Beam Screensaver V2.00 - The best Space Battle Screensaver

[Retrokomodo]

This is the Beam Screensaver V2.00 by Bravo Interactive. It is a highly configurable space battle screensaver which you will find yourself just sitting and watching again and again. It's the evolution of Beam 1.73.

This screensaver has a 14 day trial basis with an option to buy a licence to fully unlock it. Unfortunately, the payment gateway has long since been taken offline - but - having kept in contact with one of the members of the team since early 2000, I asked about the possibility of a master install key so I could pass it on to the general public to enjoy as I have. As it is no longer on sale and has not been for a good long while - they agreed - and passed on a master key so this screensaver can be enjoyed by anyone!

This saver can only really be used on machines running older operating systems though - that's the catch. Both Nvidia and ATI drivers changed to the point where the game engine no longer runs. I was told 'The problem with NVidia started when they removed support for using OpenGL 1.4 and 2+ at the same time. AMD supported this possibility a bit longer', so with older cards and XP or Windows 7 with early drivers - you should be ok.

As they have been generous enough to open this up to be free to use, I ask that you consider a donation to the Red Cross efforts in Ukraine.

Ukraine Crisis Appeal

Help provide material support for people affected by this conflict in Ukraine, by donating today. Our staff and volunteers are working working around the clock.

donate.redcross.org.uk

as the Bravo Interactive team is/was based in Kyiv.

BRAVO INTERACTIVE | ABOUT US

Game Development and Outsourcing Services for PC and Console platforms

www.bravointeractive.com

Feel free to take a look, and if you like what you see, it - and all its extras (and registration key) can be found in my shared Drive folder here:

Beam Screensaver 2 – Google Drive

drive.google.com

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[Retro]

That's a hella screensaver, wow. Looks more like a playable video game. Shame it's not updated to work on current drivers.

I suspect it might be possible to add an OGL 1.4 layer to the current driver to fix this, but it might be a bit of a challenge.

Any chance of convincing the developer to update it to work with DirectX or OGL 2.0 perhaps? What about making it open source and letting the community make a compatible version? This is just too good to be limited to an outdated system.

Great video and I'll make a donation, no problem.

 

[Retrokomodo]

I don't think Bravo Interactive as a company exist in the same way anymore, and no idea about the working files they were using. Certainly nothing currently happening. Last I heard in 2017 by email was 'Beam fails to run on nVidia cards due to the changes in drivers. I had to start learning to code in C++ and recently tracked bunch of general bugs and now Zeus engine is more stable and less prone to unexpected fails. To make Beam run on nVidia I'll have to dig in the graphics part of engine and make it use only shaders because nVidia does not allow mixing shader pipeline and fixed pipeline anymore. It will take me some time to do this, but I definitely want it done.' So maybe some development was still happening until recently? Previous to that in 2016 I had a reply saying 'We had a first session of porting the code base to new MS VS and need to have a few more before it gets compiled and start working' so they were hoping to do something..

I mean.. I can ask?

 

[Retro]

That doesn't look promising, does it? But yeah, if you're up for asking, then it's worth a shot I think. There's nothing to lose at this point.

 

[Retrokomodo]

Well I emailed him and just got a reply!

Yeah, I remember those words and still want to revive it. Our company no longer operates but I continue to pay for hosting (don't really know why, nostalgia probably)

I had thoughts about making Beam code open source, but was too lazy to dig into all this stuff and even if I was not that lazy it would still require lots of efforts to make it usable for interested parties

I found a coding job back in 2019 in web development area to let me have a basement for earning my living and learning to code.
Given my current knowledge in coding I see that a lot has to be done on the Beam's source code.

My Unity experiments did not finish well I don't know why but I did not like how things are organized there.

Past 10 months were not the best time to think about Beam, as you may understand - active war along all the borders, bombing with rockets and past few months - terror against civilian infrastructure. Russia already mobilized about 500K more soldiers against us and they will plan new massive attacks on us pretty soon. Despite all this, situation is now more stable than it was even 3 months ago. All thanks to western supply of weaponry and humanitarian aid.

Nevertheless, your videos inspired me to install MS Visual Studio and look what I can do now, given my experience.
Can't promise anything but lets see where I will end up with it.

So fingers crossed he may make some progress and then I can do a new video to say it works! If he can make it work..

 

[Retro]

Wow, that's quite some reply and of course, Beam pales into insignificnce compared to that awful war. Hope him and his family are ok. Feel free to invite him to NerdZone perhaps, where he'll find a welcoming and safe online home. It would be quite epic to have him here.