The Traffic screensaver - Introduction

The idea of the Traffic Screensaver is simple - little vehicle pictures are moving on the screen. The Traffic Screensaver is "programmable" - a configuration file, the timetable file defines the trains, the movements, the animations. You can build trains from individual coaches, wagons and locomotives, determine the movements (simple run through, stop, stop and backward, change loco, add coaches etc.), use animations (pantograph up and down, open and close doors etc.). The syntax allows random selections, repetitions of train parts. You can put pictures over other pictures (to change logos, to put load on freight wagons), to change the color of the pictures, to mirror pictures (but leave some parts - texts - unmirrored) "on the fly" - so achieve greater variation from the same picture set.

It makes use of transparent pictures, you can create background and foreground images using single pictures or combining many pictures together.

The program is not limited only to show the moving vehicles as a screensaver, it is much more. It can show the scenes not only on full screen, and it contains a whole toolset to collect, integrate vehicle pictures, add data, and develop scenes. It has functions to:

• Show the scenes in a window: Test in Window
• Show the scenes in a stripe on the upper of lower side of the screen: Run in Stripe
• Show the scenes in a small window: Run in Mini
• Show the vehicle collection to browse it, with a multi-level catalog system - the Stock List window
• Show the individual vehicle pictures or add/edit the modifiers to add animations, to modify the images - for example, to add loads, to change numbers, to recolor, to change the window apperances: the Graphic Testpad or the Macro Editor
• Add/edit the technical data attached to the vehicles: the Description Editor
• Add/edit the script specifying what happens on the screen: how to build trains from individual vehicles, how to move them, how to construct the background/foreground pictures for the scenes: the Edit Timetable windows.

In the initial times the vehicle collection and the timetable files were thought to be only an example, how to use Traffic, how to create your own railway screensaver, but they became an important 'product', especially the huge vehicle collection.

The Traffic Screensaver accepts the following picture formats:

• Resources in windows binary files - .exe, .dll, .scr - both 16 and 32 bit formats
• GIF files. Transparent and interlaced formats are accepted. Traffic can extract the (aggregated) phase pictures from animated GIF pictures, and it is a single keystroke to create an animated Traffic vehicle from an animated GIF, but it is not an automatic possibility.
• BMP and DIB files - 2,16, 256 color, both standard and RLE encoded format. Also the 16, 24 and 32 bit color formats are accepted, and can be used directly. Pictures with less, than 256 different colors can treated automatically as transparent pictures, using the color in a corner, or one of the black (0,0,0), white (255,255,255) and a special purple (243,0,243) color.
• PNG files - opaque and transparent pictures. Translucent pictures are converted to transparent pictures using a fixed threshold for the A channel. Supporint real translucent pictures is since a decade on the ToDo list - perhaps it will come sometimes. It will come surely eearlier for WTraffic.
• JPG files - preferably for use as background pictures
• A proprietary picture library format - TVL files - allowing the user to create or extend the library content himself and storing the pictures in a compressed format. As the great amount of small files consumes very large disc space (the worst case from the older times using DOS, Windows 3.14 or Windows 95 is a FAT16 system having the largest cluster size, thus losting the most disc space, even if the pictures themself are compressed, as the GIF format). Dealing with several hundred thousand individual picture files during the installation would be also a nightmare.

The documentation is the weakness of Traffic at the moment.

For those who understand German i recommend the following 2 descriptions:

Das Traffic-Kochbuch from Martin Graap

Eine Dokumentation im Umgang mit Traffic from Ulrich Fleischer