I've been using panon for a while, and I've never really been happy with how the default shaders work. Not enough customization-- and the biggest thing, a complete lack of smoothing.
hcps_small.mp4
Featuring configurable smoothing, bars, colors, and damn near everything else!
Clone the repository into ~/.local/share/panon/{folder name here}. That's it.
HCPS features several bespoke features for bars. The only thing it lacks is circles; however, there are several fantastic shaders for that, and quite honestly the math makes my head hurt.
The width of the bars
The gap between bars
The gap between vertical sections of bars
The height of each vertical section in the bars
If turned on, the bars will start at the middle, and expand outwards evenly.
If turned on, the ends will be rounded.
There are two main color modes: default, and custom. Default coloring just uses the panon color modes, and it's what I recommend for most people. Here are the related settings:
If turned on, the mode will be set to default.
If turned on, colors will "snap" between bars, rather than being a gradient.
If turned on, the color will be based off of the Y position, rather than the X position.
This is for people like me who want full customization. Inside of the image.frag file, there is a variable labeled "colors". If you add colors to it, bars will be sequentially colored based on the array (if it reaches the end, it will simply loop around). The syntax looks like this:
const vec4 colors[] = vec4[](
vec4(r,g,b,a),
vec4(255,255,255,255)
);Remember to add a comma after each entry, except for the last one. If you get any of the syntax wrong, even slightly, it will not work. If you need help with this, look up "glsl array" and "glsl vec4". If you still can't figure it out, you probably shouldn't be using the advanced colors, but if you really want to, shoot me an email at [email protected] with the colors you want, and I'll make something for you to copy/paste.
This is probably the biggest benefit of HCPS. Generally speaking, panon shaders are very jittery and sensitive to very small inputs. I've implemented two seperate methods for smoothing, which you can set using the smooth_mode setting, then you can adjust the amount with the smooth_amount setting. Here are the modes in more detail:
Smoothing disabled.
Smoothing is enabled, and does not scale with difference in amount.
Smoothing is enabled, with scaling based on differences in amount-- this is the mode I recommend, as it reduces jitter from small changes while still allowing snappy response to large changes.
I'm not entirely certain which license to use, because it uses some code from rbn42-bar in rbn42's plasma-effects repository, so I'll just use the same one he uses.