- Summer 22 Update - 30 June 2022
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…
- Auto-play Filtering & Camera - 18 April 2022
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 - 17 March 2022
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. https://i.imgur.com/KrmYRmf.jpg 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…
- Audio Movement - 9 March 2022
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 - 7 March 2022
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 - 4 March 2022
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! https://i.imgur.com/bbFAdDr.gif 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 - 3 March 2022
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. 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 - 2 March 2022
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). 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) https://i.imgur.com/p9G4sxh.png 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 https://i.imgur.com/1l8WLPo.png 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…
- Filters & Visualizer - 23 February 2022
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. https://i.imgur.com/aSRmGJt.jpg
- Kaleidoscope Update - 11 February 2022
I'm enjoying adding new shaders, the results can be quite astonishing :) https://i.imgur.com/zi9Wixl.gif https://i.imgur.com/PegeiwG.jpg The plan is to animate these shaders in the future, so sfäre can be used as an interesting visualizer as well.
- Rotation Symmetry Update - 7 February 2022
More shader stuff. This time I've added rotational symmetry. It works with mirroring and all the other features as far as I can tell. https://i.imgur.com/6UEEdFX.png https://i.imgur.com/S4Weewa.gif I also fixed a bug in the editor, where entering a numeric value updated the slider, but did not actually change the visuals... urgs.
- Bump Update - 3 February 2022
I have been experimenting with a few shaders/filters for sfäre. It's just not really easy to make anything interesting. But I came up with a pretty nice bump effect, that can add more depth/texture to the images. https://i.imgur.com/deigxhB.gif
- Twitch Update - 1 February 2022
As some of you might have noticed, it is possible to connect sfäre to your twitch channel. When enabled viewers can interact with sfäre. You can use this to take a nap or do the washing while sfäre entertains your viewers, or just have a fun time on stream while chatting. So far I was relying on a token generator not maintained by twitch (https://twitchapps.com/tmi/). But I was told this is not a good approach. So now I've adapted to my own token generator and now have full control (well not really, twitch does all the work). My last test with bits and subscribers did not work out, as there was some connection issue. If anyone is up for testing, come say hi on Discord https://discord.gg/hMdgyrWwbu.
- Color Sphere Fix - 31 January 2022
I had noticed the color changing spheres were reacting slowly a while back. I made a quick fix for this, thinking I only needed to speed them up. This worked on my machine, but I noticed while watching a stream that my fix was not really helping. So I've fixed the fix, this time I found the real issue after digging deep.
- Smooth Update - 28 January 2022
One thing has been bugging me since I created the editor. Switching back into the fun-mode (with the spheres) was not possible without losing some of the settings that were created in the editor. I had a hard think about this and decided to tackle the problem, in spite of not knowing how to do so. I just decided to find the most straight forward non flashy solution to the problem, if there was one. Turns out, there is and I would dare to say it's probably good enough. I had originally envisioned a complicated mapping from editor parameters to spheres, but ended up just checking for the differences and using these differences to adapt what you see in the play mode. Works like a charm and was not that complicated. Hardest part was actually converting the colors. Had you asked me before, I would have guessed the colors to be the only easy bit... This has opened up a few new possibilities.…
- Logo/Images Positioning + Fixes - 14 January 2022
Logo/Images: - you can now select a row and reposition/scale/rotate the image with your mouse - idle images were showing on start up, fixed Fractal Saving: - some fractal images were looking wrong after loading. I noticed that I was saving too many fractals in some cases, as there was a bug in the code to remove fractals. Fixed. If you have an image that looks wrong (mostly too bright), you will likely have Repeaters with mostly 0 information in them. You can delete them to fix the image.
- System Audio Visualization - 13 January 2022
it's now possible to listen to System audio, so you can visualize audio from your system. Unfortunately it does not work with Spotify. But it does work with the Spotify web version. It must have something to do with how Spotify processes Audio, I just currently don't know what I would need to change.
- Hot Fix Nr.4 - 11 January 2022
When adding tons of new features, some issues just slip through the cracks. Added a bunch of fixes for following issues: - gradient settings will be transferred to the editor on first try - Invert can be set in the editor - color selector hides when the color panels are closed - alternative cursor for Editor and Settings - keyboard actions work again, but are disabled in the editor and export - Twitch connection was swapping channel and username... duh - ESC does not close the app - settings window can be moved (you can click buttons underneath the window, it's not perfect yet)
- Streamer Update - 10 January 2022
I've handed out keys to streamers and watched how sfäre is performing. Thank you for streaming! Due to C19 I have not been able to attend any live events, limiting my options to see people interact and find out what they like/dislike. Some streamers were nice enough to contact me directly on discord or write in the steam forums. My first real update is therefore very streamer focused. I expect this to change after release. Some wished for their own music. You can now select a folder with music and sfäre will recursively load up to 200 songs. They must be ".ogg" or ".wav". sfäre will sequentially play these songs on a loop. If you desire, sfäre will start up with your music. Others wished to be able to use sfäre as a kind of in-between games screen on twitch. To make it their own, adding a logo/image is essential. So now you can add logos/images in sfäre. As the screen get's busy very qu…
- Hot Fix Nr.3 - 6 January 2022
Saving and loading was only added quite recently. Mostly quite reliable, but there are so many parameters. While watching streamer shalimara I noticed something was off. She saved her creation, restarted sfäre and after loading it, it was not quite the same. She noticed too of course. So I went looking for the bug. She had been using Shape-Morphing so that was the first thing I tried. Turns out... I forgot to save the second shape. Great. Fixed! Still working on Twitch integration, would be interested to hear what would make sense to add. I'm not that well versed in Twitch. I was thinking I could add actions for new followers, subscribers, bits, raids. Something that looks like this:
