| Submitted by , posted on 11 November 2004 |

Image Description, by These are screen shots of an application I have been working on for some years in my spare time. The goal was to create a 3D desktop so I could make a more dynamic desktop environment. Its along the same lines as Sphere XP or Cube Server but I took a bottom up approach. So rather than have a cool environment with static windows I have focused on having fully interactive windows that update as fast as possible and require little extra processing time.
Its written in C++ and uses DirectX9.0b and uses a variety of hooks ( Message hooks, API hooks and Low level input hooks ). The hooks capture all drawing activity in a window and store the it in a shared memory area. When the viewer updates it enumerates all the drawing activity in the shared memory and will create/destroy a mesh and texture for each window that is hooked. Each windows representation chopped up in 256x256 chunks to accomate the full size of the window and be compatible with low end hardware.
There are still a few programs that elude proper capturing but most programs work, I am shooting for 100% functionality for all apps before moving onto a working enviroment. On my site I detail some ideas I am exploring for future development, feel free to post some of your own. Oh ya, also feel free to let me know what you think, but please read the site first as I have tried to address some of the "concerns" I have come across in the past.
Major features

> - Very fast updating( before I got media player 9 I could capture video and it would play back at fullspeed, it looked amazing )
> - Full mouse/keyboard interaction
> - CPU utilization limiter, wont bog your computer down.. too much
> - Non rectangular windows supported
> - Works on even the oldest hardware, assuming it will run with DirectX 9.0b
> - Has a ini file to specify applications to hook
> - Windows are placed in 3D in the same relative positions in 2D

Some of the major problems I encountered

> - Shared memory was very slow until I found MeteredSections, its like a Mutex but doesnt incur a kernel swap hit.
> - Hidden system drawing, things like scroll bars, borders and captions are drawn in the bowels of windows and their drawing could only be infered from certain conditions I could watch for in user mode.
> - Menus were also handled in the kernel and were harder to capture, my solution.. An entirely new menu system that cirumvents the kernel entirely. Its hard to even tell that its not the real windows menu system ;)
> - Initially I had a major problem with capturing kernel drawing, fortunately I sorted it out. Unfortunatly I spent months on a highly dubious kernel level service decriptor table hook ( interrupt calls ) which I eventually ripped out.

Future development: Like I said I have a list of possible projects I'd like to attempt on my website. I'd like to stress that I dont intend to have people looking and working with windows at oblique angles. This is mostly to facilitate adding cool new feature ala expose, REAL virtual desktops and some pretty ( perhaps gimmicky ) environmental effects ( along the lines of "Peep: The Network Auralizer" but visual.)
http://www.logiccubed.com

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