Dev Log #42 (Patreon)

Discord link for new people:

https://discord.gg/9ZW2UXM

Over the past few days I fixed some horrible new audio engine crashes that I discovered while testing things, and I re-implemented the snapshot system that I previously disabled and got bouncing working again.

I also spent some time trying to solve some design and technical issues with the new "always visible" envelopes feature that I added. Envelopes in the background have a slightly lower opacity but this sometimes means they are difficult to see at all depending on the color of the waveform.

I tried several different things to mitigate this including putting a shadow behind the labels and also this quite complicated thing where I generated cut-out regions behind the labels which would then be passed to the waveform shader and used as a mask.

I didn't manage to find any approach that looked particularly good and in the end I decided I was spending too long on it. For now I just added a simple 1-pixel drop shadow to the label and will work on a better solution at a later time.

I also plan to eventually replace the current color picker tool with something better and when I do that I could just switch to some kind of swatch based system to ensure that the colors always have good contrast.

Another issue I found after implementing the background envelopes was that it was introducing a little big of lag when enabled on many blocks at once. Eventually I decided to take a heavy handed approach to this and now background envelopes only appear when the mouse cursor is hovering over the block, which prevents many envelopes from being rendered at the same time. In the future I may invest more time into finding an optimal way to render a lot more envelopes at once.

I have also been trying to decide on is how best to visually indicate when blocks are being affected by choke regions. Currently when blocks are muted they are grayed out so my initial idea was to gray out the affected regions to indicate the choke effect (this is just a mockup):

Choke blocks can also have fade-in/fade-out regions configured so these could also be represented by doing a color-fade which follows the envelope curve:

This might take some time to figure out how to do properly because it involves dynamically generating textures to pass in to the waveform shader.

Blocks also get this zigzag pattern at the top when choke is enabled which is just something I whipped up really quickly so I might change it in the future. But there is also the idea of mirroring this pattern at the bottom of the affected blocks to better indicate the connection: