Puppet Wrap Filter?

[kevclev]

Audio Responsive, etc. have their own filters, but I can't seem to find any filters for puppet wrap, parallax, etc. if you want to narrow it down, and searching isn't bringing them up either. Am I missing a search filter, or are these just not searchable categories?

[Tim]

We don't consider them useful for filtering purposes, there is not much of a point in filtering specifically for wallpapers with these underlying technologies - it would just add bloat and confusion to the user interface. We basically created a couple of tags for "statistical" purposes and to accommodate certain technical limitations.

For example, "video textures" do not work on Windows 7 and the easiest way to deal with this was by adding a "Video Texture" tag and then adding special logic to the Windows 7 version of the app for all wallpapers that have this tag.

[butcho]

Originally posted by Tim:

there is not much of a point in filtering specifically for wallpapers with these underlying technologies

Maybe some people like the look of puppet warp animations in scene wallpapers and would like to filter them in the Wallpaper Engine browser instead of using the overview of all PW wallpapers within the steam client. Why not hide these filters by default like the wallpaper types for example? The more advanced user who'd lilke to get to know the features of the application would sooner or later stumble upon the extra filters anyway without getting confused. I guess there are way more things in WPE that might confuse the standard user than a few extra filters and at least for puppet warp I would find that really useful.

[kevclev]

Originally posted by Tim:

We don't consider them useful for filtering purposes, there is not much of a point in filtering specifically for wallpapers with these underlying technologies - it would just add bloat and confusion to the user interface. We basically created a couple of tags for "statistical" purposes and to accommodate certain technical limitations.

For example, "video textures" do not work on Windows 7 and the easiest way to deal with this was by adding a "Video Texture" tag and then adding special logic to the Windows 7 version of the app for all wallpapers that have this tag.

Yeah, if you tuck the ability to filter for wallpapers by effect in an "additional options" or something tab, wouldn't that fix the bloat concern? There are a bazillion wallpapers, so I'm not sure how empowering users with the ability to filter down to exactly what they're looking for wouldn't be of value to the community. Imagine if steam only had 5 tags you could use to filter through its (equivalently) bazillion games. There are dozens of search/filter tags, and I'm not hearing of any concerns about "bloat and confusion" regarding finding stuff on steam.

Maybe you don't even need to add a category for it in the main filter/search area, but if you found a wallpaper that was tagged with puppet, you could just click it, and it would bring up a list of all the other ones with the same tag. It would be hyperlinking at that point, not even changing the UI.

[Biohazard]

We are trying to solve another issue in the next updates first which is that some users enable the special tags "audio responsive" and "customizable" and end up with an almost empty Workshop because it's not clear enough that these tags work differently.

There is a puppet warp tag on the Steam Workshop because we added this tag immediately when adding that feature, so for now you could use the Steam Workshop page to filter for this. Maybe we will add the more technical tags into the application at some point, but for now we are trying to solve some other issues first.

"Parallax" will not have a tag because we can't retroactively add it to existing submissions, there are simply too many and the Steam Workshop doesn't help us much to analyze and update them.

The system for game tags on Steam doesn't really compare, it has more features especially in regards to user customization and reviewing. We frequently hear complaints about the Workshop tags/search function and if they would be as advanced as the Steam game tags we would have less issues with them.

[kevclev]

Originally posted by Biohazard:

We are trying to solve another issue in the next updates first which is that some users enable the special tags "audio responsive" and "customizable" and end up with an almost empty Workshop because it's not clear enough that these tags work differently.

There is a puppet warp tag on the Steam Workshop because we added this tag immediately when adding that feature, so for now you could use the Steam Workshop page to filter for this. Maybe we will add the more technical tags into the application at some point, but for now we are trying to solve some other issues first.

"Parallax" will not have a tag because we can't retroactively add it to existing submissions, there are simply too many and the Steam Workshop doesn't help us much to analyze and update them.

The system for game tags on Steam doesn't really compare, it has more features especially in regards to user customization and reviewing. We frequently hear complaints about the Workshop tags/search function and if they would be as advanced as the Steam game tags we would have less issues with them.

This was helpful - much appreciated