sanakan8472/copy-dialog-lunar-lander

Copy Dialog Lunar Lander is a small joke application for Windows that turns the file copy progress bar into a playable lunar lander game. While a large file transfer crawls along and you have nothing to do but watch the progress chart bounce around, this app overlays a spaceship on top of the graph and lets you steer it with the arrow keys, trying to land softly on the terrain that the transfer speed data generates. The landscape is drawn from the real-time speed graph of whatever copy dialog is on screen, so no two levels ever look exactly the same. The author describes this as giving the game infinite levels, since slow or unpredictable transfers produce wilder terrain. Difficulty is determined by what kind of transfer is happening: copying between two fast drives is the easy setting, copying to an old USB stick is medium, and grinding through a slow work VPN connection is hard. There are also different visual themes tied to Windows settings. The default is a green forest look. Pausing the copy turns the world into a desert. Enabling Windows high contrast mode switches to an ice planet theme. Combining the two unlocks a nuclear wasteland. And because the themes respond to color settings in Windows accessibility options, the readme points out that you can technically create tens of millions of custom worlds by changing system colors. The game runs as a background tray application. It detects any open Windows copy dialog, paints the game overlay on top of it when that window is focused, and lets you click in the progress chart area to start playing. Controls are the arrow keys for thrusters and space to restart. Building it requires Visual Studio 2019 and at least Windows 10. The project uses a physics library called box2d-netstandard to handle the lander's movement and crashes.