Friendly Bugs Live Wallpaper v1.1

  - New Feature: Butterflies!  Six different types!
  - New Feature: Population Settings (ladybugs & butterflies)
  - Update: Categories in settings menu
  - Update: Name change from Ladybugs Live Wallpaper
  - Bug Fix: Now calling glFinish() to satisfy HTC's drivers

Ladybugs has long been the least popular of our live wallpapers, and let's face it: the lack of butterflies is why.  So, taking action on that observation, it now has a whole mess of butterflies (six different types) and if you set the population to "Invasion" you get swarms of them!

This, of course, means "Ladybugs Live Wallpaper" is now a bit of a misnomer, so after a few attempts that kept bumping into the 30 character limit, we're going with "Friendly Bugs Live Wallpaper" for the new name.  It's descriptive, it's totally friendly, and it's got a vaguely Japanese anime vibe that we like.

The butterfly models and textures are the work of Allyson Kates, who did damn well for just a few hours!  Getting the landing and taking off to feel right took a bit of time, but overall I'm happy with the result, and it'll probably get a bit of tweaking in future updates.  Summoning a butterfly when you tap the screen might make sense too. :)

How to disable vCast Media Manager popup

If you have an HTC Incredible, you probably noticed that as of the 2.2 update Verizon saw fit to include an agonizing popup every time you plug your phone in, telling you to install vCast Media Manager.  Here's how to disable that.  I use this phone as my main test device, so I get to see that thing dozens of times a day.  No more!

Here's how to disable it:

* Go to the dialer, dial ##7764726
* Hit Call
* Type Password 000000 (six zeros)
* Select Feature Settings -> CD ROM
* Disable it

Asteroid Belt Live Wallpaper v1.0

(Android Market Link)
(YouTube link)

Been working on this one on and off the last couple weeks, and finally have it to a point where I like it.  For a change not a lot of tech development happened with this one, it was mostly a matter of tackling the art and scene setup, and I'm happy with how all that turned out.

There's a few dozen asteroids in the foreground that tumble from one side of the screen to another, with the rest of the solar system in the background.  The orbits of the planets in the system are tied into time of day, with the slowest (the green gas giant) orbiting once every six hours.  The rest of them are at 3, 2, and 1 hour intervals.

The original scene didn't have the planetary orbits outlines, and it felt rather empty, and was hard to understand where the planets are were relative to each other (since they're all different sizes).  Adding the rings helped that a lot and means you get to see some shift when switching home screens.

The sun is a couple of layers of alpha, rotating at different speets, multitextured together, with a color gradiant overtop.  The result in a subtle but attractive animation, I think.

This is the first wallpaper that's really leaned heavily on OpenGL's lighting for effect, I think, and it didn't turn out badly.  I'm actually quite happy with the asteroids -- they're two passes, the first diffuse lighting and the second specular lighting.  They've got a good cold shiny look that feels very appropriate, I think.  They're also dark enough that they don't distract as a background.

All told I'm quite happy with how things shaped up.  It still needs a few more user options, I think, but I haven't worked out exactly what those should be yet... they'll happen in future updates.  Any thoughts as to what those should be, I'm all ears.

Checklist

Things to tackle over the next few days:

* Halloween update (ghosts & witches!)
* Vertex color support in model format
* Seahorse (finally) in Aquarium - 50%
* Upsell activity into Silhouette
* Butterflies
* Landscape mode upsell dialog
* More prefs for Asteroid Belt
* Implement Jungle Waterfall

Thunderstorm v1.2

  - Update: Sharper lightning bolts
  - New Feature: Minimalist Mode

Minimalist mode is actually a bit of an off-the-cuff feature in response to an e-mail asking if they could get just the lightning against a black background.  As it's easy to do, why not?

The lightning bolt graphics are now double the resolution, with some tech development done to offset the memory usage.  While previously all images were treated as RGB, now the engine supports loading of greyscale TGA images, and will appropriately treat them as luminance at upload time.  That means while the image is much higher res, it should actually be using a comparable amount of memory to before.

Notably, while the glTexImage2D description says input format and internal format are supposed to be separate, and that it's OpenGL's responsibility to convert from one to the other, I didn't find that to be the case on my HTC device.  Whatever your input format is dictates your internal format, so far as I can tell.  I suspect the internal format argument is more or less ignored.

NA Flags v1.15 & EU flags v1.1

  - New Feature: Custom Backgrounds
  - Update:  Removed banner-style Canadian flag
  - Update:  Added England flag

These are all pretty self-explanatory.  Everyone seemed to hate and loathe the portrait-mode Canada flag, so away it goes.  It was based on an actual banner that some reference photos showed (similar to American flag banners that might put the stars all the way across the top), but the general tone of the comments clearly didn't appreciate that.  It's gone now, as the customer is always right.

EU Flags gained the red-and-white flag of England, which was an oversight in the original release.  Sorry folks.

The Custom Backgrounds feature is using most of the same tech development as Aquarium's equivalent (which you can read about below), though it was interesting dealing with PreferenceActivity rather than with standard UI buttons.  Similar but not quite the same, and I'd been leaning on the load-from-XML implementation enough previously to not have to deal with it.