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Bad Apple but it's a Windows virus

A high-performance (I've never seen anything like this run in realtime before) rendition of Bad Apple, using Windows windows as the video surface.

It's not actually a virus, but it is reminiscent of the viruses of old that were more of a nuisance than anything.

Video demonstration:

Flandre Scarlet made out of windows

Why is it so performant?

  • DeferWindowPos - even the most naive of projects can go from 1fps to 15fps by using this wonderful batched API instead of SetWindowPos.
  • WS_EX_TOOLWINDOW to remove the taskbar entry
  • SWP_NOREDRAW when moving/resizing windows
  • Optimised code that only shows/hides/moves windows that need showing/hiding/moving
  • Rust is blazing fast, don't you know?

Could it be faster?

I suspect that choosing which windows to move/resize, such that each is resized as little as possible, can increase performance - currently, the windows are just used from largest to smallest, which can result in some location jitter as they fit into different indexes.

Future work

All of these I have done already in small tests, but they're both difficult to make performant (copy dialogs are particularly slow), and difficult to arrange into a pleasing display.

  • Spawning MessageBoxA windows and taking their handle (thus avoiding the need to replicate the layout of MessageBoxA for each version of Windows you run on)
  • Spawning Vista file copy dialogs using IProgressDialog
  • Arranging windows in rolling sine waves, circles, etc

All of these I have not tried yet, but would be great additions:

  • Water physics using hundreds of scroll bars
  • Basic hard-body physics between windows
  • Error noises synced with the audio (could just pre-render...)
  • Notification bubbles
  • Windows in the taskbar to show text (if the user has large taskbar buttons enabled)
  • A large variety of error messages to delight the user with

Building and such

Should be fine to just cargo build --release.

Look at bad apple.py for the pre-processing to take an input video and turn it into boxes.bin, a space-optimized representation of the window bounds for each frame. The script is jank, don't come complaining.

Check the PRs for some forks that improve the python script to be easier to run.

Why's the repo archived?

I simply don't have the bandwidth to respond to questions and merge PRs for this little project I threw out into the world. Feel free to fork it and make it do cool things!

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