Hello! We are now at the 5th update past "the final update" and counting, but here we go...

While making some of my own content, I ran into some annoyances with Keysight and decided to fix them. Without further ado, here is the changelog:

--- SMALL ADDITIONS ---

Added a preset search function (only took 4 years)

Added function to auto-focus the selected preset when the selected preset is changed

Added support for render resolutions above 4096x4096 pixels. I strongly recommend not doing this though, Keysight is liable to crash!

Added blending mode support to Light Bar Wisp and Plasma objects, allowing "Normal" blending mode. This allows for dark or black Wisps and Plasma

--- CHANGES ---

Changed "Midi" tab to be "MIDI", since it is an acronym and not a word (hugely important, I know)

Changed preset scroll bar scrolling to be smoothly animated

Changed all file pickers for image importing to show all files, and just block non-supported image files. Should streamline the experience of using non-default file types (such as a jpg on Pulses which expect a png)

Changed all materials to render "two-sided"

Changed Reflections on Note Objects that use the static rotation mode to rotate 180 degrees if the note is realtime. Functionally this means if you rotate Reflections and pan them such that they follow Note Object movement, this persists even if you change the direction of note travel, making presets a bit more shareable!

--- BUG FIXES ---

Fixed materials in "Transparent" mode not showing texture options when emissive colour is set to "Texture" but masking is not enabled

Fixed "Cancel render" button tooltip being wrong

Fixed unbinding from a MIDI device failing to properly release that device, causing it to be unusable in other programs (or Keysight, if you try to bind to it again). This fix brought to you by: "some tiny one-line comment at the bottom of a forum post" and it has eluded me for 4+ years!

--- ---

Happy Keysighting! <3

Greetings! It's that time of year again: the Keysight anniversary. Oh, and I guess the Steam Summer Sale too, so Keysight is 30% off!

I've also been working hard on something that turned out to be way bigger than anticipated:


Here it is![egglyberts.live] This site aims to replace the Steam guides with something a lot more cross-linked and searchable now that Keysight is in its "final state".

The Wiki[egglyberts.live] aims to mitigate what I see as the core problem with Keysight 1: usability and user education. Keysight 1 can achieve a lot of things, but usually through very unintuitive and circuitous methods. The Wiki[egglyberts.live] provides a much easier-to-browse source of information than the existing Steam guides, and is guaranteed to be up to date. I recommend starting with the "Concept" pages if you want a broad overview of how Keysight works without getting bogged down in technicalities.

• Warning: at time of writing, the Wiki is maybe 30% complete. I wanted to have it done for the 4-year anniversary, but a combination of "oh, this is way bigger of a task than I thought" and "let's sort out MacOS and a bunch of bugfixes" stopped that from happening. Finishing the Wiki is my current priority!

Thanks to the incredible work of HeapUnderflow[ip-over-avian-carrier.net] doing some really cursed things to get it all to work: Keysight is now fully up to date on the MacOS branch after being abandoned since May 24th, 2023! MacOS users now have access to:

• "Channel" colour mode
  
• Up to 88 colour slots
  
• Point-based particle force (black hole particles)
  
• CPU render mode for render-to-video
  
• Tons of bugfixes

On top of the new stuff in 1.6.3b!


Since I had to go in to change all the menu links from Steam guides to the Wiki,[egglyberts.live] some minor adjustments and fixes have also been made:

• All measurements are now in centimetres. (Prior to this change, there was a lot of inconsistency with some things being in 10cm per unit, or 1cm per unit, or 1 "key width" (2.358cm) per unit.)
  
• Updated all default presets and Light Bar templates to be better laid out in 3D space, with no overhanging shadows or excessive Z-height on some Pulses
  
• Added "Static rotation" Reflection mode for materials to allow material to pan without rotation in any direction
  
• Added emergency soft-lock prevention on render-to-video operations which lose connection with the video export tool

At the time of writing, there are still some Wiki pages left to be written, and I want to record some good video guides. But once that's out of the way, it's back to Keysight 2 development!

Don't forget about the devlog playlist if you want to keep up to date on KS2 development, but I have learned my lesson and will not be able to provide any ETA on when it'll be ready. It's still a very long way off though, apologies!

Anyway, as ever, I'm on hand in the Discord[discord.com] if you have questions, or you're interested in commissioning custom Keysight implementations.

Happy Keysighting! <3

Hello! I got my hands on some new performance testing utilities and ended up making a couple changes, wanted to push it as a build so everyone benefits. 1.6.3a (Windows-only) contains the following changes:

--- SMALL ADDITIONS ---

Added a "Disable frame-smoothing optimisations" toggle to Graphics > Framerate. This applies "RHI.MaximumFrameLatency 0" and "RHI.SyncSlackMS 10" in the event that the new default behaviour of "RHI.MaximumFrameLatency 1" "RHI.SyncSlackMS 0" somehow causes issues for anyone.

--- CHANGES ---

Changed Pulses to switch to mask-capable mode only when Mask Mode is enabled, and allowed this to happen for sprite and world-space opacity masked Pulses

Changed default engine CVars to "RHI.MaximumFrameLatency 1" "RHI.SyncSlackMS 0" to add in smoother frame delivery when v-sync'd and operating comfortably within hardware capabilities. This is measurable, but minor

--- BUG FIXES ---

Fixed Render-to-video lack of resampling when using a branding image that is not a clean multiple of the target render resolution

In this update...
Have you ever ended up with a file called "thing_final_final_v4_new"? In unrelated news, I am pleased to announce the final version of Keysight (1.6.3) is now available!

This update focuses on the default resources bundled with Keysight, incorporating new Keysight-usage techniques that bring visuals to the next level! All default presets / particles / pulses / light bars have been edited to a greater or lesser degree to give you the best start to building visualisations.

All the new default presets! Some new, some reworked, some largely untouched.

These default resources are loaded from external files when Keysight launches, and so happily: update 1.6.3 is also available for MacOS users! Minus a few little bugfixes I snuck into the Windows version.

This update will not change the look of any pre-existing presets. You will need to manually re-import the default presets in order to see them (if you already use Keysight)! I have made a video outlining how to access the new stuff here:

Or if you prefer to read, here's the different ways you can grab the new default presets:

Simply head to the System tab, then click "re-import default presets"! However, warning: this will overwrite any presets that share the same name as a default preset. Those names are:
Quicksilver / Vintage / Electric / Night / Fire / Spectrum / Gemstone / Keysight / Plain (default)

All default presets are bundled with the Keysight install as .kspreset files, and can be imported individually. Click "import" in the top left, and navigate to the Keysight install (Typically Steam/Steamapps/Common/Keysight). From here, head to Keysight/Extra resources/Presets/Stock preset backup and select the file you would like to import.

You may also want to import "Plain (default)" via this method, and then head to System > Defaults calibration and click "set current preset as default" (while using Plain (default)). This will make any new presets inherit the Plain (default) settings as the starting point, and the new default preset has various settings optimised for easier Keysight usage.

I recommend this if you're a long-time user of Keysight and have never performed a factory reset! Over time, I have altered the way a lot of default settings behave, but I do not auto-adjust user data to reflect the new defaults as they might not be suitable for all implementations. If you want to make a backup of your entire save data first, this is found under:

• Windows: C:/Users/[you]/Appdata/Local/Keysight/
  
• Mac: Library/Application Support/Epic/Keysight/

And/or you can export individual presets to .kspreset files for safe storage.

Anyway, to fully factory-reset Keysight: head to System, and then the console command entry field at the bottom of the tab. Typing reset and hitting enter will instantly delete all your save data and start fresh.

I have already announced this publicly on Discord[discord.gg], but just to repeat everything in a Steam announcement:

I (Egglyberts, sole developer) am now publicly offering a paid service to build custom Keysight implementations for you.

I've already done this for a number of creators behind-the-scenes when asked, and I wanted to formalise and make it known that I am happy to do this. To be clear, I am not changing my policy of near-infinite free help via Discord and Steam answering questions, and I do not expect preset commission to be of interest to 99% of users. "Custom Keysight implementation" in this context means presets, AR 3D camera matching, or just an entire Keysight setup if you have something niche in mind!

So, how does this work?

• £20 (about US $25) base price. This guarantees up to one hour of my time
  
• Further time, if required, at £20/h
  
• Time cost is dependent on goals. There will be a free consultation phase where I present a fixed-price for your requirements. (One hour is roughly enough to make two really nice presets with stock resources in Keysight, or one preset with custom art assets)
  
• I'll provide images / videos of progress as I go to make sure it's in line with your vision
  
• Payment on completion, and only if you're happy with it. Then I'll send over necessary files + source materials
  
• Payment via PayPal[paypal.me] or Buy Me a Coffee[www.buymeacoffee.com]
  
• Any submitted files are yours. I will not use them, I will not share them. Not even any preview images (unless you would like me to do that and promote it!)

I also made a video explaining all of this:
Ok! With that out of the way, time to show off the new goodies. All the new presets, plus a couple extra, are on display in the freshly-reworked trailer:
It's interesting to note that I haven't added or changed the way anything in Keysight actually works; these new presets could have been built way back in 1.6.0! 1.6.3 presets look nicer due to better usage of Light Bars and the Reflections system, and I've also tried to make things cleaner and less obnoxiously bright/flashy as well.

"Classroom" and "Synthwave" presets have been removed, and the new presets of "Vintage" and "Night" have been added in their place. Here's a quick comparison and breakdown of the rest:
- Notes use the new Fluid reflection texture, strongly inspired by some older Kassia and Rousseau videos
- Impact light shadows have been lengthened
- Light bars have been used to fake some ambient occlusion on the keyboard
- Rising haze particles are improved and made cleaner
- Added streak particles
- Lowered brightness of keypresses
- Lowered overall brightess of preset to be easier on the eyes
- Added shadow at top of screen, kind of like a vignette

- Added warm lighting to the keyboard
- Light bars have been used to fake some ambient occlusion on the keyboard
- Added top shadow
- Added reflection to backdrop to provide more visual interest to empty areas
- Reduced amount of sparks

- Changed hue gradient to be vertical, with green at the top, using a new Light Bar template
- Made lightning more subtle
- Inverted and tweaked piano key materials
- Added reflection-driven interesting keypress material
- Made circuit board more subtle, but also larger and bolder
- Changed notes to semi-rounded and gave them a Pietschmann-inspired reflection-driven material
- Added top shadow
- Added some blue smoke
- Reduced brightness of light bar

- Changed particles from "Column" to "Basic fountain"
- Added keyboard shadow
- Changed keyboard lighting
- Tweaked reflections on notes to be less high-contrast
- Added "Drifting specks" particles
- Added top shadow

- Removed keyboard light
- Added keyboard shadow
- Updated "Rising haze" particles to the new template

Sorry this is such a compressed mess, thanks GIF format...
- Made note border narrow instead of wide
- Overall heavy brightness reduction
- Added keyboard shadows
- Updated "Burst" particles to the new template
- Added "Drifting specks" particles
- Added top shadow underneath smoke

- Added top shadow
- Added keyboard shadows
- Reduced note light brightness
- Reduced keypress brightness
- Lengthened impact light shadows
- Changed scene lighting to give more interesting highlights on piano keys

Next up: particle / pulse / light bar templates!
Every template has been tuned up to a greater or lesser extent. Some templates, like Burst, have barely changed but should render faster. Others have undergone serious reworks, here are some examples (old on the left, new on the right):
These now pop into existence at their target height instantly, rather than being thrown upwards first. As shown, this allows Fireworks to be useful in bottom-up mode. They are also a lot more detailed and realistic, at the cost of not having an even spread.
The comparison GIF doesn't do a great job at showing it, but this template is now made up of smoke + oval particles rather than a single fade-with-speck. The vector field force has also been tuned heavily to be more swirly and detailed.
This template has been drastically tuned down so as not to dominate any preset it is added to, as well as dropping to just one streak instead of two.
This has also been made more subtle, with less arcing and sticking lower down to the keyboard to act more as a "pulse" than a particle system. A GIF of just the lightning here might look a little dull, but it fits more presets a lot better than the original lightning.

Pulses have undergone far less change, but have also been tuned slightly. No lengthy comparisons here! Most changes amount to subtle things like adjusting the base size of "Basic ring" such that it intersects nicely with "Basic circle", allowing faster and nicer composite Pulse layouts.

Light bars have been renamed to be better organised, with a few additions!

"Fade"-type templates (shadows) now include more options for adding piano shadow, as extensively seen in the new default presets. There is also a new "Hue (Colour)" template (only available on Windows) which allows for easily multiplying the scene colour towards a target colour towards the top of the screen, in order to more easily allow for vertical-gradient-type visualisations.

• All default textures have been consistently compressed (turns out some were PNGs, some were low quality JPGs... an artefact of just throwing more stuff on the pile over time). Normal maps are now PNGs, and everything else is 95% JPG, which saves a small amount of storage space and improves normal map quality in some instances.
  
• Added new "Stars" mask, and added a starry backdrop template to any default template that does not use an Overlay.
  
• Added rough CPU/GPU cost to particle template descriptions (these are relative, and should only be compared to each other, although these are the actual millisecond performance cost for my own computer).
  
• Organised and added more "Extra resources" .kspresets and templates. These are found under the Keysight install, then /Keysight/Extra resources.
  
• (Windows-only) fixed a bunch of small bugs:
  - Fixed missing textures causing buggy, infinite-stretched materials
  - Fixed editing Colour in Basic mode causing black note borders to turn white
  - Fixed colour pickers not displaying the correct hex code (these were using Linear hex codes, and now use the expected sRGB)
  - Fixed sustain-effect-extension mode breaking keypress indicators if keypress indicators are not also extended

Well... with Keysight 1? Hopefully nothing! 1.6.3 is intended to be the final update for Keysight (but it is the third "final update" to date so... take that with a pinch of salt). However, before getting back to Keysight 2 development, I would also like to create a Keysight Wiki. Keysight 2 is still going to take me a long time to finish, and Keysight 1 will not be going away once Keysight 2 is released... so I want to try and address the ease-of-use issues in Keysight 1 with a really good, easy-to-navigate wiki, now that everything in the program is not going to undergo any more changes.

Anyway! Wow, err, long announcement (1,911 words, in fact). If you read the whole thing... well done! You're never getting that time back. If you want to keep up on Keysight 2 news, join the Discord[discord.gg], subscribe to Youtube, maybe come chat to me on Twitch[www.twitch.tv]!

Happy Keysighting! <3

Hello! It's, err, me again. Another hotfix, although this is more of a coldfix at this point!

Activity and Notes-per-second colour mode are now functional once more and not stuck at 0.00 blending factor. Please note that as this is a Windows-only fix for a bug introduced way back in 1.6.0, MacOS still suffers from broken Activity/NPS modes and will remain that way. I am so sorry for letting this slip through at the time and now have no way of updating the MacOS branch :( Big thanks to Plain-Piano in the Discord for bringing this to my attention!

In the process of fixing things, I did have to remove the "colour look-ahead" feature under Core > Simulation. But this was a weird and entirely unknown feature for colour modes that weren't even working, so... acceptable losses, in my book.

Anyway, back to Keysight 2 development for me!

Happy Keysighting <3

Hey folks! Tiny hotfix here addressing an oversight with the Channel colour mode. No idea how, but particle systems were just not using the new mode at all. Apologies for that!

While I'm posting here I'd like to mention that Keysight 2 devlogs are now a thing on Youtube! If you're curious about what Keysight 2 is going to look like and would like to keep up on development, get subscribed!

Hello! Teeny tiny update (Windows-only) to add a necessary feature for a streamer to achieve a specific implementation.

Only two changes:

• Pulses which are translucent and always fully opaque (that is, 1.00 opacity across opacity-by-velocity and opacity-by-lifetime-1/2) will now be masked in mask mode. While in this mode, they also slightly move downwards over time in order to properly perform transparency sorting. This allows masking of "note object replacement" pulses.
  
• Fixed midi transposing breaking test inputs

Now, I better get back to Keysight 2 development!

Regretfully, 1.6.2 will not be available on MacOS. This is for the very lame reason that I told my external developer in charge of MacOS porting that 1.6.1 was definitely the final Keysight update. They have therefore torn down the necessary Unreal Engine setup required to create more builds. My deepest apologies! Very much my fault, but I'm not about to ask them to re-figure-out the outrageous hoops to jump through to get certain plugins working on Mac.

Hey so err, remember when I boldly announced "no more Keysight 1.X updates, I'm working on Keysight 2.X"? While working through some important bugfixes for 1.6.1, I accidentally snuck in some much-requested features. Whoops! Let's break those down quickly, and then talk about Keysight 2 news.

Colour modes got a bit of a facelift, and a new addition! The "Channel" colour mode does exactly what you would expect it to do: change colour based on the channel being used by the event. This is less flexible than using full Channel-to-Preset mapping under Automation, but is far more quick and convenient if you simply want some flat colours to change based on the hand or instrument.

Additionally, the Gradient mode (previously called Key Position) now dynamically updates slot name based on which pitch that slot is closest to on the keyboard.

Finally, the colour slot limit has been increased from 12 slots all the way to 88! It is incredibly unwieldly to have so many slots, but having 88 slots with Series colour mode allows a specific pitch to have a specific colour in a way that was not previously possible. If doing this, I recommend ensuring Slot 12 is the colour you want all notes to be, as this colour is added to the end of the colour list when adding slots beyond slot 12.

By popular request, particles have a new force they can use! "Point-based force" lives under the Wind tab and is a bit of a mouthful, but the snappier "Black hole" name does not quite describe what these new options do. You can now assign a point in space which exerts a force on all particles with (of course) a lot of configuration. In trying to use this effect myself, it is by far the "hardest" system to get to grips with in Keysight, but it can do some cool new stuff as already proven by Shyked[s.shyked.fr].

Ok so before I get distracted talking about why this has been such a struggle, the headline: perfect quality renders are now typically more than twice as fast to render using the new CPU particle mode. This has the caveat that this is only faster than "safe" particle mode, and only works on "reasonable" numbers of particles (systems with greater than 5k particles spawned per second will benefit much less, and may even be slower). Oh, and the resolution limits have been changed: rendering up to 16,384 x 16,384 is now allowed (at your own risk!). But hey, we have the marketing point of "8k rendering!!11!" now...

The technical details for "CPU" mode, for those interested: Keysight's render-to-video (RTV) exports frames using RenderTargets, which exist in the GPU's memory (VRAM). Particles simulate via the GPU and are also stored in VRAM. For some unknown reason, writing to RenderTargets and simulating particles in the same frame causes horrendous particle artifacting, and so for RTV to actually work it needs to write to a RenderTarget for one frame, and then advance the particle simulation on the next frame. This alternation is what "FAST" particle mode does (and may still have a single broken frame here or there); with "SAFE" particle mode being 1-frame-write, 1-frame-simulation, 2-frame-wait as the cycle (which is guaranteed to give perfect frames). The new "CPU" particle mode simulates particles on the CPU and in regular old RAM, thus avoiding the particle artifacting if writing a frame and simulating particles at the same time and guaranteeing non-broken particles on every frame.

CPU simulated particles are much slower than normal GPU simulated particles. If using presets without a high volume of particle spawning, CPU can be even faster than FAST mode, but this is very much a preset-by-preset thing and I encourage you to do some tests!

Full 1.6.2 changelog[egglyberts.live]

I wanted to give you folks some super early heads-up about how things are going to work. If you have questions or any input, I would love to hear from you in the comments or via the Discord![discord.gg] (This is big scary product roadmap stuff and I want to do everything I can to give you the best experience moving forwards)

Anyone who owns Keysight at the time of Keysight 2 being released will receive a free license to Keysight 2. Keysight 1 will continue to exist on Steam and be available to purchase at a slightly lower base price, as my plan is to list Keysight 2 at a higher base price. Anyone purchasing Keysight 1 after the release of Keysight 2 will not receive a key for Keysight 2.

Originally, I had intended to release 2.0 as a free update to Keysight. However, the architecture and flexibility of 2.0 is going to be so radically different that I will not be able to support up-converting 1.X data. Therefore, if I did release 2.0 as an update to Keysight then it would cause a huge headache to any user opening Keysight post-update and suddenly needing to rebuild all their data (unless they manually downgrade via Beta branches back to 1.X). Having a separate product of Keysight 2 allows a much better-communicated split between 1.X and 2.X, but I absolutely want to ensure it acts as a "free update" to you existing Keysight users! Hence the free keys.

I have very lofty ambitions for 2.0, and that brings with it a lot of big technical questions I have yet to solve! Pre-production and testing of ideas has already begun, but I don't yet even have a concept for how long it's likely to take to rebuild everything we currently have (on top of adding new features). Let's go with "probably at least a year".

Interested to see how things are going? I am regularly opening up 2.X feedback discussion threads in the Discord[discord.gg] and adjusting the design based on thoughts from users like you! Additionally, I will occasionally stream development and have shared various design documents (like this one outlining the planned data structure)[docs.google.com].

Disclaimer: everything is subject to change, and no discussion of a planned feature should be taken as a promise that this feature will eventually exist. With that out of the way, here's some things to fire the imagination!

• We are, of course, using Unreal Engine 5 for Keysight 2. The typical big-ticket features like Nanite and Lumen are less relevant to Keysight, but there is an experimental new engine feature called Substrate for building materials. And oh man, Keysight 2 materials are going to be exquisite!
  
• HeapUnderflow, the external developer responsible for all the actually-difficult tool development for Keysight (like midi file reading, render to video, preset import/export), is working closely with me to "nativise" all tools directly into the engine itself. This brings a host of back-end benefits to make development for me easier, but also brings a huge speed increase to those systems! As an example, the proof-of-concept midi file importing now appears to be upwards of 10x faster and capable of handling larger files.
  
• Automation will be a major focus for the general data architecture of Keysight 2. This is very difficult for me to explain succinctly, but the idea is as follows: every menu action in Keysight can also be performed through an "Automation action", and these Actions can be triggered by a variety of inputs. Actions can also smoothly set a variable over time, allowing every single setting in Keysight to become animated.
  
• Following the ease and popularity of .KSpreset files, we will be replacing the awkward "basic / advanced" menu switching in Keysight 1 with a "template -> customise" workflow for every object and effect, and then allow these templates to be exported. The dream is to allow people to share just things like a ".KSnote" or ".KSmaterial" to let beginner users snap together pre-made elements rather than operate within the janky confines of Basic mode; suffer through Advanced mode; or use someone else's preset completely as-is.

There is, of course, so much more I could talk about. But rather than do that, I'll get back to actually building it! Keysight 1 has been a great exploration into the design space of midi visualization and I am quite proud of what has been built, but there are so many lessons and ideas that I am excited to build into the foundations of something new. Watch this space!

Happy Keysighting <3

I am very pleased to announce that 1.6.1 is done and live! This update originally started as a simple "let's just quickly add preset import/export", but exploded out into a number of high-priority bugfixes and some small tweaks to existing systems which massively expand the possibility space for what can be achieved with Keysight.

Please note that 1.6.1 will be the final update for Keysight 1.X. However, this is not the end of the Keysight development journey! More information at the end of this announcement, but let us first talk about what's new...

Sharing presets just got a lot easier! Thanks to the wonderful work of HeapUnderflow developing another extension to Keysight, presets can now be imported from and exported to ".kspreset" files complete with all their custom images! There's honestly not much more I can say about this; you just click the button, select a file, and it all works as expected.

Due to .kspreset files having the ability to contain unmoderated text and images, I am pushing the official Keysight Discord[discord.gg] as the best place to share and find files from other users. In fact, we have a #Hall-Of-Fame channel set up in there to showcase and share anything which really makes go you "whoa, Keysight can do that?!" featuring, for example: Shyked's wonderful "Raindrops" preset!
Go grab the preset file from the Discord if you want to use this preset!On top of the main goal of implementing native preset import/export, 1.6.1 also brings with it a number of small feature iterations. 1.6.1 adds:

• Two new particle systems! "Streaks" emulates spline-based trails as seen in other styles of visualisation, and "Drifting specks" emulates an ambient particle system look.
  
• A flag for particle systems to be flipped upside down, and snapped to the top of the active area instead. Makes particle system bursts tied to note spawns in top-down mode a lot easier to achieve!
  
• Global brightness modifier for scene lights, making it a lot easier to turn up or down piano lighting as a whole if built up from multiple lights (as is the case in most default presets)
  
• Lighting channel control to all objects which can receive lighting. This allows much finer control over what is illuminated and is particularly useful for stopping keypresses/note objects from having any other colour than their emissive colour
  
• Reflection colour multiplication modes (for the extra spicy advanced users out there). This allows the reflection image to be much more finely controlled in terms of colour, rather than always using the emissive colour of the material
  
• Flat midi velocity mode. This allows rapid removal of all dynamic effect response with velocity, or remapping the response from midi files with a single midi velocity
  
• Improved repeat note-on piano key animation behaviour. Keys now no longer snap upwards to begin animating downwards if a note-on event occurs while the key is mid-animation, which actually does more than you might think for believability!
  
• Index-based sprite frame display for pulses. Err, that is to say: when using horizontal sprite sheets as the pulse stencil, these can now take the note's pitch as their frame to display. If using a 12 frame sprite sheet, this allows for per-pitch stencil switching on pulses, which in turn allows for note names to be attached to notes!

"Note names.kspreset" is included as part of the /Keysight/Extra resources/ folder included in the Keysight install. The Import button goes here by default. Please note that these note names are essentially hard-coded to follow the path of notes in a stock Core > Visual Layout setup at 16:9 resolution, and will require tweaking if you have changed these settings at all.

With 1.6.0 bringing a huge overhaul to the state machine in Keysight, it's unsurprising (to me, anyway) that a bunch of bugs slipped through. 1.6.1 squashes a ton of these! Here's a summary:

• Fixed midi culling being completely absent, whoops!
  
• Fixed pitch bending completely breaking note object position, also whoops!
  
• Fixed custom frame and output directory selection resetting on each Keysight launch
  
• Also made custom frame directory write to a sub-folder, fixing file-deletes in the instance of a user specifying a location shared by other files (this is actually by far the worst bug ever to have existed in Keysight, sorry!)
  
• Fixed keypress reflections not behaving as expected compared to other materials
  
• Fixed soft-pedal-based bloom and exposure modification not occurring during render-to-video operations
  
• Fixed key and damper animations not resetting cleanly when the panic button was pressed (a bug which also occurred at the beginning of any render-to-video operation, fade-in would simply mask it)
  
• Fixed midi playback breaking and going backwards in time if the panic button was pressed during playback
  
• Fixed midi playback not resetting cleanly if loading a midi file while midi playback was occurring
  
• Fixed midi playback looping, if enabled, causing the file to play after a render-to-video operation completes (avoiding system strain if you start a render and then walk away, as most people do!)
  
• Fixed particle alignment with non-standard 3D camera angles
  
• Fixed camera roll applying incorrectly (or, rather: unintuitively) when using non-90 local roll values
  
• Fixed various unwanted behaviour when pasting an object type which had not yet been copied

Full changelog[egglyberts.live]

I mentioned this at the end of the 1.6.0 announcement, but: I want to completely rebuild Keysight. There is a concept in development called "technical debt", and Keysight suffers from it badly. The analogy of a house works pretty well here: the foundations of Keysight were laid three years ago (!) without much of a concept for what the actual structure would look like. The resulting structure is a pile of awkward extensions and supports, with many parts being dependent on some rickety little subsystem which cannot be easily replaced without tearing the entire thing down.

So that's what we do! We tear it down. I have a lot of very ambitious goals for Keysight 2.X, but I'll share the ones that I am reasonably confident I can actually achieve:

• Building in Unreal Engine 5. This is less exciting than you might think, but still!
  
• A clean and enjoyable menu
  
• Support for localisation down the line (it's currently impossible in 1.X thanks to how I built early systems)
  
• Better preset display and organisation
  
• A consistent way of allowing presets to use a "global" value for a variable, or their own "local override" across every single option

This will take an unknown amount of time. This time around, I want to properly forward-plan and take the necessary development time to build things right. If that means spending a month making a really nice slider, then I'm going to spend a month making a really nice slider.

I'll be asking for feedback on prospective ideas and rambling about progress over in the Discord[discord.gg] if you want to stay up to date with what's going on. But in the mean-time, I hope preset sharing allows users struggling under the weight of poor user experience to get their hands on some really awesome visuals without having to climb the learning curve themselves!

Oh, and: this 2.0 rebuild will be released for free for all Keysight users. I hate to mention this at all, but this kind of continuous development on a fixed-price product doesn't make a ton of economic sense, especially not as a sole-developer... As such, if you believe Keysight is worth more than what you paid for it, I set up a buymeacoffee link[www.buymeacoffee.com] to support me further.

Happy Keysighting! <3