Night motorway: an endless drive through fog and lights

Driving at night has a strange calm to it: the hum, the headlights coming the other way, the streetlights passing overhead one after another. Night motorway in Screensavers by Zaweba recreates that feeling as an endless drive through fog. Oncoming headlights pass on the other side, red tail-lights wait ahead to be overtaken, and the roadside slides by with streetlights, gantries, bridges, petrol stations, warehouses and houses.

It is part of the night pack, the dark scenes with a few bright moving things. Here those things are lights, and the result is one of the most atmospheric screensavers in the app.

Speed and traffic

Speed sets how fast you drive. A gentle speed gives a relaxed cruise where the streetlights tick past slowly. A higher one feels like a late-night run with somewhere to be.

Traffic offers light, medium or heavy. Light traffic means long stretches of empty road with the odd set of lights, which is very calm. Heavy traffic keeps the road busy, with lots of headlights and tail-lights. Medium is a good everyday choice.

Roadside, fog and streetlights

Roadside decides what you pass. A bit of everything mixes it all, from industrial units to houses. Industrial estates gives warehouses and the lit sprawl of the edge of a town. Countryside keeps it rural and darker, with fewer buildings along the way.

Fog can be switched on or off. With it on, lights glow and fade into the distance, and the scene becomes soft and moody. With it off, you see further and everything is sharper. Streetlights can be switched on or off too. With them on, the road is lit in pools passing overhead. With them off, you rely on your own headlights and the traffic, which is darker and closer to a country road.

Some combinations are especially good. Countryside with fog on, streetlights off and light traffic is the most peaceful. Industrial estates with streetlights on and heavy traffic is busy and urban.

How light it runs

Night motorway does a lot of drawing, and in testing it was the heaviest screensaver in the app on the processor, at 0.2 to 2.5 per cent when measured off-screen. That is still small. If you want to keep it lighter, the frame cap in Install and options can be set to 30 frames per second, and on a laptop the battery saver turns the screen black once the charge falls below the level you set.

Taking it for a drive

Set it up in the manager, where the live preview follows your choices. Then use Preview full screen to judge the speed at real size, because a fast drive can feel much faster on a big monitor. Any key, click or mouse movement closes it.

When it looks right, Use this screensaver builds it into your profile, with no administrator rights needed, and opens Windows' Screen Saver Settings so you can choose the wait time and the password option. Settings are read when the screensaver starts, so you can switch from countryside to industrial estates later without building anything.

With several monitors, choose a road on each screen, one wide road stretched across all of them, or the main monitor only with the others black.

Watch the speed

A very high speed combined with heavy traffic can become hard to watch for long, especially when you sit right beside the screen. If that happens, slow down first, then lighten the traffic. Night motorway also goes well with the two floodlit race screensavers in the night pack, Night bike race and Night open wheel race, if you want a set of night-time driving scenes picked at random through Install several.