The Pixel Words Screensaver

Introduction

Pixel Words is a fully customizable pixel fractal screensaver for Window based on a unique new effect. A hypnotic cascade of interlocked recursive crossword puzzles is generated in real time with real American English words that are randomly pulled from the Official Tournament and Club Word List. This is the same dictionary used by tournaments for word games like Scrabble®, Boggle®, anagrams, etc.  Pixel Words can be used as an aid for brainstorming and strengthening vocabulary. But Pixel Words does more then just words, there’s a whole suite of unique modes and display combinations to play with!

Features

• Generates pixel fractals and recursive crossword puzzles
• Smoothly and continuously zooms in or out in real time
• Multiple monitor friendly
• Randomly picks from all one to five letter words in the dictionary
• Easy to customize the dictionary and make unique glyph sets

Downloading and Installing

To install the Pixel Words simply run the self installing setup program.

• Pixel Words – Download the latest version here. (Requires Windows and DirectX 9)

Videos

Desktop Wallpapers

Customizing

It’s easy to customize Pixel Words! Just set the custom word list in the Pixel Words Settings window to point to any valid text file. Pixel words will automatically sort through it and pick out any 1-5 letter words. Here are a few ideas about how to use the custom dictionary…

• If you are you learning English try this basic English word list that contains all of the most common words. (Compiled from the GSL and a few other sources)
• If you’re an artist working on a scrip, novel, or poetry try converting it to plain text and set it as the word list to get a fractal mashup.
• If you need a company screensaver load it up with a text file filled with positive words that represent your company.
• If you trying to think of names for a child or character try a list of first names and maybe you’ll see one you like. I found a few name lists on this page.
• Are you a fan of classic literature? Project Gutenberg has plenty of great books you could try setting set it to.

Setting up a custom glyph set requires only basic image editing ability but you will need to follow a few simple guidelines…

• First download this template to use as a starting point for your custom glyph set.
• Only the first 8 lines are used by the custom glyph set, the bottom 8 are ignored and only there for reference.
• Create your custom glyphs by editing the blocks starting from the top left. Pixel Words will read in your custom sheet from left to right, top to bottom and automatically stop when it gets to an empty glyph.
• If you notice that you’re glyphs are showing a little blurry there is a simple fix for that. Just scale the image by a factor of 4 (to 1024×512) with interpolation set to none.
• Here’s an example custom glyph set I created as an homage to pac-man.

Installation Help

• If you receive a missing dll error when the screensaver is run then it is likely that you don’t have a recent enough version of DirectX. Try updating DirectX via microsoft’s site here.
• If Pixel Words is running choppy or slow try unchecking the “High Detail” box in the settings window.
• Contact me at frankforce@gmail.com if you have any other problems and I will look into it.