Important!
If this version causes problems for you, you can use previous versions.
They are available under Settings -> Betas along with release date.
20 Years Anniversary
This weekend (21-23 April, 2023) there is a Sale for all VZX things. This is to celebrate 20 years since we started releasing GPU-accelerated music visuals.
In addition, we've recorded a chat (in a podcast format) between the two founders.
Now on to the release!
Removed Features
New versions of Pro Player can no longer play DLC from the regular "VZX Player". This is a feature we really liked to offer, so it's kind of sad, but had to be done because it is impossible for us to release new content and develop the two products as separate projects. We had a lot of issues with new code and old visuals including with the current published version.
If you've relied on this feature, feel free to go into "Betas" and select a previous version where it works (depending on the situation, you might have to do the same for the regular "VZX Player").
From now on, DLC packs will be released for Pro Player first. If there were no technical issues with this, we would gladly still offer this feature.
We kindly ask for your understanding - the simple truth is we were a bit too optimistic in being able to pull this off. (And again, the feature is still there in older versions, we're not sweeping anything under the rug by removing those.)
New Features
New DLC Visual Pack: The Next Generation
This pack features 7 new visuals. They all use our new graphics engine with better lighting, raytraced reflections and more.
So as such, it's a concept pack of sorts.
Pearls
Through The Gate
Lightning Conductor
Quanta Eternal
Spectrum Pillars
Interstellar Lighthouse
The Visitor
Generic Improvements
- Main menu (and popup menus to some extent) has been much improved:
- hovering around can select another menu item
- the menus close when clicking outside of them (was a really annoying bug)
Pro Controller / Player
- A thumbnail screenshot of a visual is shown in some lists, helping with visual selection
- Current play queue is saved in states
- A state can be selected as "startup state"
- Status pane where one can currently see memory usage of the player (more to be done here in future releases)
Artiste
- Menu option to open the resources folder in Windows Explorer. This also works with custom data_path which is really helpful for eveyone including us devs.
- Notes (which you can add to document a group of modules) is now always rendered behind the module(s), this enables you to let it wrap around / encompass a group of modules, better describing what those modules do.
Improved Modules
- Particlesystem EXT can support colors per particle
- Scene graph GLTF loader
- New option to disable casting shadows from world directional lights
- New option to not reflect with Screen Space Reflection
- New output value - node result position along with quaternion and matrix to attach other objects at joint positions (This is used in "Lightning conductor" to find the end points of the arcs, lights and glowing blobs.)
- Fog support in renderer
New Modules
- Rotator oscillator module which helps with moving or rotating a camera instead of doing a cos / sin module all the time
- Particle System Scene Graph subsystem, see the "pearls" visual for how this can be used - there is only one emitter and each "arm" is made up of 7 translate modules multiplied by 6 rotation modules making it very efficient.
- Line emitter
- Point emitter
- Matrix operations (translate, rotate, scale)
- UDP Server Module where values can be set by sending network packages to Artiste. Useful for integrating custom designs with events from the outside world. See also our open source example client repository on github: https://github.com/vovoid/vzx_udp_client
- float_array_abs making sure all values in a float array are positive (-0.123 turns into 0.123 and so on)
- float_array_ramp where you can multiply an array using a hand drawn sequence
- A new set of matrix math operations - translate/rotate/multiply etc
Bug Fixes
Pro Controller / Player
- A garbage collection routine which should have been run in the player was not, resulting in a memory leak. This has now been added.
- A rare bug in the audio sub process backend has been fixed.
Artiste
- Text Editor Cursor would disappear on 3D edit boxes such as knobs and shader editors when the module was positioned below the initiali position of the "screen" module
- Default shader in particlesystem_render_ext was broken
- Scene graph rotation matrix operations modules would not normalize float3 and quaternion, this could cause issues
- Billboard rendering module was very unfinished, causing funny bugs where unrelated textures would show up. This module has been rewritten and is now in a hopefully usable state.
- When a module would have to change its input configuration, parameters that were previously smoothly interpolated/integrated (knob with slow smoothness for instance) would not be removed causing a segfault/access violation crash.