Big list o' feature requests
Now that I've finished and published a few lenses I figure I'd put a list of features I'd like to see:
* Delete key clears a field in the inspector
* A volume slider on the Audio component
* Animation times specified in frames instead of seconds
* Ability to use an FBX file per animation instead of one FBX with all the animations in one long sequence. It makes it much harder to add/remove animations when you have to re-bake out everything into one file
* Have Lens Studio compress the textures instead of using JPG files directly. It would be cool if you could check off "compress" on an individual PNG file in the inspector to have it convert it to JPEG (which is weird) or native texture formats (what should be happening) when you publish or send do your development device. It also would be cool to specify the output size so you could put very large source texture in the project but in the inspector tell it to resize it to 1024x1024 etc. This would make it much easier to play with different detail levels
* Ability to detect the performance level of the phone so you can add/reduce detail based on device. Perhaps we could specify coarse detail settings (no shadows, no specular, etc.) for various setups, like Level 1 devices, 2 and 3--and then Snapchat could have an API that tells us which type of device we are running on (high end, middle, low end etc.) Then we can switch the detail level at startup.
* Ambient light in shader. Right now I'm using emission to simulate an ambient light. Because it seems like you can't have ambient and directional in the same scene? I might be wrong about this.
* Have the option to allow ambient and light sources to use native SDK's light detection features. Both ARKit and ARCore have features that detect the lighting conditions and return lighting data based on its environmental lighting estimate. It would be great if we had an option to allow lights to use this information to somewhat match the lighting of the environment in the Lens.
* Generate environmental reflections from video. This is an example from Unity but the same principle applies: https://github.com/johnsietsma/ARCameraLighting It's splatting the video feed into a spherical texture and using it as the environment map for IBL and reflections. I think this might be better than choosing from the built-in reflection maps in many cases.
* Seamless sound looping. When I try to loop an MP3 there is an audible hiccup when it loops. Maybe yo need to decompress it in memory and play it as uncompressed to remove this stutter?
* Ability to cancel submission in review if it hasn't been reviewed yet
* HTTP class to access web resources (JSON, REST APIs. etc) from inside the Lens
* A user class to access user info in the lens (some kind of unique ID, perhaps unique to the app, so we could store persistent info about the user in our own database accessed via REST API)
* Particle system! I guess I could write one with the billboarding sprites, but a basic scriptable particle system would be great.
I'm sure I'll have more, this is just my first list! :)
* Delete key clears a field in the inspector
Holy... Please add this. The amount of times ive accidently added an object to a field by accident, and having to delete the WHOLE OBJECT just to get it back to none is very annoying.
* Ability to cancel submission in review if it hasn't been reviewed yet
Should already be added :P
* Animation times specified in frames instead of seconds
Uh, yes!
Other suggestions are nice but these 3 in my opinion are the most important.
Looks like we can scratch environmental reflections, I didn't know about the "From Camera" property. Seems like it works perfectly for my purposes.
Good list. I hope we see some implemented - sooner the better. I would like to see the 'animation times as frames' done as a priority.
I am sure I can add to this as well but I've only started using it.
Basically I want everything that's in Unity :D
Thank you so Ralph for all the great ideas! I have added them to our feature requests!!
Other requests:
Prefabs: You can export an object as a file, it would be cool if we could extend this functionality so that scene objects can reference these files and we can edit these files independently somehow. Ala Unity prefabs.
Text: A system for displaying 2D and 3D text. Either from sprite sheets or generated from geometry.
Editor Drag & Drop: I'd like the ability to drag and drop objects on to inspector fields. As it works now when you click and hold on an object, the inspector switches to show that object.
Editor Copy & Paste of entire component: You should be able to copy and paste things like transforms on to other transforms in the inspector.
Oh, one more!
Ability to trigger video capture or snapshot via code. When making games in a Lens, it's tricky for the player to record while playing. It almost takes three hands! It would be cool if we could start captures via code...so if, say, I know there's a 10-second sequence in my game worth capturing, I can start the snap and it would appear in the corner as a normal video capture would, etc. Then later on the user can tap that to decide whether to share it or not.
All of these are wonderful feedbacks!! They are in our feature request lists now!!!
Of this list, these two are near the top of my list as well
Having Lens Studio handle the compression allows us to work with high-res assets and then selectively down-res/compress as needed in order to hit our filesize target.
A 2D & 3D particle system that supports Sprites and simple 3D objects would be really helpful - especially if we could use scripting to create/modify particles.
Hey Donovan,
While I can add an auto-compression tool to the feature request list, have you checked out the guide for optimization best practices yet?
We also have since added Particles to Lens Studio. Check out our two templates featuring it here and here, and let us know if you have any additional questions.
Cheers,
Kaitlyn
Gotta be honest, the particle system is kind of unusable. I’m impressed at the quality of the effects the template comes with because trying to make new ones that look good is nearly impossible. It’s a far cry from even Unity’s old legacy particle system. I guess it’s a good start...?
@Kaitlyn - thanks for the heads up about the particle system! The examples are really beautiful.
Hey Ralph, We'd love to hear how we could improve, just let us know what you'd like to create so we can see if it's already possible or requires new features.
And happy to hear you're enjoying the particle system Donovan. We really appreciate all the Bug Reports and Feature Requests you've sent in the past couple of days. Have you submitted a Lens yet? We'd love to see it!
Cheers,
Kaitlyn
@Kaitlyn - I'm working on a pretty involved lens for a client. If I get clearance to publicize the work once it's done I'll happily share.