I was super excited to see that update 4.4 had dropped with motorized stars, but I quickly found some things that don’t work as expected or thing that I would like to see differently.
Suggestions:
Have shells also be motorized, this would allow one to create howler cakes. These are cakes where the bombette would go up with a long whistle/howl and then explode like a normal bombette/shell.
Bugs:
When making a fountain with motorized stars, the stars do not start from the base, but appear in the sky.
Crossettes do not seem to work at all with motorized stars, you can hear the sound, but you cannot see the stars from the crossette
When creating mines with motorized stars, the effect creator does not zoom out enough for you to see the end of motorized stars life. This also means that the effect dimension does not show the true dimension, it only shows the dimension if you do not use motorized stars.
There are also things that I do like about this update, for instance the continuous slides for star size, or the addition of the pillow shape for stars to more closely mimic consumer cakes which do not have perfect circular breaks.
I know it’s really early in the lifetime of this update, and probably some (bug fix) updates will follow, but I still think it could be very valuable to have this topic for feedback/bug reports for this somewhat major update.
May I request some suggestions? For next update, we want to add durations for whistles, tourbillon, and farfalle, and rotations just like in the shell effect. One thing is, we want to add some wolf sound. Thanks in advance.
I do like how the stars look now. However, this update kinda ruined my shells as the color of the firework tails are different now, especially with the microstars. Here is the comparison of the 2 versions with the same shell,
This is a usability problem: FWsim has an internal type for each effect. This type is only visible when you click File > “Change Type, Caliber or Custom data”.
We should improve this in a future update, such that the “Internal type” is more clearly visible.
Thanks for sharing that comparison. Can you send me the effects file via private message? (You can find the effects file in Documents > FW-Sim).
Can you send me an effects file where this problem can be seen?
We made some slight changes to the star sizes. Things should look mostly like before, but there might be differences. If you have an effect where you see a large difference, send me the effects file via private message and I’ll have a look.
I encountered bugs where popping flowers and crossettes applied to a shell with a motorised star do not work.
Is the fact of gravity being overridden when using the motorised function an intended behaviour, or is it a bug?
I would love to request the motor star with shells too; if you think about it, you can apply it just slightly to change the shot’s trajectory, making it more realistic.
Another suggestion is to add the air resistance feature to standard shells. Now that we know it is possible to have this feature thanks to the motorised stars, this could be incredibly interesting to try out on some fireworks, such as consumer cakes, where small shells are stopped early as their force is absorbed by the air. At the moment, we can exploit this, albeit with limitations, to give stars an effect of a sudden burst and an earlier stop. I will share a video here with this: https://youtu.be/Gg8CRScDBZs
The first two shells are normal, then the other two are the “experimental” version. Following them, on the left there is a normal one and on the right the “experimental version”. Note that it takes a lot of trial and error in this mode, and gravity cannot be set.
I second the suggestion of allowing more controls on farfalle, tourbillons and whistles, but my impression is that these feature might come in the future, as a clear base has been laid down.
@fireworkslover The Pro update has not been released yet. (We updated the change notes on the website too early - sorry for that)
It will be made available later today!
