Keysight 1.3 is here!

Welcome to the biggest overhaul of Keysight to date! Featuring: huge visual improvements to particles and the virtual keyboard, smoother performance, deeper piano visualization, stronger streaming tools, and much more. This update has been 5 months in the making, and it is with great joy that it can finally be released into the wild. Go forth, Keysighters, and do cool stuff!

Notable new features and improvements

Particles

This is the big one. Keysight's particles have always been... fine. Just fine. But other visualizers people are used to seeing have really nice particles and it was about time Keysight got up to speed! Here are the top level changes:

- 1,000,000 particles per second cap, up from 100
- Vector fields and much deeper path customization
- Force on particles from note events
- Additional colour modifiers like hue or saturation shift over particle lifetime
- New graphical-based editing UI
- Exportable and shareable JSON templates for particle systems

Sounds intimidating? This update ships with 9 finely tuned particle templates and auto-conversion from 1.2 particle systems to 1.3 systems! No need to dig into all the options, simply load up a template and enjoy the huge visual improvements.

Piano model and animation

The 3D models used for piano keys and the frame have gotten a huge facelift. They now support full texturing, are higher resolution, more realistic, and smoothly animate with key events! Complete with subtle key bounce on high-velocity note-off events. On top of this, individual per-key dampers are also visualized and animated, giving a diegetic way of showing pedalling (including sostenuto pedalling!)

Readable, individual save files

Presets are now stored inside individual JSON files! This means presets are more readily shareable, and also human-readable and editable from outside of Keysight itself. Presets can be found by heading into Preset Management and clicking the "Open presets folder" button!

Mask mode for semi-transparency in OBS

Mask mode has gotten a huge overhaul! Gone is the loss of quality and fiddly multi-scene OBS setup nonsense. Mask mode now integrates with an OBS plugin and a single shader filter, as explained in this guide. It's now completely indistinguishable from non-semi-transparent Keysight in OBS!

Graphics presets

Keysight has always been very resource demanding by default, but with some calibration it can run smoothly on almost any system. The problem has been that these calibration steps are pretty obscure and obtuse, so now they are done for you! Three graphics presets are available in the Graphics menu: "Standard" will give you the best possible visual experience, "Low" is intended for older gaming systems and disables some features like shadow casting and note lights, "Very low" is intended for basic visualization on non-gaming laptops and the like and has all dynamic lighting disabled.

Default presets

Keysight now comes bundled with four default presets, each with three fidelity levels to match the graphics preset chosen. These will be loaded as part of the setup wizard, or via re-selecting a graphics preset in the Graphics tab. This system is very flexible and will be expanded with more default presets in the future!

More flexible texture system

Keysight's default texture sets are now exposed and editable to users inside the install directory, and user-imported normal maps now behave correctly. Also added a bunch more masks and a new texture!

Better performance and capture

Despite all these huge visual improvements to particles/models/shadows, Keysight runs faster and smoother! Average framerate for equivalent presets between 1.2 and 1.3 should be 5-10% improved, but "1% lows" (stutter) is drastically reduced and this now also does not show up in capture software as much.

Additional element visualizations

Pitch bend can now be visualized by wiggling notes from side to side, along with "bending" their hue. Soft pedal can now alter the exposure and bloom of the overall scene to give you a different "feel" when soft pedal is down!

... and more!

I know ending a list with "... and more!" is a terrible cliché, but it's true! The full changelog from 1.2.2c to 1.3.0 can be found at the end of this previous announcement. Warning: it's even more reading than this monster update!

What's next?

- Better documentation and universal in-Keysight tooltips
- Upgrading all elements to use the new Graphical Editor UI elements
- Native Twitch chat control ;)
- Deeper midi device support and control ID mapping

Here's to one year of the most fun project I have ever worked on, and I am certainly not stopping here! Thank you for making it this far in the post; having folks express interest and share in my passion for music visualization is phenomenally motivating. I hope that I can continue to provide you better and more beautiful tools for your own creative endeavours!

Happy Keysighting <3