Dreams PS4

Dreams features lots of great user-made experiences to play/watch/listen to, but that's only half the game. Where Media Molecule's PS4 exclusive really gets crazy is with its versatile Create mode, allowing users to make more or less whatever they like. While the toolset was fantastic at launch, there is always room for improvement, and that's the focus of the latest Dreams patch, 2.44. It's only 105MB in size, but it packs in an awful lot for creators.

With this update, which is available now by the way, Create mode receives all kinds of useful improvements and brand new features. An opaque, square paint fleck has been added, which is a stark contrast from the more abstract, organic fleck shapes. It'll allow creators to make super smooth surfaces, sharp pixel art, and much more besides. Other new features include a Time & Date gadget, a Wide Calculator so you can input lots of values into one handy gadget, and the ability to swap between IK and FK animation, the latter of which essentially chains connected objects together. An example given is a character waving their hand; swapping to FK will make the animation smoother by also animating the arm as opposed to just the hand, which will save time animating all the individual parts how you want them.

If you couldn't tell by now, this update gets pretty nerdy pretty fast, but let's go over a couple more points. The regular Calculator gadget now has a lot more mathematical functions available. The Sun & Sky gadget now has an input and output on the Sun Position. You can now dramatically reduce the sort of textured appearance of sculpts so they appear much smoother. New filters let you adjust your scene based on various forms of colourblindness. Finally, a new toggle makes it so that you can make changes to a sculpt you've cloned and have those changes appear on all the other clones.

There's a lot to unpack for Dreams creators here, so below we've laid out the full patch notes:

New and Improved Gadgets!

  • NEW Time & Date Gadget [Sensors & Input] - Detect the current time and date IRL, you say? Why certainly! Pair it with new tweaks in the Sun & Sky gadget to set the sun’s position in your creations! Find out more in the edit mode guide.
  • IMPROVED Sun & Sky Gadget [Cameras & Lighting] - A new page of tweaks to let you control the position of the sun with the new Time & Date gadget.
  • NEW Wide Calculator Gadget [Logic & Processing] - Need to do calculations with more than two values? Now you can! This baby can have up to 10 inputs! Find out more in the edit mode guide.
  • IMPROVED Calculator Gadget [Logic & Processing] - We’ve added heaps of new operations to the calculator, including two whole new pages with trigonometric and vector operations!

New and Improved Tools!

  • NEW Bake Emitted Tool [Assembly/Tools] - Emitted objects are temporary, right? Not any more! This new tool takes emitted objects and bakes them into your scene, making them permanent! Find out more in the edit mode guide entry.
  • IMPROVED Adjust Detail Tool [Assembly/Tools] - You know the Sculpture Detail tool? Well it’s been renamed. Why? Because now it works on paintings too, reducing the number of flecks to save thermo! Find out more in the edit mode guide entry.
  • IMPROVED Clone Tool [Assembly/Tools] - Two improvements!
    • Wanted a live clone but forgot to turn on Live Clone? We got you! Use + over a clone to make it a live one after the fact!
    • Finding the Live Clone visuals a bit much? Use the new toggle in the context menu to turn them off/on!
  • IMPROVED Mic Recording Sync on Timelines [Animate/Mic; Sound/Sound Recorder] - Fed up of manually re-timing the audio you’ve recorded for your creations? Those days are gone! Stamp a mic onto your audio or animation Timeline, record your audio, and it’ll synchronise with your Timeline music/animation! There’s even a count-in!

New and Improved Tweaks!

Featuring a clutch of brand new audio tweaks for sound objects…

  • NEW Downsampler Tweak - [Distortion page] This new distortion type gives you a delicious lo-fi effect like an old school video game or sci-fi movie. Yum.
  • NEW Legato Tweak [Pitch page] - Love you some legato? Previously you could only do it while performing, but now you can apply it to existing sounds!
  • NEW Transpose Tweak [Pitch page] - Want higher quality transposition than the Coarse and Fine tweaks? This literally picks higher/lower notes from the sample library, as if you’d manually moved the notes in the Piano Roll!
  • NEW Octave Jitter Tweak [Granular Randomisation page] - Randomises octave changes for thick, cloud-like textures.
  • NEW Input/Output Values Displayed on Tweaks [Input/output tweaks] - Been using Number Displayers to find out what exactly is going in and out of tweaks? Never again! Input/output tweaks now display the values currently going to/from them in the tweak menus!
  • NEW Luma Noise Tweak [Outer Properties page on sculptures] - Turn off/on the built-in colour variation of a sculpture’s flecks, giving them a smoother, more uniform look. If that’s your jam.
  • NEW Camera Blocking Mode [Collision Labels page on sculptures] - Camera blocking getting you down? Now you can pick a mode to control how a sculpture blocks the 3rd-person camera - Dynamic, Never and Always.
  • NEW Minimum In Scene Size [Settings page on Text/Dialogue Text/Number Displayer] - Set a minimum size for text set to In Scene, so that no matter how far away the camera is, your text won’t be too teeny-tiny to read.
  • NEW Convert to Painting [Context Menu] - Want to know what that gorgeous sculpture would look like as a painting? Select it and hit Convert to Painting. Ta-daaah!
  • NEW Convert to FK/Convert to IK [Context Menu] - Made an FK () animation and wish it was IK ()? Or maybe vice versa? Select it and hit Convert to IK or Convert to FK. Done!
  • NEW Opaque Square Fleck [Paint Mode] - For the first time in Dreams history (Dreamstory? Maybe not…) there is a NEW FLECK! We know! It’s a clean, sharp, opaque square! No more fuzzy water!
  • NEW Colour Blindness Filters [Show/Hide Menu] - Lots of folks have some form of colour vision deficiency, and games can be super-frustrating for them. These new Show/Hide filters let you preview how your creations might look for people with different forms of colour blindness. You can even adjust for severity! Try them out and make your creations more inclusive. Find out more in the edit mode guide entry.

Other Improvements and Bugfixes

  • IMPROVED Animating/Keyframing of more gizmos
    • Lots more gizmos will now be recorded if you interact with them while using an Action Recorder or a Keyframe.
  • FIXED Variable Scope
    • We’ve added two fixes to the Scope tweak on variables based on feedback. Scope will now be ignored if a Variable is set to Persist in Dream; and the Scope tweak will not be greyed-out on a Variable Modifier set to Get.

Will you be experimenting with all these Create mode changes in Dreams? Tell us in the comments section below.

[source docs.indreams.me]