Aquarium Live Wallpaper v2.55

  - New Feature: Random fish!

As mentioned a couple days ago, the main addition to this update is randomized fish!  If you select the question mark icon in the fish select window, you'll end up with a fish that randomly changes its species periodically!

The logic here is that every time the wallpaper goes to sleep (meaning your phone went to sleep, or the home screen otherwise is no longer active), we roll the dice on any random fish in the scene.  There's about a 5% chance any given once will change to a different one.  This means they're not changing constantly, but will shift over time so you get to see different ones.

Due to a limitation with the AI, Jellyfish aren't in the random fish list.  Sorry!

Next Aquarium update

I've got an update ready to go for Aquarium that will let you set a fish as 'random'.  Basically, the fish selection window now has a "?" option, which will let you set that particular fish to change its species occasionally.  This means you can choose how many random fish you want.

There's some loading/unloading on the fly going on here so I'm going to run it for a while and make sure there's no problem, but it seems to work pretty well.  Here's a pic!

True Blood Live Wallpaper

In addition to other things, we've been busy the last few weeks creating a promotional project for the good folks over at HBO.  As a result, we've got the official True Blood live wallpaper up for download on the Market now!

What we have here is a blood pool on your home screen, that responds to touch and device movement, creating waves and ripples that behave realistically.  You can double-tap to fade in or out the logo overlay.  We put a lot of time into getting a good looking liquid simulation running well across all devices, and even have it multithreaded to take advantage of a dual-core device if you have one.  It behaves and settles out extremely well, and we learned a lot about this sort of thing in the process.

Both HBO and Admob have been very good to work with, and I'm thrilled we could tackle this project for them.  :)

Patterns Live Wallpaper v1.02

  - Bug Fix: Crash on 2.3.x devices

I actually pulled this off the market back when we published Prismatic, since it's prettier and I didn't want Patterns to eat into it's market share.  Still, I got an e-mail informing me it crashes on 2.3.x devices and after confirming this is the case, I just published an update to it.  Not really sure if the Market will recognize this and update folks -- I did hit the update button on it, so I kind of think so.

Adding a facebook link!

That's right, we actually set up a Facebook page.  Visit it, follow it, like it, whatever you kids do.  We appreciate the attention, believe me!  :)

Blue Skies v1.5

  - Update:  Better sun blending
  - Bug Fix:  Better behavior when loading preview screen while wallpaper already applied

That's my hope anyway, for the bug fix.  I turned a number of TGAs into PNGs so they can avoid the uncompressing cycle and such, my best guess is some handsets are having issues with that.  The TGAs were also right on the 512k size borderline, which makes me nervous.  Hopefully this smooths things out a bit.

While I was at it I took another pass at the sun and updated the way it blends, I think it reads better now.  The sun textures are also greyscale now, so they'll use a quarter of the ram they did before.

NA Flags v1.51

  - Bug Fix: South Carolina flag
  - Update: Much smaller filesize

I'm pleased to say we got the filesize down to 3.7 meg for this release!  We'd originally hoped to have that be the case for v1.5, but ran into a couple of issues on old 2.1 handsets.  Those got resolved in the interim, and so we've shaved almost four meg off with this build.  :)

Unfortunately, while I thought I'd gone through and checked all the flags last time, apparently South Carolina snuck through broken.  Sorry about that folks, it's fixed now and I went through the whole list again to make sure of it.

NA Flags Live Wallpaper v1.5

  - Update: Now using OpenGL 2.0
  - Update: Higher framerate on tablets
  - Update: Smoother animation
  - Update: Custom flags now get ripples/cloth embossing

This update represents a substantial rewrite of this product, but doesn't really look much different, or at least shouldn't.  What we got instead was a general raft of improvements.

Firstly, we're now backing the flag blend and texture together at startup, which means we can now do everything all in one pass.  This nearly doubles our framerate on Tegra tablets.  It also means that we can get rid of the 'simple lighting' pref, since there's no longer a big speed improvement to be had by disabling the second pass.

Since we have proper acess to vertex shaders, we're also now using animation blending, so the flag's framerate will now go as high as your phone does.  That's a big improvement over the ~20ish that the flag animated at before, and it's quite noticable when placed side by side.

In addition, we're using render to texture to bake the cloth texture and ripples in at startup time, which means any custom flag images will get that as well.  That's probably a general improvement -- if we need to add a checkbox to disable that we can.  It also means you can basically just use a Wikipedia flag image verbatim and it'll look basically the same as the ones we've included, which wasn't the case before.

All told, I think this is a pretty nice update.  Please shoot us an e-mail with any problems!