filename you choose, in any of the supported file formats.

Minimizing

Starfish is designed to be easy to start once, then left to run (and create new wallpaper) as long as your computer is turned on. To reduce clutter on your task bar, Starfish minimizes itself to the "System Tray" area - the area next to the clock. Double click the Starfish icon there to get the main window back. If you exit the program, the task bar icon will disappear.

Image Tab

The controls on this tab allow you to choose what kind of patterns Starfish generates.

Preset

If you want to quickly select settings for most or all of the image tab options at once, select a preset from the preset drop-down list.  Starfish comes with several presets (Desktop 1 through 4 and Tiles 1 through 4) which you may modify, replace, or add to by clicking the Presets... button and using the Preset Editor.

Complexity

You can enter a number between 1 and 200 here. This number puts a cap on how many layers of patterns and distortions Starfish can use to build an image.

Lower numbers generally produce simpler patterns that appear to have larger features, and higher numbers generally produce patterns with lots of fine detail. Because of the random nature of the image generation process, though, there will be some chaotic low-complexity patterns and some simple-looking high-complexity patterns.

Changing the complexity limit changes the pattern that you get from any particular seed. If you're trying to reproduce a pattern, be sure to use the same complexity value as the original.

Seed

Every pattern Starfish makes has a number, called the seed, associated with it. This means you can re-create any Starfish pattern by starting from the same seed. (Although see the sections on Complexity and Seamless Tiles for some caveats.)

In the seed box, you can type in a seed number (between 0 and 4,294,967,295), or you can pick one of two special settings.

• Random causes Starfish to pick a random number for the image seed.
• Same As Last causes the next pattern to be created from the same seed as the previous pattern, whether it was typed-in or random.

You may also choose a seed from the image history by clicking the Recent... button.

Palette

This selection allows you to control the colors Starfish uses. Pick a color palette from the list, or pick one of the two special settings.

• Randomly Created causes Starfish to create palette at random before starting a new image. The palettes Starfish creates this way always contain white, black, and two random colors.
• Randomly Selected causes Starfish to randomly select one of the palettes in the list before starting a new image. (If there are no palettes in the list, the Starfish will behave as if you picked Randomly Created instead.)

Starfish comes with some palettes set up; you may modify them or add your own palettes as you wish by clicking on the Palettes... button to display the Palette Editor.

Size

The Size list includes a variety of image sizes, measured in pixels wide by pixels high. Some of them are fractions of the desktop size, others are fixed presets. There are also three special values:

• Custom allows you to type an arbitrary width and height into the custom width and custom height fields.
• Random Select randomly picks a size (that is equal to or smaller than your desktop size) from the size list.
• Random Select (Small) randomly picks a size between 480 x 320 and 32 x 32. You'll generally want to use this with the Seamless Tiles option.

Seamless Tiles

When checked, Starfish produces patterns that match up top-to-bottom and left-to-right so that they show no seams when tiled on the desktop.

Changing the seamless tiling setting changes the pattern that you get from any particular seed. If you're trying to reproduce a pattern, be sure to use the same seamless tiling setting as the original.

Smoothing

Three settings allow you to make a trade-off between calculation speed and suppression of "jaggies" - areas of high contrast where the pixels that make up an image may be more obvious.  Some images benefit a lot from image smoothing, others you may prefer with no image smoothing.

• None is the fastest setting, but does nothing to combat the jaggies.
• 2x Anti-Aliasing smooths the jaggies slightly, but takes about twice as long as None.
• 4x Anti-Aliasing smooths the jaggies the most, but takes about twice as long as 2x Anti-Aliasing (four times as long as None).

Output Tab

The controls on this tab allow you to specify what happens after Starfish finishes a pattern.

Use new image as desktop wallpaper when done

When checked, Starfish will set your desktop wallpaper to the completed image.  Starfish will stretch the image to fit the desktop, unless Seamless Tiles was checked, in which case the wallpaper will be tiled.

If you're using Starfish to create patterns for some other purpose and don't want your desktop wallpaper to change, un-check this option.

Store images as:

This selection allows you to choose what file format Starfish will save images in.

• BMP files are large (2.25 MB for a 1024x768 pattern, for example), but they are of the highest possible quality, and will work as wallpaper on all versions of Windows, with or without Active Desktop.
• PNG files are smaller, and because they are losslessly compressed, also of the highest possible quality. Older versions of windows (before XP) will only display PNG files as wallpaper if Active Desktop is enabled. PNG files can vary widely in size, depending on the complexity of the pattern encoded, but most of them are 30% to 60% of the size of the equivalent BMP file - a considerable space savings.  PNG files can several seconds to save, something that's particularly noticeable with very big images.
• JPG files are even smaller than PNGs, but they use lossy compression, so there may be a visible quality trade off. There are two JPG settings. "Good quality" JPG files will generally be around 10% of the size of the equivalent BMP, and for many images will look nearly as good as the equivalent BMP or PNG. "Low quality" JPGs are very small, at around 5% of the BMP size, but the quality trade off is usually obvious.  As with PNGs, older versions of Windows will require Active Desktop to be enabled to display JPGs.

Image history limited to...

This allows you to adjust how many images are kept in the image history.  Click Change... to change the limit.  You may specify a number of images to keep or a maximum number of megabytes to consume.  If the new setting will cause images to be deleted, Starfish will warn you before deleting anything.

Schedule Tab

The controls on the Schedule tab allow you to configure Starfish to create new wallpaper automatically.

Create new image every

When checked, Starfish will automatically create new images at the interval specified.

Note that Starfish must be running to create new images. If you close the program, the Starfish icon in the system tray will disappear, and Starfish won't be able to create new wallpaper.  To hide Starfish in the background while it's updating your desktop wallpaper, click the window's minimize button, not the close (X) button.

Create new image when program starts

Check this to make Starfish start a new pattern immediately on program startup. You may want to use this option if you've placed Starfish in your Startup program folder, to create a new desktop at the start of your workday.

Image History

Starfish automatically keeps copies of the most recently created images.  You can see the list of recently created images by clicking the Recent... button on the Image tab.

Starfish won't keep all of the images it generates forever; once a certain number of images have been created, Starfish will automatically delete old images to make room for new ones. You can control how many images Starfish keeps from the Output tab.

Redraw

Click Redraw to set all of the Image tab controls to the settings that created the selected image.  This is useful if you like a pattern, but want to redraw it in a different size or with a different palette. Starfish won't actually start calculating the image until you click Go, so you can make the changes you want.

Set Wallpaper

Click Set Wallpaper to set the desktop wallpaper to the selected image.  The wallpaper will be stretched to fit the desktop unless the selected image was drawn with the Seamless Tiles option, in which case the wallpaper will be tiled.

Save As...

Click Save As... to save a permanent copy of the selected image. You can choose a filename, directory, and file format.

Delete

Click Delete to permanently remove the selected image from the image history. You can use this to delete patterns you don't like to save a little disk space or to make more room for your favorites.

Delete All

Removes every image in the image history. Prompts for confirmation before doing so.

Preset Editor

Use the presets button to open the preset editor.

Each setting on the Image tab has a corresponding control in the image preset editor, plus a check-box to enable or disable changes to that item.  If a setting is checked in the preset editor, then that setting on the Image tab is changed when the preset is applied; if it's not checked, the preset won't change that setting.

Palette Editor

In the Palette Properties dialog, you may select between 2 and 256 color entries for a palette.

Note that although 256 colors are allowed, it's not necessary to include more than 3 or 4 colors to make very colorful patterns. Starfish uses the palette to construct gradients between colors. The color gradients are then twisted, swirled, bent and overlaid on one another. Even with only 4 colors in the initial palette, this process usually produces images with several thousand distinct colors.

Also note that Starfish selects colors from a palette at random, so any particular color you add to a palette will only appear in some of the images generated with that palette. The only way to guarantee the appearance of all the colors in a palette in every image is to use a 2-color palette.