Wallpaper Engine News

Happy Holidays and Merry Christmas everyone!

We just wanted to take a quick moment to thank you all for the great support in 2019! We have just recently crossed the mark of 100,000 positive ratings on Steam and we appreciate all the kind words and feature suggestions we have received. We will be back with some big updates in 2020, so stay tuned for more!

If you or a friend have recently bought something during the Steam Winter sale and you have collected 5000 festivity tokens, you can redeem a Winter Rewards Coupon which completely covers the cost of Wallpaper Engine. This lets you get Wallpaper Engine on Steam for free. You can check your tokens and get the coupon on the Steam Winter Event Page:


▶ Click here to use your festivity tokens

Do be aware that the Winter Rewards Coupon cannot be used for gift purchases - however, if you have a friend or family member who always wanted to have Wallpaper Engine (or never knew that they wanted it), maybe let them know about this deal!

▶ Wallpaper Engine on the Steam Store

We'll be spending the rest of the holidays with our families, and we will be back in 2020 for more!

We have extended the Windows Insider Build warning so that it will be shown until the existing Windows bug affecting Insider users has been fixed. This build does not allow Wallpaper Engine to work, See here for more infos.

This patch also fixes a bug with video wallpaper cycling in playlists and updates some translations.


We added a warning to the browser that will be shown if you are using the Windows Insider build 19536. This build does not allow Wallpaper Engine to work, see here.

Several stability issues with the new LED integration should be fixed now, the Chroma SDK should work when you enable it manually and if you use Synpase 3. Both iCUE and Chroma currently have some half-supported devices (K55, Nanoleaf and a few more) which just turn off, this is not a bug in Wallpaper Engine unfortunately, you cannot use the LED integration with them and need to switch it off.


Fixed the program crashing when old versions of Razer Chroma are installed, even when not in use. To use the beta Chroma integration, make sure to enable Chroma in the plugin options, by default it is disabled! It requires Synapse 3 because we experienced those crashes with older versions so for now only the latest version of Synapse will work.



Hey all,

this patch adds a new Winter skin, a command line control system, a lot of minor quality of life improvements and better support for your LED peripherals.


The new winter skin is applied automatically during December if the seasonal theming option is enabled. The program will now also tell you about this and allow you to disable it right away if you don't like the skin.




Wallpaper Engine can now be controlled from the command line. This means that you can control or automate wallpaper changes, playback, playlists or even wallpaper properties from other applications or for streaming multiple wallpapers from different pop-out windows.

The full reference to the command line arguments can be found here: https://wallpaper-engine.fandom.com/wiki/Command_Line

For example, you could create buttons in Rainmeter to control the wallpaper or hotkey macros or you could pop-out several wallpapers for streaming on Twitch.


Video wallpapers can now drive your iCUE devices as well and they will do so by default. If you don't like this, you can disable this in the wallpaper settings or even for specific wallpaper types in the new plugin options.

We will also release support for LED peripherals for Razer Chroma devices in January 2020, stay tuned! We already invite you to test the RGB features for Razer Chroma peripherals by enabling the Chroma SDK integration in the plugin options of the Wallpaper Engine settings. Should you have any questions about this or encounter an issue with this, don't hesitate to reach out to us through the Steam Discussions or via email, we would really appreciate feedback on this upcoming feature!


A checkbox to disable the automatic monitor selection dialog if you have multiple wallpapers/monitors active:



Playlists can now be configured to always show the first wallpaper when they are started:



The Discover tab now has a search button which brings you to the Workshop tab, where you can search the Workshop:



A warning dialog will be shown if Wallpaper Engine things that your Steam has an issue and is re-downloading a lot of wallpapers:




Wallpaper Engine among lots of other programs (Discord, Nvidia Control Center, Skype, Windows Explorer) is being terminated by BattlEye if you have Nvidia Low-Latency Mode enabled globally. This is not a bug in Wallpaper Engine, it's a long standing bug in BattlEye. As a workaround, don't enable Low-Latency Mode globally but only directly for your game (like Rainbow Six: Siege or PUBG).

Full changelog

• Added command line control system.
  
• Added winter skin.
  
• Added checkbox to disable automatic display of monitor selection.
  
• Added seasonal info dialog.
  
• Added steam redownload warning dialog.
  
• Added fake search button to explore.
  
• Added hidden Nvidia property to disable image sharpening in WE.
  
• Added video support to directory file import.
  
• Added option to always start a playlist with the first wallpaper.
  
• Added led extensions for videos through software frame grabbing.
  

• Made multiple play in window possible.
  
• Removed playlist contents when there are more than 1000 wallpapers in a playlist to improve UI performance.
  
• Delayed second iCUE reload 60 seconds after login.
  
• Renamed cue plugin to led.
  
• Updated CUE SDK.
  
• Randomized collections in explore.
  
• Changed tag exclusions to enable everything when everything gets deselected.
  
• Limited search text to 40 characters for better Steam performance.
  

Verification issue while updating Content file locked / Disk write error / Content encrypted Steamworks unavailable https://steamcommunity.com/app/431960/discussions/1/

Hey all,

this patch adds a seasonal theme option, a new Halloween skin and seasonal collections for the discover tab that we will manually curate.


Wallpaper Engine can now adjust the skin it uses dynamically based on the current date. To get started, we have improved the Halloween skin and set up its dates and we intend to add a few more skins to be displayed automatically over the year.

You can control this with a new setting next to the skin option. If seasonal theming is enabled, the skin will change a few times a year during special occasions, then it will revert back to the default skin you chose:



The Discover tab will also show new seasonal lists at the top next to the approved list. Seasonal content will appear during specific times each year. We will start off with some spooky Halloween content in the time around Halloween and later this year you will find some winter wallpapers in its place:




We have removed the recently added 'search relevance' option again because as it turns out, Steam doesn't order by popularity at all with this setting which leads to random wallpapers being displayed first even when there are popular ones that match the text just as well.

Instead of using search relevance, Wallpaper Engine will now automatically enable the 'exact match' option if the search text contains any spaces to avoid single words being matched by Steam. This should keep results sorted by popularity and also prevent Steam from returning completely unrelated results if any search text with a space is used.


Since a few months more users seem to have issues with wallpapers not returning after Windows or display hibernation or when the PC starts. It seems that some change in Windows or a graphics driver made the monitor identification of Windows even less reliable. This update adds additional and delayed checks for monitor changes and also introduces a new, more stable fallback option you can choose if the options from Windows alone just don't work right.

There is also a detailed explanation for each option now when you click the question mark next to it:



Pick the option 'Layout' if the wallpapers still frequently disappear on your system after using Windows sleep or monitor sleep.

Full changelog

• Added new Halloween skin.
  
• Added seasonal themes.
  
• Added seasonal curated collections.
  
• Added info box to monitor identification option.
  
• Added new 'layout' monitor identification option that merely uses the position.
  

• Fixed text layer crashing if it's empty but effects are applied.
  
• Fixed missing platform translations in launcher.
  
• Fixed script user properties only returning last modified values.
  
• Fixed particle element name being cut.
  
• Fixed particle playback script functions.
  
• Fixed GIF importer for GIFs that use 'restore frame' without having a frame to restore to.
  

• Removed greeting asset and instead moved it to a tutorial:
  
• Changed Workshop search to add quotation marks automatically if the search text contains a space. Steam's built-in options just have too many problems.
  
• Removed search relevance option.
  
• Renamed log generated by ui to uilog.txt.
  
• Added redundant and delayed monitor refresh after logging in or resolution changing because drivers are so buggy.
  

Verification issue while updating Content file locked / Disk write error / Content encrypted Steamworks unavailable https://steamcommunity.com/app/431960/discussions/1/

Hey all,

this update brings text rendering support to Scene wallpapers and adds an option to browse all wallpapers by author right in the browser.


A new layer type has been added, 'Text Layer', which allows you to add text to scenes. It supports multiple lines, custom fonts, basic alignment options and you can even apply all existing image effects to this layer.




Using the scripting system, you can update the text while the wallpaper is running or even let the user write something in the browser that your wallpaper will then display. Some new assets have been added that use the text layer to demonstrate what you can do. That includes two clocks:



a countdown timer and a greeting, which uses a custom name the user can enter in the browser and changes based on the current time of day:



Each asset uses a script to dynamically update the text of the layer. Those scripts also contain a number of options for you to adjust, like the date that the countdown timer stops or whether you want a 12h or 24h clock.


The text layer supports proper shaping and parsing. Overlapping characters will work or even colored emojis with modifiers:



The emojis are rendered with the Windows 10 system font and will fallback to the Twitter font for emojis (ported by Mozilla) if your system doesn't come with its own font.



Vertical or RTL text is currently not supported.


You can now right click a wallpaper or use the looking glass next to the author on the right to browse all wallpapers by a specific author:




Full changelog

• Added proper text rendering support using HarfBuzz and Freetype2.
  
• Added new text based asset presets: clock, 3D clock, personal greeting, countdown.
  
• Added a bunch of custom stock fonts.
  
• Added browse by author to wallpaper browser.
  
• Added Dino Run wallpaper as a default wallpaper to demonstrate SceneScript/text layers.
  
• Added registry key HKCU/Software/WallpaperEngine/hideTrayIcon to hide tray icon for power users since it makes it confusing/impossible to access or close the program.
  
• Added warning if Wallpaper Engine was installed into a badly named directory where Chromium can't load the UI.
  
• Added composition options to blur effect so it can be used as a drop shadow or outline on fonts.
  

• Disabled task bar color in Win10 light mode because it can make the text unreadable and Microsoft wants to lock the task bar color in this mode.
  
• Made wallpaper multi select clear after moving items.
  
• Fixed URLs in playlists being skipped.
  
• Fixed Steam stats related crash when user stats weren't queried yet in the editor.
  
• Fixed particle systems using world space options to use wrong coordinates on control points.
  

Verification issue while updating Content file locked / Disk write error / Content encrypted Steamworks unavailable https://steamcommunity.com/app/431960/discussions/1/

Hey all, this update fixes a number of bugs introduced with the previous big update. Most of them were already silently live as a hotfix right after the last update.

No new features were added in this patch. As always, if Steam doesn't download the files right or an anti-virus is randomly breaking Steam or Wallpaper Engine, please refer to these solutions or create a new thread on the forums:

Verification issue while updating Content file locked / Disk write error / Content encrypted Steamworks unavailable

• Reverted Steamworks SDK because the new Steamworks SDK 1.44 is making the wallpaper browser crash for some people.
  
• Fixed particle instance control points not saving (i.e. for lightning discharge).
  
• Fixed particle instance undo/redo.
  
• Fixed playlists with custom daytime settings not being able to be loaded from hotkey or tray.
  

• Fixed playlist timer not restarting when triggered by ending video.
  
• Fixed image layers that were set to be sprite sheets before support for sprite sheets was added.
  
• Fixed removal button of camera paths.
  
• Fixed particle instance UI options de-syncing with wallpaper and having no effect anymore.
  
• Forced shader rebuilt after new effect import.
  
• Added option to skip effect upgrade.
  
• Enabled image sequence duration in filenames.
  
• Made clone wallpaper management more definitive when monitor aspect ratios are incompatible.