User guide/What’s new in 1.7

What’s new in 1.7: Alive

IKANDY 1.7 makes every knob on the console one setting for every scene and gives presets a fresh start, turns Bass, Mid and Treble into color knobs for every scene, puts Motion on the beat’s hit, and adds Comfort mode, which holds fast flashing back for anyone who wants it.

1.7.4: smooth for hours

Graphics memory is no longer kept after leaving WGSL scenes, which made some long PILOT sessions slow down as the graphics card filled up.
WarpField scenes no longer restart a few seconds after they load. A scene that has to lower its detail on a slower graphics card does it in one step.
Span no longer leaves a thin strip of desktop along the bottom on some setups, and imported shaders stay sharp across wide setups and fill a wallpaper that spans several screens.
Wallpaper all from the Quick Access ring covers every screen, and says how many.
A crash at start on some PCs with Steam installed is fixed: Steam’s Vulkan add-ons are no longer loaded into IKANDY.
The name check blocks more swear words and slurs, and in Shared Moon another player’s name shows as Player and their number until the check has loaded.

1.7.1: pick your own name

Pick your own name on the welcome card, or later in Setup, PROFILE, Change name. Your number and Author ID never change. The name rules.
Comfort mode is now off unless you turn it on, in Setup, COMFORT or with Continue with Comfort mode on at the first start. It no longer follows the Windows animation setting.
MilkDrop .milk files import again.
Imported shaders lower their detail by themselves to stay smooth, and keep your own Detail setting when you set one. They stay sharp in span.
IKANDY’s compute scenes and WarpField scenes no longer draw a black live wallpaper on PCs whose wallpaper runs in standard 8-bit color, as some AMD graphics cards do.
A crash fixed: IKANDY no longer closes when listening to one app’s audio fails to start. The app’s engine is updated to Electron 42.11.10 for stability and security fixes.

One setting, every scene

Every knob on the console is one setting for every scene: set Bass, Speed or Bloom once and it stays as you move between scenes.
God Rays and LUT work the same way: one setting for every scene, off until you turn it on, and on Auto the first time you do. An adjustment carries to the next scene until you click Auto again.
Presets have been wiped, because your old ones were tuned for IKANDY as it was. The preset you pick or save on a scene opens with that scene from then on, until you pick another; a small dot marks it. Scenes without a preset play your own settings. How presets work.
A preset saves every knob, Intensity, God Rays, LUT, the Look and Motion, but not the MilkDrop and WarpField scene knobs, which are one setting per engine. Particles, Emitter, Coupling and Persist are one setting shared by both.
Switch presets Off with the switch beside the Presets label and every scene opens on your own settings; your saved presets are kept for when you switch them back On.
The Lock and Pin are gone: every knob now works the way the Lock did. If you had the Lock on, its values are now your settings for every scene.
A preset never raises Intensity when it is all the way down, where nothing reacts, whatever you load.
To start over, press MOTION on the console and, under Console knobs, press Reset console settings: every knob goes back to IKANDY’s defaults, and Intensity, God Rays, LUT, the Look, Motion and your presets stay as they are. Right click a knob to reset just that one.

Color on every scene

Bass, Mid and Treble are color knobs: Bass warms the body of the picture, Mid shifts its colors like oil on water and Treble lights the edges, on every scene, with or without a Look. They add color and never change how a scene moves. More on the color knobs.
0 turns that color off, 1 is the gentle default and 2 is the full effect. A color knob reads alike on dark and light scenes, on MilkDrop, WarpField and HDR pictures too, and it never turns a color into red.
The color knobs are Pro. On the Free plan every scene plays with them at their gentle default, and Intensity is the knob you turn.

Motion on the hit

Motion starts with two moves on every plan: Swell on the hit and a slow Drift between hits, so a quiet passage still breathes.
Swell lands once on each main hit of the beat, never on every kick or hi-hat. On a scene with no centre object it gives the whole picture a small push that springs straight back. It no longer moves WarpField scenes: like MilkDrop, they move themselves.
Imported shaders no longer speed up and slow down with every bass note: their pace follows the song, quicker in a drop and slower in a breakdown.
With a Look on, the rings of light it sends out on the beat are born at least a third of a second apart.
When the picture goes to an audience (Span, the Output window or mirror, Spout and NDI, the wallpaper, or recordings and replay), Motion stays inside its standard range.
The Motion window opens from MOTION on the console and is Pro and Studio. Every plan can switch the moves off: Setup, COMFORT, Motion moves turns Swell, Drift and any moves you added off and back on.

Scenes

With no Look on, the beat’s brightness punch lands on the main hits instead of on every bass note and hi-hat, so many of the scenes that come with IKANDY flash far less on Free, and on Pro with the Look set to Original.
Seventeen IKANDY scenes now light up on the beat’s hit instead of flickering with every note, so they flash far less at the default settings: Techno Flow, Psytrance Iridescent Current, Synthwave Breathing Current, Prism Cells, Mercury Pool, Chrome Chaotic Flow, Cyberpunk Nebula Flow, Molten Crust Veins, Chrome Metaball, Cyberpunk Chase Wireframe, Synthwave Breathing Flow, Face in Clouds, Organic Flow, Strobe Monoliths, Vibe Lab Hyperbolic Bloom, Synthwave Ember Flow and Industrial Ember Flow.
Rave Tunnel has left the library: it still flashed too often to keep.
The Ensemble is back in PILOT, and Cathedral of Bars, Attractor and Luminous Attractor have new card art with nothing drawn over the scene.

PILOT

PILOT no longer plays games or 3D worlds: Slingshot, One Small Step, the 3D Worlds, the LUMINAL realm showcases and the flown 3D fractals on the AI shelf stay out of its show on every plan, and so do your own saved scenes built on them. A pool you build yourself, such as Favorites, still plays exactly what you put in it. Everything is still one click away in the library.
The back arrow in PILOT takes you to what PILOT showed before, step by step. Next and R pick the way PILOT’s own switch does, so they no longer bring back something you saw a few minutes ago.
A cleared LUMINAL realm’s showcase joins your library.

Setup, the keys and the first launch

The workspace is called Setup, and its pages are AUDIO, PICTURE, COMFORT, OUTPUT, KEYS, PROFILE, PRIVACY, ABOUT and DEBUG.
Visual Quality, Highlights, the FPS Counter, HDR and wide gamut are together on PICTURE. Comfort mode, Who is watching each output, Motion moves and Screen readers are on COMFORT, free on every plan. UI Size is on OUTPUT.
The KEYS page shows PRO or STUDIO beside the keys that open a feature above your plan, and lists Ctrl+Shift+D, which saves a diagnostic file for support. Esc closes menus and leaves span.
IKANDY opens about two seconds after you accept the license. The first time this version starts on your PC, Now Playing, lyrics, logos and pets can take up to a minute and a half to appear; after that they are there at once.

Comfort and flashing

New: Comfort mode, in Setup on the COMFORT page under Comfort and flashing. While it is on, IKANDY holds back fast flashing, measured against WCAG 2.3.1 and ITU-R BT.1702, keeps Intensity at 6 or lower and turns every Motion move off. It is off until you turn it on (since 1.7.1 it no longer follows the Windows animation setting).
With Comfort mode off, scenes play as they were made: IKANDY measures their flashing but does not hold it back.
MilkDrop and WarpField presets play as their authors made them, and some flash or move fast. Comfort mode holds them back.
The photosensitivity warning at first start names Comfort mode and has a Continue with Comfort mode on button.
On the Stage, FLASH, STROBE and the return from BLACKOUT share one limit of three flashes a second, for everyone.
The Now Playing announcement’s full-screen flash fires at most once a second, so skipping quickly through tracks no longer strobes the screen.

HDR, sound and privacy

Picture settings live together in Setup, PICTURE: Visual Quality, Highlights, FPS Counter, HDR output and headroom, Wide gamut output and MilkDrop per-pixel warp. HDR and 4K.
On an HDR display, built-in scenes no longer look darker than on a standard screen: the shadows and midtones now match it, and only the highlights rise into HDR.
When Smart Auto moves from your whole system’s sound to the one app playing music, the visuals keep hearing the music through the switch instead of dropping out for a moment.
Crash reports no longer include the title, artist or album of the song you are playing.

Known limits

Psytrance Flow Prime, Psytrance Current and Vibe Lab Hyperbolic Bloom still flash at the default settings on their own, Synthwave Waveform can when the Look is set to Original, and the One Small Step moon can on its first view after you start IKANDY. Comfort mode holds them back.
Comfort mode dims blocks of the picture where it holds a flash back, which shows most on bright scenes, and it lowers the frame rate. It is off unless you turn it on; click the COMFORT chip to turn it off.
Speed: the color effect adds about one millisecond a frame at 4K on an RTX 2080 Ti class card. Measured against 1.6.23 on the same machine, every engine runs level except MilkDrop presets, which can run one step slower on very high refresh displays.
This release was tested on NVIDIA graphics cards only; AMD and Intel graphics cards were not tested.

The full notes, with how to use Comfort mode, are in the What’s New page when you start IKANDY. See pricing for what each plan includes; the Steam page is authoritative.

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