-foreground

Colour of circles if -simple mode is selected.

-background

Colour of window background.

-window

Draw on a newly-created window. This is the default.

-root

Draw on the root window.

-mono

If on a color display, pretend we're on a monochrome display.

-install

Install a private colormap for the window.

-visual visual

Specify which visual to use. Legal values are the name of a visual class, or the id number (decimal or hex) of a specific visual.

-delay microseconds

How much of a delay should be introduced between steps of the animation. Default 800, or about 800 microsecond. Actually, this is the delay between each group of 15 new bubbles since such a delay between each step results in a very slow animation rate.

-nodelay

Same as -delay 0.

-simple

Don't use the default fancy pixmap bubbles. Just draw circles instead. This may give more bearable performance if your hardware wasn't made for this sort of thing.

-broken

Don't hide bubbles when they pop. This was a bug during development but the results were actually quite attractive.

-3D

Normally, the simulation is done completely in two dimensions. When a bubble swallows up another bubble, the areas of each are added to get the area of the resulting bubble. This option changes the algorithm to instead add volume (imagining each to be a sphere in 3D space). The whole thing looks more realistic but I find it attracts attention to the flickering of each bubble as they are move and are redrawn. Your mileage may vary.

-quiet

Don't print messages explaining why one or several command line options were ignored. This is disabled by default.

-rise | -drop

-trails

Some tools to assist in creation of new bubbles are included in the source distribution. These can either be loaded with the -file or -directory options (if available) or they can be used in place of the distributed default bubble (bubble_default.c). You might like to copy these scripts to a permanent location and use them. Read bubbles.README.

Rendered bubbles are not supported on monochrome displays. I'm not convinced that small bubbles, even dithered properly are going to look like anything more than a jumble of random dots.

The movement of the bubbles looks jerky if an incomplete set of bubbles is used.

The hide/display algorithm could do with some work to avoid flickering when -nodelay is set.

DISPLAY

to get the default host and display number.

XENVIRONMENT

to get the name of a resource file that overrides the global resources stored in the RESOURCE_MANAGER property.