Facer 4.5.0 Beta: A New & Improved Android Wear Rendering Engine!

Hey there Facer-ers!

We previously debuted our fancy new rendering engine in this post: Introducing new Facer engine for Android Wear - Planetary 2.0

We’re proud to announce we are beginning a beta test of our new engine in Google Play today! This is an experimental build, and very much a ‘beta’ product. We’d love to have you all help us improve the engine by trying the new beta and reporting any issues.

If you haven’t signed up for the beta, you can sign up here: https://play.google.com/apps/testing/com.jeremysteckling.facerrel

There are a few known issues that our team is already working on:

  • Bugs with applying themes, or with themes being an incorrect color
  • After syncing a new watch, you may see the previous watch flash for a moment
  • Certain letters & characters (diacritics) do not render correctly
  • Certain text features such as ‘glow’ and ‘stroke’ do not render

If you see any other issues, please let us know in this thread.

If possible, please include:

  • Your Phone & Watch combination
  • Your version of Android and Android Wear
  • A link to the watch (if applicable)

Thanks everyone!
The Facer Crew

3 Likes

First of all: Congratulations on finally releasing this new engine.
It runs so smooth!
I CAN SEE THE 1/100 PART OF SECONDS FLIPPING IN REAL TIME ON MY MOST COMPLEX FACE!

I do see those issues mentioned before so I will limit myself to other ones:

  1. I can clearly see a problem with sizes of shapes, especially lines. It seems like the line is treated as a rectangle.
  2. semi-transparent images seem to have a gray line in the places where it normally when from nontransparent to fully transparent.

I’m using Mellin - Datum Left - watch face for Apple Watch, Samsung Gear S3, Huawei Watch, and more - Facer
on Sony SWR50 and Vernee Mars Pro.
Android Wear 1.5.0.3508863 Android 7.0

2 Likes

The Battery Bar of my Watchface Nflate! has got an issue: It is absolute-positioned to be inside the battery - but it’s not since the update (spot it above the right side of the battery).

This is how it looks on my ZenWatch 2 with Android Wear 2.0 (Phone: Galaxy S8 on Android 7.0).

Cannot change color for now, it’s always orange.

But the animations are now smoother, very nice. Good job devs!

Running through my elements test series, I get the following results in performance (New engine in Blue):

This is based on the post I wrote here: http://community.facer.io/t/how-much-is-too-much-elements/8030/2

Note I only looked at overall render rate. I wan’t necessarily scoring the animation per se. My method for calculating frame rate was to watch the DWE counter at the bottom and see how many times it refreshes with a new number. In the case of the 287 frame set, it would refresh about 3 times every 2 seconds. Whereas the old Engine would only post a new frame every 1 1/2 seconds.

From a true usability standpoint I think 60 frame elements seems ok in terms of performance. The 0.16/sec frame rate is roughly equivalent to 6/fps. My opinion of animations is that 8/fps is generally pleasing, with 12-15’fps being really smooth. Based on that the 30 frame group posts around a 8/fps performance. That works well with using a 2 second loop with 24-30 images.

Later today I’ll try re-running my Long Animation Performance series.

Hello There!

In general, from my point of view, you did an Excellent Job! Congratulation*! I never saw such smooth animations on my watch before.

Here is, what I observed in the short testing time today:

5 - The only one thing, which “slow down” was the reaction to the accelerator used rotations:

Phone: samsung SM-G950F
Watch: LG Urbane
App Version: 4.4.2_4597
Android Version: 7.0

Here are the mentioned watch faces:

1 Like

I tested one of my designs in development. I’m getting some weird results on the DIM screen and with some of the other elements. Design looks fine on phone app.

On the wake side, the leftmost digit (I did individual digits to match the background text)
On the DIM side, a bunch of my masks are coming up white instead of black. Also noting a weird refresh flicker on the white elements.

<img src="/uploads/default/original/2X/a/acf2204d2e393ec48593324c1cf87262296102da.jpg" width="375"height=“500”>

Tried my ISO 205 - Subsector design. Animation looks good. Text and other elements have issues.

The main time text color should be pinkish. On my watch its closer to orange. Themeable colors don’t work on icons. On DIM side, my dim mask which is normally a black full screen rectangle with a transparency set is coming up white instead. Themed colors are showing white on dim side.

Three of my four faces won’t load and just sit at the “Powered by FACER” Screen.



And the forth doesn’t have any of the text glow effect (known issue), but loads and displays on the watch.

Google Pixel XL 8.1.0
Motorola Moto 360 Sport 2.7.0.178645119

Thanks so much for your reports everyone! We’ve continued work and just released the latest Beta. This includes the following fixes:

  • Fixes an issue where theme colors would always show as orange
  • Fixes an issue where Dim mode would render with white images
  • Fixes an issue with misplaced shapes in watch faces

The latest versions are 4.5.0_4525 and 4.5.0_4524

I believe this will cover many of the issues reported so far, but our team will continue to investigate all new issues, so keep the reports coming! Thanks again everyone!

1 Like

Thank you for this update.
All fixes mentioned by you have been resolved on my end.

The only issue still present is lack of stroke effect.

2 Likes

Couple of issues I seem to still be having:

  1. Phone app continually requires me to sign in
  2. Hyphens in Date text field on my “Rick and Morty” design seem to not render. Hyphens on other designs look fine
  3. Weird result on first time a design loads. Whenever I load a new design, the first time it wakes there is a delay for when elements start to display. I’ll try an upload a video to explain.
2 Likes

My issue of the misplaced battery indicator (post #3) is resolved. Thank you for the quick update. :slight_smile:

1 Like

Happy Weekend everyone! We’ve continued our work on the new engine and a brand new Beta is going to Google Play now! Here are the release notes:

- Improves image rendering
- Improves font rendering
- Adds support for gyro / accelerometer 
- Adds support for text stroke
- Fix to theme colors being applied in dim mode
- Fix to complication tapping & rendering
- Improves initial watch face loading 'stutter' in animation

There are still a few things finicky about loading, particularly if your watch face uses a lot of fonts. We’re continuing our work on that front, but we’d love to hear any additional feedback!

Great job again to solve almost all of the problems (incl. gyro & accelerometer) in only a few days. I was trying to check my last open issue again - nr. 2 from this post.

Anyway, I found something a very interesting and potentially highly useful effect for animations (if you know about it).

It would be great, it you could see this “minus effect” also directly in the facer creator.

Unfortunately, build 4.5.0_4636_beta-(4636) didn’t fix the lack of stroke effect for me.
Sony SWR50 and Vernee Mars Pro
Android Wear 1.5.0.3508863 Android 7.0

Accelerometer

I tested my new watch face today and there is still tremendous slow down with accelerometer function in the BETA.

Regular Facer 4.4.3_4603 App
Gif-video shows the (accelerometerRawY()) “light effect” with double speed (screen shot from my phone during turning the display in the y-axis). At the watch it looks very similar according to the reaction time.

Beta Facer App
Gif-Video from the real watch (8 times speed). It takes more than 15 second to get a new (accelerometerRawY()) value and move (jump) the shadows and the “white strip” to new position.

Phone:
Samsung SM-G950F

Watch:
LG Urbane

Facer 4.4.3_4603 vs. Beta (Jan 16, 2018)

Watch Face:

Anyway, the speed for standard animation (based on regular time or at “interpAccel”) is amazing :+1:

@Mellin could you send a link to one of the watch faces you aren’t seeing the stroke on?

New update, from 4.5.0_4636_beta-(4636) to 4.5.0_4653_beta-(4653) solved the stroke problem for me.

Unfortunately, similar to @Tomas I’m still seeing very long update time / no update to accelerometer-based features.

I can see that on my main face:

And on my text face:

And both of them worked before the new engine.