Hey all,
A new patch for Wallpaper Engine has been released that makes discovering wallpapers in the Workshop easier and adds a few rudimentary features to the scene editor.
Wallpaper Discovery
The wallpaper browse window received a new tab, Discover, which allows browsing the Workshop based on genres, keywords and creators.
You receive a balanced mix of all genres from the Workshop, making it easier to get an idea about what kind of wallpapers are available and helping you to find new and popular ones.
Make sure to vote on lists you really like or dislike. By doing that, more similar lists will be shown to you that belong into the same genre. For example, if you vote for game related wallpapers, you will receive more game specific lists.
You can also favorite lists to find them again more easily:
Or create a custom list by searching for a keyword through Steam:
Wallpapers in all lists will now scale along with the window and screen size better and a new download icon on the Workshop tabs indicates which wallpapers you already downloaded. The new Discover view is still based on Steam's Workshop at its core meaning wrongly tagged submissions may show up in the lists. As before, the built-in report tool can be used to flag them so they can be sorted properly by us.
Editor Improvements
The scene editor will now show a selection box for the selected object, which is especially useful for translucent images and particles.
Three buttons have been added to the top as well to quickly toggle the visibility for the new selection box, the grid and performance stats.
There is also a new tutorial about scene performance optimization that describes how expensive effects (like Shine) can be limited effectively to a small portion of the wallpaper.
CEF Update
CEF has been updated to the version cef_binary_3.3396.1777.g636f29b (Chromium 67.0.3396.79). To reduce some persistent CEF/Chromium stability issues, I have also implemented some additional work arounds. The web wallpaper will now only close after the wallpaper file has either been loaded or timed out to prevent an issue on shutdown. Quickly switching between web wallpapers should now apply the properties better and keep the wallpaper working as expected. Finally, the UI will now ignore mouse/keyboard input until the page has been loaded to a degree which should avoid some start up crashes (safe for a very rare one coming from the Steam overlay).
Full changelog
Additions
- Added new Workshop Discovery view.
- Added responsive layout for wallpaper lists.
- Added selection box in editor for images and particles.
- Added tool bar buttons for grid/selection/stats.
- Added proper default x ray sprite.
- Added last file modified time to local files so they can be sorted.
- Added downloaded icon to wallpapers in Workshop/Discovery browser.
- Made all windows save and restore their position.
- Added a small diagnostics tool (bin/diagnostics64.exe) to help detect other programs breaking Wallpaper Engine.
Fixes
- Changed editor to use safe LZ4 decompress to avoid crashes from corrupted texture files due to hard drive failures.
- Fixed composition layer UV scaling.
- Possibly fixed a crash on playlist advance with multiple playlists running at the same time.
- Fixed adding multiple wallpapers to a playlist with the + button.
- Fixed boost copy crash on file read/write error when setting up a web/app project.
- Fixed custom URLs not being persisted in history.
Misc
- Added more unsolicited hook DLLs to the crash detector.
- Hid compose layer framebuffer texture sampler in editor.
- Refactored genre tags to use new exclusion system.
- Disabled monetization option unless a start parameter was specified.
- Updated Steam SDK.
- Changed web wallpapers to wait for loading to end before shutting down.
- Updated FontAwesome to version 5.
- Updated CEF to cef_binary_3.3396.1777.g636f29b.