2011/06/16

Live Wallpaper (some progress)

So, I progressed a lot in developing my first Live Wallpaper for Android. For now, I call this app "Weird Voronoi" because it uses the concept of the Voronoi diagram with some tweaks to create various visual effects.

I had a bit of difficulties to convert directly my fragment shader used on my machine to a fragment shader that can be used on Android with OpenGL ES 2.0. There's some restriction over the language that requires a certain adaptation. But in the end, the result is mostly the same.

Other problem in development, the emulators available cannot run shaders. So I have to debug completely on my Galaxy S. This mean that I know it's working on my phone, but I don't know about any other. I suspect that any phones more recent than the Galaxy S won't have any problem running it.

For now, in the project, I made the majority of the test I wanted to do. To see what are the limits. And actually, compared to a desktop, it's very limited. On my phone, running more than 4 points can be tricky while on the desktop, hundred points is not really a problem. So the objective was also to use this limited amount of points to be able to create some nice effect and I think I managed to do this.

Here's a first images of what the Live Wallpaper will look like:

I took this images from an app I'm developing on my desktop, but the visual effect is mostly the same.

Now that I know the limitation and the possibilities, the main thing left to be able to produce a first version to put on the Android Market is the settings to control the Live Wallpaper.

For now, the common options would be to choose the number of points. Even if 4 on my phone is the limit, there's some benchmark showing that some phones might be able to handle 16 points without a problem. The users will be able to choose if the points are moving, and at which speed. Same thing of the spirals (or if they want a spiral or not).

A variety of functions will be available to choose the right distribution of color. And the possibility to choose between a colored version or a gray scale version.

When the app will be available on the Market, I will give more detail about the features.

Meanwhile, I might post other images of other functions to show other visual effects.

No comments:

Post a Comment