❗ Feedback for upcoming Asset Sharing Feature ❗

Hey y'all,



for our next update we have something big planned and we'd love some people to give our upcoming patch a try and provide feedback. You can test the features outlined here in the current beta version of Wallpaper Engine. You can enable the beta by right-clicking on Wallpaper Engine in Steam -> Properties -> "BETAS".



The update consists of two parts. The first is asset sharing, this means you will be able to share custom creations in the Wallpaper Engine editor with the community or use the feature for private backups of wallpaper elements that you frequently re-use or simply do not want to lose. An asset can be any groups of layers including custom SceneScript logic that you have created. You can also select multiple layers and publish them as variants. For example, a test upload I have made is a clock which bumps up and down to music being played in two variants: A 24h and a 12h version. You can subscribe to it by going to the Wallpaper Engine editor, click on the "Steam" menu option and then "Browse Assets". It will then become available at the top of the "Add assets" list after Steam has downloaded it.



The second part of the change is the ability to create effects within Wallpaper Engine. Now this is going to be a way more advanced feature and requires knowledge of GLSL shader programming but we know that there are a number of people in the community that are able to work with this (and anyone else can learn, it's definitely useful if you plan on working in the gaming industry for example). To get started with this, select an effect and click on the "New" button in the lower left corner of the effect screen. Note: This button is hidden by default, more at the end of this post. Once that is done, you will be able to edit the vertex shader and fragment shader of the effect, we have also added some snippets in the editor to help get you started from scratch. Please note that code completion is limited for HLSL, at least for now, so the editor will not show you a full set of hints of what code you can write.



Now, we think that creating assets is for more advanced users of Wallpaper Engine as you generally want to first figure out how to use the editor before you start sharing your creations with others. That's why all the asset sharing features are only visible when enabling the asset creator mode, you can do so in the Wallpaper Engine editor by going to the "View" menu item and then making sure "Enable Asset Creation" is checked. This will unlock new menu items, mainly "Steam" -> "Share Assets on Workshop". From there, you can select layers that you want to publish as a coherent item or as variants.



There is no official documentation on all of this for now but we'd really love if you could have a look, give it a try and possibly even start creating some new assets. It would definitely be useful to catch bugs before this goes live and there are still some things we want to improve before this will be published on the stable release. If you have any questions, comments, feedback, please don't hesitate to share it here!