Key coloring mod

Collaborate with other modders to make Synthesia the way you want it.
Always the latest versions: [ colors.xml | ui.xml ]
Read the Getting Started topic to learn how important it is to MERGE YOUR CHANGES every time you download a new dev preview.
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duncanisgoed
Posts: 7

Post by duncanisgoed »

Hey,

Recently I've been picking up on Synthesia again, but it has been hard for me to orient my hands on the keyboard. I was hoping that there would be an option to color individual notes' keys in the colors.xml, but this appears to not be possible. I decided to do a small texture mod instead. I wanted to change the colors of the first two black keys of every octave to make them stand out more, but I don't quite understand how the various play_KeysBlackXX map to the black keys so I decided to make a block of pixels around those keys instead.

With the contrast it's really hard for me to find the right color to make those keys 'pop', so any help with that would be appreciated.

Image

Duncan
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play_KeysWhite.zip
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Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

play_KeysBlack is actually incomplete as stored in the file. The remainder of the texture (and each pressed-down, colorized black key) is generated at run time with the correct tint and highlighting applied over it.

(Historically, keys were drawn in a couple passes so the vertex color -- or tint -- wouldn't wash out the white reflection/highlight in playKeysBlack_o1. In an effort to consolidate drawing, Synthesia builds the texture with the highlight and shadow layers baked in correctly so it can be drawn in a single pass.)

On older systems or low-end tablets, building those textures is actually 95% of the reason there is a tiny hiccup when pressing the "Continue" button to go to the Play screen. Now that Synthesia 11 is adding proper shader support, we'll be able to merge all the layers into a single texture (notice each is already essentially single-channel, so we can put the highlight on, say, the red channel, shadow on green, etc.) and let the shader draw everything correctly in real-time. No more hiccup. Lots more flexibility. Fewer textures. Arbitrary note colors!

That last one is the best part. The black keys are the last holdout that are preventing arbitrary note colors. Soon. Not in 11, but soon. :D
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