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Making Abound

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Get Abound for free from our site or Download.com by clicking one of the above images.

What is it?

Abound is a fun screensaver for your computer that will keep you fascinated for hours on end. It will help you be more healthy throughout your day by taking breaks from work to relax and enjoy the colorful balls bounding around your screen, colliding off one another and trying to avoid the Black Holes that swirl around. If you ever saw the After Dark screensaver collection's Marbles screensaver, Abound is an augmentation of it. Use one of the links above to download and try it for free today!

Buy Abound today and get free upgrades for life!

$9.95 (US)

Features

Easily configure:

the number and size of moving balls and stationary pins
the gravity
the bounciness of the balls
the amount of the screen you want the balls to fill before starting over with a new screen
the number and strength of Black Holes

Realistic physics as balls collide off one another and the walls, zip around Black Holes, which act a gravity wells, and roll around one another.
Multi-monitor support for monitors with one video card. Abound takes up both screens seamlessly for a truly spectacular display.
Up to 100 active balls flying around the screen at one time.
Runs on all all Windows platforms, requiring only OpenGL (already installed on almost all Windows platforms,).
Minimum requirement of only a 266 MHz processor, 64 MB of RAM. The faster your computer is, the more moving balls and Black Holes it can support.
Endless number of fascinating simulations based on what configurations you enjoy most.

How does it work?

Abound uses a very powerful and realistic physics engine to simulate spheres colliding with one another, gravity vortexes influencing their movement (Black Holes), and planes holding the spheres inside the screen. Easily download the very small installer and you will have it running in seconds on your computer. Then sit back and relax as balls bounce around your screen. You can tweak the settings to make an endless number of configurations which change everytime you watch it.

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Question:
How can I make it run faster?

Answer:
There are many ways to improve the speed of Abound. Generally, the greatest amount of time is taken up by the graphics drawing the objects on the screen, and by calculating the physics movements and collisions. You can try these operations:

Decrease the number of moving (active) balls. Experiment with this number until you find the number of balls your computer can handle smoothly. Here are some guidelines:

266 MHz processor speed: 2 - 3 moving balls
1 GHz processor speed: 10 - 15 moving balls
2 GHz processor speed: 20 - 30 moving balls
3 GHz processor speed: 40 - 100 moving balls

Decrease the number of Black Holes.
Modify settings on video card to maximize OpenGL speed instead of quality.

Go to the Control Panel (accessible from Start button >> Control Panel or Start >> Settings >> Control Panel), select Display, then click on the Settings tab for the Display Properties.
On the Settings tab, click the Advanced button, then look for either the Adapter settings tab, or for some adapters, the OpenGL tab.
Make sure full hardware acceleration is turned on, and also that if the option exists maximize speed instead of quality.

Question:
       I set the start over percentage to 95%, but the screen starts over even when the screen is not 95% full. Why is this?

Answer:
       The screen starts over when a moving ball comes to rest at a height greater than or equal to the start over percentage of the screen. For example, if you selected 50% as the start over percentage and a ball comes to rest just above the halfway point on the screen, then the screen will reset with a new configuration. There is one exception: A minimum number of moving balls must have already come to rest before the screen starts over. If, for example, a ball comes to rest on top of some stationary pins near the top of the screen at the very beginning of a particular screen configuration, most likely the screen will not start over because the screensaver logic knows that not many balls have been put into play yet. This prevents the screen from being reset prematurely.

Question:
       Why do the moving balls sometimes come to rest and become fixed in places where they should keep moving?

Answer:
       This occurs because the physics logic is not perfect and takes guesses as to when it thinks the ball should come to rest. Sometimes balls can fulfill the criteria for coming to rest by the physics engine even when they really should keep moving. This goes to show how superior human beings are to computers: We can discern errors in simulations like this one very easily, but computers have a much more difficult time figuring such things out.
       We are constantly working to improve the physics logic that drives Abound, so in future releases many of these quirks will be fixed.