So it’s happening! Writing that post about Psyia a few months ago has turned out to be very helpful – it forced me to crystallize my feelings about the project, and gave me the freedom to think about it a little more calmly. Also, writing out the feature list actually made me realise that Psyia is much better than GPU Cubes was, and that releasing it wouldn’t be the huge embarrassment that I was imagining.
So I scheduled some time to work on Psyia, defined my feature set for release, and have been hauling ass to get it done by the end of the month. I’ve gotten quite a bit done over the past couple of weeks:
- A complete reimplementation of XRPanel, with a single large UI panel with two modes – Mixed Settings and Controller settings. It feels way, way nicer than flipping through pages like in Psyia 1.x, and is more robust to new control mechanisms. I actually built it for Knuckles, so Psyia is much more enjoyable to use with those right now…
- Implemented the new UCTK-based version of Psyia. This means I get all the benefits of the compute work I did last year, such as many force sources, way better particle emission, depth-sorting, higher particle counts, better particle colours and more!
- Reconfigured the app to use a settings-preset system, allowing for settings to be saved and shared in the future perhaps, as well as…
- Preset modes – to cut down on the initial complexity of StarLab (which I have renamed to Sandbox Mode), I’m creating five presets that show off some of the variety achievable in the system, hopefully to inspire people to try Sandbox mode.
- A complete rework of the audio-visualisation system – now you can bind audioreactivity to just about any variable you like! This has tons of room for expansion in the future but for now, I wanted to err on the side of simplicity in the UI.
All that’s left to do is:
- Add back in Meditation Mode (which will be much easier using the UCTK system!)
- Create an introductory UX-flow, from the first preset on first-run, to the other presets, to figuring out how to enter Meditation Mode.
- Fix a bug preventing particle emission from working correctly
Once that’s all done (I expect that’s all no more than two or three days work), I’ll spend a week testing and, barring any major problems, will release at the end of that week!