Greetings!
In this update...
- New default presets
- Polished particle / pulse templates
- Better organised light bars
- New custom-commissions service on offer
- Far too many words, GIFs and videos
Have you ever ended up with a file called "thing_final_final_v4_new"? In unrelated news, I am pleased to announce the final version of Keysight (1.6.3) is now available!
This update focuses on the default resources bundled with Keysight, incorporating new Keysight-usage techniques that bring visuals to the next level! All default presets / particles / pulses / light bars have been edited to a greater or lesser degree to give you the best start to building visualisations.
All the new default presets! Some new, some reworked, some largely untouched.
These default resources are loaded from external files when Keysight launches, and so happily: update 1.6.3 is also available for MacOS users! Minus a few little bugfixes I snuck into the Windows version.
IMPORTANT! Please read (or watch!)
This update will not change the look of any pre-existing presets. You will need to manually re-import the default presets in order to see them (if you already use Keysight)! I have made a video outlining how to access the new stuff here:
Or if you prefer to read, here's the different ways you can grab the new default presets:
Option 1: re-importing all default presets
Simply head to the System tab, then click "re-import default presets"! However, warning: this will overwrite any presets that share the same name as a default preset. Those names are:
Quicksilver / Vintage / Electric / Night / Fire / Spectrum / Gemstone / Keysight / Plain (default)
Option 2: importing a specific default preset
All default presets are bundled with the Keysight install as .kspreset files, and can be imported individually. Click "import" in the top left, and navigate to the Keysight install (Typically Steam/Steamapps/Common/Keysight). From here, head to Keysight/Extra resources/Presets/Stock preset backup and select the file you would like to import.
You may also want to import "Plain (default)" via this method, and then head to System > Defaults calibration and click "set current preset as default" (while using Plain (default)). This will make any new presets inherit the Plain (default) settings as the starting point, and the new default preset has various settings optimised for easier Keysight usage.
Option 3: completely wiping your data and starting fresh
I recommend this if you're a long-time user of Keysight and have never performed a factory reset! Over time, I have altered the way a lot of default settings behave, but I do not auto-adjust user data to reflect the new defaults as they might not be suitable for all implementations. If you want to make a backup of your entire save data first, this is found under:
- Windows: C:/Users/[you]/Appdata/Local/Keysight/
- Mac: Library/Application Support/Epic/Keysight/
And/or you can export individual presets to .kspreset files for safe storage.
Anyway, to fully factory-reset Keysight: head to System, and then the console command entry field at the bottom of the tab. Typing reset and hitting enter will instantly delete all your save data and start fresh.
Commission custom Keysight presets!
I have already announced this publicly on Discord, but just to repeat everything in a Steam announcement:
I (Egglyberts, sole developer) am now publicly offering a paid service to build custom Keysight implementations for you.
I've already done this for a number of creators behind-the-scenes when asked, and I wanted to formalise and make it known that I am happy to do this. To be clear, I am not changing my policy of near-infinite free help via Discord and Steam answering questions, and I do not expect preset commission to be of interest to 99% of users. "Custom Keysight implementation" in this context means presets, AR 3D camera matching, or just an entire Keysight setup if you have something niche in mind!
So, how does this work?
- £20 (about US $25) base price. This guarantees up to one hour of my time
- Further time, if required, at £20/h
- Time cost is dependent on goals. There will be a free consultation phase where I present a fixed-price for your requirements. (One hour is roughly enough to make two really nice presets with stock resources in Keysight, or one preset with custom art assets)
- I'll provide images / videos of progress as I go to make sure it's in line with your vision
- Payment on completion, and only if you're happy with it. Then I'll send over necessary files + source materials
- Payment via PayPal or Buy Me a Coffee
- Any submitted files are yours. I will not use them, I will not share them. Not even any preview images (unless you would like me to do that and promote it!)
I also made a video explaining all of this:
The new presets
Ok! With that out of the way, time to show off the new goodies. All the new presets, plus a couple extra, are on display in the freshly-reworked trailer:
It's interesting to note that I haven't added or changed the way anything in Keysight actually works; these new presets could have been built way back in 1.6.0! 1.6.3 presets look nicer due to better usage of Light Bars and the Reflections system, and I've also tried to make things cleaner and less obnoxiously bright/flashy as well.
"Classroom" and "Synthwave" presets have been removed, and the new presets of "Vintage" and "Night" have been added in their place. Here's a quick comparison and breakdown of the rest:
Quicksilver
- Notes use the new Fluid reflection texture, strongly inspired by some older Kassia and Rousseau videos
- Impact light shadows have been lengthened
- Light bars have been used to fake some ambient occlusion on the keyboard
- Rising haze particles are improved and made cleaner
- Added streak particles
- Lowered brightness of keypresses
- Lowered overall brightess of preset to be easier on the eyes
- Added shadow at top of screen, kind of like a vignette
Fire
- Added warm lighting to the keyboard
- Light bars have been used to fake some ambient occlusion on the keyboard
- Added top shadow
- Added reflection to backdrop to provide more visual interest to empty areas
- Reduced amount of sparks
Electric
- Changed hue gradient to be vertical, with green at the top, using a new Light Bar template
- Made lightning more subtle
- Inverted and tweaked piano key materials
- Added reflection-driven interesting keypress material
- Made circuit board more subtle, but also larger and bolder
- Changed notes to semi-rounded and gave them a Pietschmann-inspired reflection-driven material
- Added top shadow
- Added some blue smoke
- Reduced brightness of light bar
Gemstone
- Changed particles from "Column" to "Basic fountain"
- Added keyboard shadow
- Changed keyboard lighting
- Tweaked reflections on notes to be less high-contrast
- Added "Drifting specks" particles
- Added top shadow
Keysight
- Removed keyboard light
- Added keyboard shadow
- Updated "Rising haze" particles to the new template
Spectrum
Sorry this is such a compressed mess, thanks GIF format...
- Made note border narrow instead of wide
- Overall heavy brightness reduction
- Added keyboard shadows
- Updated "Burst" particles to the new template
- Added "Drifting specks" particles
- Added top shadow underneath smoke
Plain
- Added top shadow
- Added keyboard shadows
- Reduced note light brightness
- Reduced keypress brightness
- Lengthened impact light shadows
- Changed scene lighting to give more interesting highlights on piano keys
Reworked templates
Next up: particle / pulse / light bar templates!
Particles
Every template has been tuned up to a greater or lesser extent. Some templates, like Burst, have barely changed but should render faster. Others have undergone serious reworks, here are some examples (old on the left, new on the right):
Fireworks
These now pop into existence at their target height instantly, rather than being thrown upwards first. As shown, this allows Fireworks to be useful in bottom-up mode. They are also a lot more detailed and realistic, at the cost of not having an even spread.
Rising haze
The comparison GIF doesn't do a great job at showing it, but this template is now made up of smoke + oval particles rather than a single fade-with-speck. The vector field force has also been tuned heavily to be more swirly and detailed.
Streak
This template has been drastically tuned down so as not to dominate any preset it is added to, as well as dropping to just one streak instead of two.
Lightning
This has also been made more subtle, with less arcing and sticking lower down to the keyboard to act more as a "pulse" than a particle system. A GIF of just the lightning here might look a little dull, but it fits more presets a lot better than the original lightning.
Pulses
Pulses have undergone far less change, but have also been tuned slightly. No lengthy comparisons here! Most changes amount to subtle things like adjusting the base size of "Basic ring" such that it intersects nicely with "Basic circle", allowing faster and nicer composite Pulse layouts.
Light bars
Light bars have been renamed to be better organised, with a few additions!
"Fade"-type templates (shadows) now include more options for adding piano shadow, as extensively seen in the new default presets. There is also a new "Hue (Colour)" template (only available on Windows) which allows for easily multiplying the scene colour towards a target colour towards the top of the screen, in order to more easily allow for vertical-gradient-type visualisations.
Other improvements
- All default textures have been consistently compressed (turns out some were PNGs, some were low quality JPGs... an artefact of just throwing more stuff on the pile over time). Normal maps are now PNGs, and everything else is 95% JPG, which saves a small amount of storage space and improves normal map quality in some instances.
- Added new "Stars" mask, and added a starry backdrop template to any default template that does not use an Overlay.
- Added rough CPU/GPU cost to particle template descriptions (these are relative, and should only be compared to each other, although these are the actual millisecond performance cost for my own computer).
- Organised and added more "Extra resources" .kspresets and templates. These are found under the Keysight install, then /Keysight/Extra resources.
- (Windows-only) fixed a bunch of small bugs: - Fixed missing textures causing buggy, infinite-stretched materials - Fixed editing Colour in Basic mode causing black note borders to turn white - Fixed colour pickers not displaying the correct hex code (these were using Linear hex codes, and now use the expected sRGB) - Fixed sustain-effect-extension mode breaking keypress indicators if keypress indicators are not also extended
What next?
Well... with Keysight 1? Hopefully nothing! 1.6.3 is intended to be the final update for Keysight (but it is the third "final update" to date so... take that with a pinch of salt). However, before getting back to Keysight 2 development, I would also like to create a Keysight Wiki. Keysight 2 is still going to take me a long time to finish, and Keysight 1 will not be going away once Keysight 2 is released... so I want to try and address the ease-of-use issues in Keysight 1 with a really good, easy-to-navigate wiki, now that everything in the program is not going to undergo any more changes.
Anyway! Wow, err, long announcement (1,911 words, in fact). If you read the whole thing... well done! You're never getting that time back. If you want to keep up on Keysight 2 news, join the Discord, subscribe to Youtube, maybe come chat to me on Twitch!
Happy Keysighting! <3