uLiveWallpaper - Develop Android Live Wallpapers with Unity!

I understand that you might not have worked with Android Studio before, but there are already plenty of information about this subject on the Internet, and I don't think my tutorials could be any better Here are official docs that could get you started quickly:
http://developer.android.com/tools/building/building-studio.html
http://developer.android.com/tools/publishing/preparing.html

Feel free to ask if you'll face any troubles, though.

Indeed, I do plan on adding PlayMaker integration in a future update. Though I've designed the API to be really simple even for non-programmer to use, so I hope this won't be a problem.

 

@ZimM
I would say the media button is a nasty issue (for me, it's a show stopper, most of my users complained when I've first released my lwps). If you could fix that, it would be great.

 

It's definitely a #1 issue on my list to fix for the next update.

 

The wallpapers freezes and crashes when opening the Unity activity.

I have purchased the PRO version. I have created a simple scene in Unity with a rotating cube, created the Android Studio project(unchecked "Remove Unity activity"). The problem is that on the device I get frequent "Wallpaper has stopped" messages. What I have noticed is that right after I start the Unity activity the cube freezes in both the opened activity and wallpaper and the wallpaper crashes. I am running on a LG G2 device.

 

It is not possible to have Unity running both in wallpaper and inside a standard UnityPlayerActivity. The reason is that there could be only one instance of UnityPlayer for the whole application, and UnityPlayerActivity always attempts to create a new one, which basically fails if UnityPlayer was already created for the wallpaper, and vice versa.

"Remove Unity activities" checkbox is designed to make iterating a little bit easier, as wallpaper service is not always automatically restarted after the applications is updated on the device. It is not supposed to be used simultaneously with live wallpaper.

This is a documentation issue, I guess. You can re-create the project with "Remove Unity activities" unchecked, or manually remove Unity Activities and all references to them in your Android Studio project. "Remove Unity activities" will probably be reworked into something more useful and intuitive sometime in the future.

 

What`s the difference between indie and pro? Thank you!

 

Hi just a quick question. I've done countless searches on google but I just can't find the answer. I'm on the final step of publishing my wallpaper, but it's asking me for Android TV screenshots. I deactivated compatibility in Unity and re-uploaded, but it still asking for these screenshots. I'm currently trying again by setting
android:xlargeScreens="false" in the manfiest file. But is there anything else I need to do? Thanks a lot

EDIT: Despite uploading the new APK with a message confirming the xlarge screen is now not supported, it is still asking for android tv screenshots. Any ideas how to disable this?

EDIT2: Basically you need to upload screenshots for tablets as well, the error message is misleading. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/27453600/you-need-to-add-at-least-2-non-android-tv-screenshots

I've been able to publish it by using the phone screenshots from emulator in the tablet and TV. I went back and set android:largeScreens="false", so it should only support normal phones. I deleted the screenshots from the tablet and Android TV and still they are asking for the screenshots before I can submit an update. I don't have an Android tablet, and the wallpaper hasn't been designed for tablets. Do you know what else I must do to disable tablet and TV support? Thanks

 

Glad you've figured it out. There is also an "Android TV Compatibility" checkbox in Player Settings in Unity. I'll make sure Android TV support is disabled for projects created by uLiveWallpaper.
Play Store recognizes an Android TV compatible application by these two lines in the manifest:

Code (CSharp):

1.  <category android:name="android.intent.category.LEANBACK_LAUNCHER" />

Code (CSharp):

1. <uses-feature android:name="android.hardware.touchscreen" android:required="false" />

For some reason, Unity always adds the last one when creating the project, but removing the first line seems to be sufficient to make Play Store know that application is not Android TV compatible.

 

Hi ZimM. You have to find a solution to the problem screen scrolling. Samsung phones to work in a huge missing. I've tried a lot of things, but I could not. The first page I looked at the page you gave me, but I could not. You should do an update on this issue. I use the plugin before uni2lwp has solved this problem.

 

Yes, I know about the issue and I am going to fix it. But there is no "real" solution to this problem. The only way is to emulate wallpaper scrolling with touch input, which will only work maybe 80% of time, and won't always match the number of screens. That's actually OK as a compromise for Samsung devices, but I don't want to sacrifice accuracy for other devices devices, so I'll have to devise some kind of auto-detection system. The problem with that is I don't own a Samsung device, so fixing this will be somewhat of a guessing game...

 

agree with @ZimM.
what we can say to user is.."the TouchWiz is not scrolling compatible with this live wallpaper..instead you can try with other launcher like Nova or Golauncher"

 

You might say to the user, but, you know, most users will be reluctant to change the launcher, so it's still a good idea to have at least a compromise mostly-working workaround for those devices.

 

indeed...
my suggestion would be the final option for the user if the emulating with touch input method also couldn't work..
Damn..there are lots of Samsung users out there....
Be ready fellas...

 

According to statistics, in google play , most wallpaper downloading the samsung owners.Therefore important samsung device.

 

Emulation will always work. Thing is, it won't ever be as nice as a native solution

Yep, nobody said we can just ignore them. It's just a pity that Samsung uses such a weird launcher that has no support
for wallpaper scrolling for no reason...

 

Question to everybody here. Two demos included currently, VirtualBox and ApiDemo, seems to cover all the APIs and how to use it. So what kind of additional demos/examples would you want to be added to uLiveWallpaper? I'm somewhat out of ideas, probably you have some?

 

How can I see the touch information? for example ; I run screen after clicking on the animation ....

for new demos, you can even more options in the settings menu.
You can make an example of the underlying methods. Some people can not do it.
Unityplayer.unitysendmessag (the "mygameobjectn Game", "myMethod Game", "Message to send");

 

Thank you for suggestions.

Regular Unity APIs work, like Input.touches. No point in duplicating Unity documentation and tutorials... But I'll probably expand the VirtualBox demo with some touch-based features.

Yeah, that should be useful, I'll do that.

The ApiDemo example already shows how to use all the methods. What trouble are you having with the API? Not sure how UnityPlayer.UnitySendMessage is related here. uLiveWallpaper uses standard C# events, which are faster and more reliable.

 

They do? I haven't been able to get the virtual box with extended setting so far (I admit, I'm almost illiterate in terms of Java and a almost rookie in terms of C#). In U2LWP it was pretty straightforward (even if time-consuming), you had the preference/settings java "app" and you could say what the xml buttons will do (they were sending a string to unity), but I couldn't find anything like that in your asset.

- A sliding camera, instead of a rotating one? I've managed to change your script and get it to move, but it's front/back, instead of left right (it may be very easy, but as I've said, I'm no programmer).
- A way to launch an invisible settings panel that triggers smth in unity (as you've suggested in the email)? , so we could manage the settings from unity's ui, instead of Android's.

Any luck with the multimedia/sound thing?

 

It's pretty much the same. Even simpler, actually. After you create the Android Studio project, you can edit "res/xml/preferences.xml" file. The format is the same as in Uni2Lwp, because, in fact, that is standard Android format for preferences. No need to send the message, it is sent automatically, and you can use the LiveWallpaper.PreferenceChanged event to catch it. The Android Studio project for Virtual Box with extended settings is located in "Assets\uLiveWallpaper\Demos\VirtualBox\VirtualBox_Android_Studio.zip" (as stated in the manual).

That's pretty easy indeed, I'll add that in the next update.

Yup, will probably be included in the next update as well.

Already fixed, will be available in next update.

 

A gyroscope/accelerometer controlled camera for rotation with clamped angle settings.
To create that parallax effect.
Like the GyroSpace app in Google Play.

 

Sir, you win the internet for today!

 

Hi, I have a problem with the android studio not updating properly. Some things will get updated like scene object changes, but not scripts. At first I thought it was because installing the apk back to back was messing with the cache in my phone so I removed everything and uninstalled,but it's not that. But I know for sure its not updating because I added an icon and changed the app name, click update then build in android studio and those things didn't change. I double checked that somehow the path to the studio project didn't get changed, I restarted android studio several times, and rebuilt the apk numerous times, but it is only changing Gameobject changes in the scene. I'm not sure what else it could be...

 

As mentioned in the manual:

This means that icon and application name changes won't be reflected when doing Update Project, and that is the intended behavior. What puzzles me if that somehow your scenes get updated, but not scripts. That should not happen since they are updated together. How are you checking if scripts had changed? Do you have any errors in Unity log when updating the project, or in Android Monitor in Android Studio when starting your live wallpaper?

 

It looks like it was just a unity problem, I think the old scripts were getting cached somehow. After making a new sample script with one function in it, suddenly all the others started working again.

 

Hey @ZimM, I was wondering if you could release the update in the current state (for the media button thing), and have the unfinished stuff in a different one?
Thanks

 

woahhhh this is cool!!
i read in this thread already, so it's still have not much feature?
i mainly a playmaker user
1. so when i make a 'scene" using playmaker for object movement (like i tween, mouse pick event, 2d/3d trigger, 3d mecanim animation, etc, all use playmaker) can this plugin works well when exported to android studio??

2. anyway is this plugin really support all unity? 2d sprite? uGui? 3D object (using Unity-chan for animation for LWP)? and we can combine all of them?

3. for example, can i make a uGui BUTTON (again. i make playmaker proxy for this uGui) in the LWP that user can touch it and it actually work?

4. - Allows to automatically generate a simple Settings Activity for you to expand. do we expand it on unity or on the android studio??
.
-= anyway, for unrelated question =-
in this 2016, how do we get a profit for making LWP? ads on LWP is not good at all...
maybe the option is just to make good premium LWP and just sell it?

 

The update is coming in a few days anyway, so I will release the update as a whole. Stay tuned!

 

@Keitaro3660
Thank you for your interest!

uLiveWallpaper is pretty much feature-complete at the moment. Updates will only deal with bugfixes, integrations, improvements of existing stuff, better demos etc.

Yes to all these questions uLiveWallpaper just wraps Unity into a live wallpaper service, so if something works in Unity - it works as well when uLiveWallpaper is used.

The preferences screen is edited in Android Studio. This makes sense since Unity is not a Android IDE. Format is really simple and there are tons of information about it on the Internet.

That's what most Live Wallpaper developers do these days - see the premium version, and optionally, release a separate free demo version. Or you can combine those approaches by using in-app purchases.

 

wow we can make unlimited things then
okay i think i'll buy it the next time when i got time for developing lwp ^__^
keep updating and bug fixing, thanksss for making this awesome asset!!

 

1. Is there any way to detect launcher switching when live wallpaper is set?
I mean that launching new launcher app when already other launcher was running.
I couldn't see any logs when launcher switches, but i want to detect when launcher switched.

2. I use Dodol launcher as my major launcher.
It doesn't show live wallpaper after I pressed "Set as live wallpaper" button time to time. It is just left with blank scene sometimes. Most of time it works smoothly but it happens time to time. Is it Dodol launcher related issue or hardware limitation due to memory issue? I have no problem with Nova launcher though.

I'm so happy to hear that you fixed media volume bug. Really great work!

 

What I would love to see would be an example of a scene, such as this (one of my favourite wallpapers):
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=kaka.wallpaper.forest&hl=en

It could include some or all (but I don't expect all as it's quite a bit of work I imagine) of the following as examples:

- Scene changes colour based on the time of day using the device clock. Alternatively, instead of a gradual change it changes suddenly (i.e. between 6-9 dawn colours, 9-6 daylight, 6-9 sunset, 9-6 night). Additionally, the user could alter the hours in the settings.

- Scene camera moves from left to right as the user swipes screens. I tried this, but for some reason in the emulator the default camera position was to the left, and not centred as it was in Unity.

- Weather, I think a free weather provider is OpenWeather. So if it's raining where the user is, it would rain in the scene as well, and the wind could blow against the trees if it's windy.

- Demo example with Ads. Alternatively, an option in the settings to Accept Purchases and which allows donation via PayPal (as in the link I provided). Paypal donations seem the best option, as you don't need to maintain two wallpapers, and you would receive the money instantly. An extra feature could be a pop-up box which only appears once after a week asking to review the app and also kindly asking for a donation.

- Another option, would be unlocking features after the user has paid, again via in-app purchases.

- Finally, anyway the APK could be compressed more. Currently, my average file is around 20mb, compared with about 10mb of a regular live wallpaper APK.

 

would be nice if have a tutorial for this..

 

I don't think Google allow Paypal donation inside the app...
You must use Google Play in app(Google Wallet)...so that they can take that 30% from us.
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/android-developers/dZ2z6Hg9w_E

 

Thanks, I didn't know that. In any case it would still be a good idea, it is so easy to make a payment using Google Wallet in Android it would be great to get a tutorial/example about this.

As an alternative, just an example to show how a prefab could be deactivated or activated via in-app payments. For example, a plane could fly over with a banner saying Please Donate, which could be deactivated via in-app payments, or some new Creatures could appear after payment.

 

Hi, not sure if it's a bug, but when I after I build the app and import it into Android Studio, I take some screenshots using the Emulator and save them in the Unity Player settings to use as the icons. However, when I update the app in Unity, the new icons are not copied over into Android Studio and leaves the default Unity Icons. Am I missing something, or is this a bug? Tks

 

Hi
can support unity 5.3.1 ?
in next update can Fix TouchWiz problem ?
thanks

 

Please go thru the forum first before ask a question.thx

 

OK, so the only way of updating icons is to do it manually?

 

it is harder than lwp2uni in work

for example :
- how disable double-tap on screen ?
- how can change camera with a event ?(ex : when long tap on screen change a Object color)

 

@ZimM
Can you release media button bug fixed version? This is major problem for uLivewallpaper.
Actually TouchWiz scrolling is not problem only for uLivewallpaper but the whole live wallpaper apps. So, it's not major and critical thing for uLiveWallpaper.
I am looking for media button bug fixed version. That's enough for me.

 

I agree with @redred77, the media button bug is pretty much a show-stopper. It's blocking us from actually releasing anything.

 

@ZimM Tested on Note 4 and it works beautifully. I've been waiting nearly 2 years for this. Now I can use all the latest Unity stuff with Android Studio. Once I get use to everything, I will leave a love letter in the reviews.

Thank you so much for your hard work. I almost lost hope in making LWPs for Android. I won't be sleeping for weeks now.

 

great!! please post your finished LWP link here
i really want to see what dedicated LWP maker will make using this asset

 

agree...can't wait for the rain of showcase..

 

Hi @ZimM, great work on this man.

I wanted to ask about the LiveWallpaper.Preferences. I have my Unity script set up the same way you have it in your example. Here is what I have as an example in my script in Unity:

Code (CSharp):

1. private void OnEnable()
2. {
3.      LiveWallpaper.PreferenceChanged += LiveWallpaperOnPreferenceChanged;
4. }
5.  
6. private void LiveWallpaperOnPreferenceChanged(string key)
7. {
8.      switch (key)
9.      {
10.           case PrefStrings.PREF_COLOR_SELECTED:
11.                string color = LiveWallpaper.Preferences.GetString(PrefStrings.PREF_COLOR_SELECTED, "RED");
12.                Debug.Log(key + " Color changed to " + color);
13.                break;
14.      }
15. }

The PreferenceChanged listener definitely gets called because I have a Debug statement in the same block of code. I print out whatever value the LiveWallpaper.Preferences.GetString gets.. and it's always that default "RED" value. It doesn't seem to actually be picking up the value. I'm wondering if there's a step I'm missing...

So I guess my question is.. Do I need to be using a PreferenceActivity for this to work? I am using my own made Activity (
AppCompatActivity) to handle the settings screen. I have done this plenty of times with the Uni2LWP so I know for sure the Android side is working (the SharedPreferences in Android save properly).

I know you're probably swamped with all the questions on this board, so please take your time man. This is really fun to work with!

edit: code

 

The developer stated that to reduce file size, it was simply a case of choosing ARMv7 only. However, when I try to test the app in Nexus Emulator it says:

Installation failed with message INSTALL_FAILED_NO_MATCHING_ABIS.
It is possible that this issue is resolved by uninstalling an existing version of the apk if it is present, and then re-installing.

WARNING: Uninstalling will remove the application data!

Do you want to uninstall the existing application?

Does this mean to say that ARMv7 is not supported on Nexus? I've done this a few different times with different apks, and the result is always the same. Thanks

 

Hi everyone!
Sorry for absence of any news and replies for a long time, and a long delay with the update. I was having certain issues with moving to other country, but everything is settled now. uLiveWallpaper update will be live on Asset Store within 48 hours, and will feature a ton of improvements and fixes. I hope it'll be worth the long wait.

 

Epic size reply incoming...

1. Yes and no. It is not a problem to detect the default launcher - the one that opens when Home button is tapped, but there is no good way to detect a launcher change if user started another launcher without making it the default one. There is a way, but it only works for API < 22, and requires an additional permission. Basically, you detect the foreground app and then check if it is a launcher. Here's some reference code:
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/...application-from-a-background-task-or-service
In the update, I've added a method to get the package name of the default launcher, since I think it might be useful anyway.
2. I couldn't find Dodol launcher anywhere to test that. It seems like Dodol Launcher has been renamed to LINE Launcher. I've tested with LINE Launcher and found no issues with it. Can you reproduce the issue with LINE Launcher?

Those are some great ideas I'd really want to make a comprehensive live wallpaper example, though it's a project on its own. Not sure when I'll have time to develop and release that.

There is no such thing as "default position". It completely depends on the launcher. In most cases, launcher reports the wallpaper position based on number of home screens. So, for example, you have 5 home screens on your launcher. In that case, when you are at home screen 1, the wallpaper will be all the way to the left, when you are at home screen 5, the wallpaper will be all the way to the right, and when you are at home screen 3, the wallpaper will be centered. To be exact, LiveWallpaper.WallpaperOffset.Offset value is 0 when at the first home screen, and 1 at the last home screen.

It really couldn't, that's the price of using Unity. Unity runtime itself just weighs a lot. All the usual advices to reduce the APK size when building with Unity also apply here. Most obvious things that you can do
1) Enable stripping, disable inclusion of standard shaders that you don't use. This will save you maybe 2 MB, depending on your project.
2) Build APK for ARMv7 and x86 platforms separately, and then configure your application in Play Store, so each device will get the version it needs. This will save you around 9 MB.

Please understand that any Android integrations are not within the responsibility range of uLiveWallpaper. I understand that not everyone is good with Java and Android API, but I can't see the point of me doing tutorials on something that already has tons of tutorials over the Internet. Each integration is a project on its own.
I'm not yet sure what I'll do in the end, but I think I'll only do a tutorial on in-app purchases for Play Store. Other than that, I'd very much like to focus on uLiveWallpaper itself.

Yes, and that is by design. The reason is that once you get the Android Studio project, it can be manipulated in every possible way, so it's impossible to even reliably know if icons are there. Because of that, Update Project is designed to only update the Unity player data and never touch anything else in the project.

uLiveWallpaper works great with Unity 5.3.1.
Yes, next update will include automatic wallpaper offset data emulation for launchers that don't report it (TouchWiz and some HTC launchers).

TapToOpenSettings is the component responsible for that. Just enabled/disable it when you need.
Not quite sure I understand the second question (how is camera related to the object color?), but it sounds like a generic Unity question. Remember, uLiveWallpaper is not an engine itself, it just wraps Unity into a live wallpaper service, so you code your application the same way you usually code for Unity. I can't provide support for all Unity-related questions, so you need to have at least some prior Unity knowledge to use uLiveWallpaper. If you have Unity-related questions, you might want to ask them in the other sections of the Unity forum. This thread is only for uLiveWallpaper and related questions.
But, for example, to change a color of the object, you might write something like

Code (CSharp):

1. public class ChangeColor : MonoBehaviour {
2.     public void OnMouseDown() {
3.         GetComponent<MeshRenderer>().material.color = Color.red;
4.     }
5. }

See, nothing special, standard Unity stuff.