Tuesday, December 6, 2011

Snowfall Live Wallpaper v2.1


  - New Feature: Occasional shooting stars!
  - Bug Fix: Fast day sometimes not working
  - Update: Camera pans farther in portrait mode

This is a misc grab-bag of updates that initially got going because a lot of people were having trouble with the Super Fast Day checkbox.  That one took a while to track down.

Basically, we have an internal library that attempts to calculate an accurate sunrise/sunset time by looking at your current position, your time zone, and a few things like that.  It mostly works pretty well.  Calculating the position is expensive-ish though, so I skip that if you're using Fast Day, since it doesn't matter anyway.

However, the renderer still uses the time of day object to get its times.  That's fine, but what would happen is if you turned on Fast Day without ever having turned on regular old boring time of day first... it wouldn't ever have calculated a position.  This means everything defaulted to 0, which means all the times end up being midnight, which means you don't see any times change, ever.

I updated the time of day library to have some reasonable defaults, so this shouldn't happen again in the future.

What are the other updates?  Nothing too big, but you'll get a little more camera panning in portrait mode now.  In addition, we've had a lot of people request shooting stars, so those will happen occasionally too.  They're uncommon, about once per minute, but you should see them here and there.  :)

8 comments:

  1. I have tried to buy this 4 times, each time it has said the transaction was successful, but each time it didn't work, so I assumed it didn't charge me...guess I'll find out...butr in the meantime, what went wrong?

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  2. LastPsalms: No idea, we don't have anything to do with billing or approval. If you need an order cancelled, we can do that, but that's about it.

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  3. I love this wallpaper. I it is my favorite! Thank you so much for developing such a nice piece of software. It brings me a lot of peace throughout my day when I look at it. K*M

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  4. Looks great, but now refuses to load on my Samsung Fascinate. (It used to load.) It freezes the phone, and I have to remove the battery to reset it.

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  5. How do I delete the free version from my Toshiba Thrive Android after purchasing the other version? Thanks I love the wallpaper. maybe next year you can make a great Santa Claus @ the North Pole one:-)

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  6. Oona - You can either do that from the Android Market listing (look for an uninstall button) or via the Applications list in your settings screen.

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  7. wow.. great job! When changing backgrounds and/or use current time of day, trees don't render and turn black sillhoettes (triangle primitives). Need to toggle background back and forth to get it to render again on an LG Lucid. Hmm, here's a challenging enhancement... Use current weather! Look forward to the upgrade! Cheers.
    gb

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