I made many changes and improvements to sfäre after launch. Unfortunately feedback and sales were hard to come by. So I was struggling to find motivation to put more work into sfäre. I ended up just leaving for a while. I recently started up sfäre again and found a few things lacking. As I don't like having unfinished business, I rolled up my sleeves to give it another go.
There have been a few quality of life improvements and some bug fixes. - shuffle button now only changes the music - new randomizer button to quickly get different visuals - audio-buttons are toggled if they can't be used - dragging over the UI no longer causes drag to continue after releasing the button - the editor toggles now have +- to indicate they can be opened/closed
In case you have missed previous updates, this is now what sfäre supports: - visualize your system audio (this works well with spotify web) - play music from a designated system folder - visual filters for cool effects and audio visualization - webcam integration - lots of post-processing effects (not all work well to export as animations, as they don't all loop)
I will probably be quiet for a while now again, unless there is an unexpected surge of feedback. I hope some of you have fun with sfäre!
Auto-play Filtering & Camera
It's now possible to use your webcam with sfäre. Whatever your webcam is showing will be projected on the background. Combined with mirrors and filters this can lead to new, weird and interesting kaleidoscopic effects.
The filters can be toggled in a radial interface with some questionable icons, but it should be functional. Only active filters will show up when randomizing in auto-play.
Wallpaper Madness
The idea was to allow sfäre to be used as an animated background on your windows desktop. I found a Unity Asset to do just this and I was confident to get it out in no time. The asset allowed me to create a second window for the wallpaper and I really liked the idea of being able to control the wallpaper from this second window.
I got most of this working in the editor, but when it came to the release, nothing worked anymore. Turns out the asset was just creating the second window as a preview. Outside of the editor Unity's multi-screen support is pretty terrible. I ended up having to code a large chunk of windows specific code myself. For everything I added in relation to wallpaper mode, I had to test it in release mode as it was not compatible with the Unity editor. Painful. After quite some time I eventually got the second screen working as a wallpaper. I could place it on any desired monitor or over all available monitors. But there was one big problem. The second screen did not allow me to set the resolution, so the image was stretched and it was not pretty.
I did a lot of testing and experimenting and noticed that the primary screen did not have a resolution issue. So to solve my wallpaper problem, I decided to use the primary window as the wallpaper. A lot of work later, I managed to get this working and the resolution issue was fixed. Of course this was not the end. The second display did not work properly. Mouse input was off. Interestingly my own UI did kind of work, but anything that used the more complex Unity UI failed. At this point I nearly gave up, as the whole process was extremely tiring.
I took a short break, but then came back to it and started analyzing mouse input. I found out how Unity was transmitting the mouse position and managed to figure out how to correct for it.
There were a lot of other painful things I needed to deal with, e.g. swapping between full screen and windowed mode had to be handled freshly without touching any Unity functions. It's possible there might still be some issues. The resolution of the second screen still does not adjust, but at least it works. I've turned off all complex UI, so in this mode you can't use the settings or the editor.
Audio Movement
Reduced movement speed in reaction to audio. It could get quite erratic.
It can be set in the Audio-Tab via slider. I'm currently working on allowing sfäre to display as animated wallpaper but it's way more complicated than I hoped.
Quick Update
Fire mode added to Auto-Play. This does not work in either Play or Editor so far. Made some adjustments to Audio-Visualization, main reason for this update.
Smoooth Visuals
The new tunnel effect was quite noisy, depending on what kind of image was being mapped to the walls. I've switched to mip-mapping and now the tunnel is a lot smoother. This new technique is also used on various other filters and should improve the overall visual quality!
I've made a small improvement to the Twitch connect interface. If the connection failed, so far you had to manually disconnect by clicking "Disconnect". It now does this for you, so if something goes wrong you can simply press "Connect" again :)
Auto-Play Movement
Movement based on audio has increased. The dots speed up when the beat drops, as do other parameter changes. I think it's an improvement, but it might require further balancing. [previewyoutube="Dk0fSKLeZ68;full"]
I've also tackled a fairly complicated issue. While listening to external audio-sources sfäre has no knowledge of the actual volume you have set. So when changing the volume e.g. Spotify-Web, this directly affected the amplitude of the spectral visualization. I know try to find the average volume and base the amplitude on this average. This also means if the song starts quiet and end loud, the spectral pattern will stay on a similar level. I think this is probably good, but would be interested to hear other opinions.
Tunnels and Balls
I've added a few more filters to sfäre and improved the lighting analysis for auto-play (tries to prevent too bright and too dark images).
[previewyoutube="zKYocpP4K98;full"] Music by Rundfunk (friends of mine). Interestingly the video on YouTube got claimed by some sketchy firm "The Orchard Music".
Bouncing Balls (only auto-play) Using Unity's physics system I built a ball pit. The positions and rotation of the balls are used in a custom shader resulting in perfect bouncy balls. The balls are only available in auto-play, you have no options to handle them in play mode or in the editor.
Tunnel Effect This effect was derived from code I found on ShaderToy: https://www.shadertoy.com/view/4tKXzV
Line Inverter Weird shader I came up with. Parts of the image are inverted and distorted before applying the bloom effect. This is the reason the inverted areas are not color inverted, but only inverted in brightness.
Filters & Visualizer
sfäre was never meant to be a music visualizer. But it is what most people see at first glance. So I've decided to go with the flow and improve sfäre's capacity as a visualizer. This lead me on a new voyage of discovery and I came up with a bunch of filters that can greatly increase the complexity of an image.
When you use auto-play filters will appear at random, currently there is no way to control this. In play-mode I've added a new little button next to the fractals, that let's you toggle filters on and off. Every time you enable this button, it will randomly select up to two filters with randomized parameters.
