FWsim 4.4 - Motorized Stars, Better Performance, and new effects features

Check out update 4.4! Here's what's new:

⭐ Graphics improvements

• More realistic appearance of stars

• Accelerated Rendering (Settings → Graphics) — runs much faster and uses less battery at the same visual quality. Available on NVidia and AMD dedicated graphics cards.

• Even without accelerated rendering, this new update should be faster on all systems.

• More realistic water reflections

✨ Effects Improvements

Stars and Ascent Effects

• Motorized Stars (go-getters / bees / fish) now available. Just enable “Motorized” on the stars and play around with the parameters

• Star size is now a continuous slider (1–100%) instead of fixed sizes. Old effects are migrated automatically and look the same.

• Stars and Sparks are now separate modes

• Ascent stars now support all 5 strobe types (Regular, Pulsar, Twinkle, Flash, Fade).

Whistles, Tourbillons & Farfalle

• Those are now much richer and more realistic out of the box.

• New “Maintain Start Width Until” slider controls how long the spiral stays narrow before widening.

• Bugfix: Shells containing only whistles/tourbillons/farfalle now get launch sparks on the way up

Fountains & Bengal Flames

• Fountains (built via “Eruption” in the effect editor) got a Cooldown Time slider, mirroring the existing Warmup Time.

• Bengal flames got both Warmup and Cooldown sliders, and all strobe types.

Tails & Sparks

• Thickness slider now goes up to 1000% (was 200%) for really fat tails.

• New “Whistle (sound only)” checkbox — plays a whistle sound timed to the tail.

• New “Particle Size” slider (25–400%) on custom tail and ascent-effect components.

• Tighter mortar liftoff — the automatic launch sparks for comets and mines are sparser and shorter-lived.

Shell Rotation (Manual)

• New “Start Width” and “Maintain Start Width” sliders — ascent tails can start tight and gradually widen.

Effect Editor

• Type-to-search in the “Add Component” and “Replace this” dropdowns.

• Editing parameters (e.g. color) no longer makes the star pattern jump around.

Cake Editor

• New “Change all Pause timings” action — set every pause in a part in one go.

🎬 Show Editor

• When you F2-edit a cue, the effect selection window keeps its filters.

• Zoom in the music beat configuration popup

• Standard Camera removed - its now auto-replaced with the Fly-around-camera.

• Removed a rarely used setting on “Automatic heights and delays” in the Preferences. If you previously had this set to “Old model (before June 2025)”, some timings of effects will now be slightly different.