Controller skins that actually move, and a theme that follows you around the app
Thirty-eight animated finishes for your controller - nebula clouds that drift, lava seams that breathe under a dark crust, circuit traces with light travelling down them. They are drawn on your own pad in 3D, they run in the overlay while you play, and you can change their colours and speed. Alongside that, your theme now applies everywhere OmniControl draws your device rather than only on the overlay, colours are remembered per controller instead of being shared across all of them, and the keyboard can be themed for the first time. Plus a fix for the emulated stick stuttering during a steady turn, and a profile switch that was only applying half of a profile.
Highlights
- Thirty-eight animated controller skins under Themes: Galaxy, Inferno, Kintsugi, Oil Slick, Cipher, Event Horizon, Liquid Chrome, Neon Grid and more. Each one is a moving finish rather than a colour, drawn on your own controller model.
- Every skin exposes its own controls - speed, colours, strength and pattern scale - and only the ones that effect actually uses. A few respond to what you are doing: Thermal runs hot where you are gripping and pressing.
- Your theme now applies everywhere the app draws your device, including the Dashboard and the keyboard overlay, not just inside the overlay.
- Colours are remembered per controller. Styling a DualSense no longer repaints your Xbox pad.
- Themes and Overlay Studio have been rebuilt around what each one is for: how your controller looks, and where the overlay sits.
Fixes
- A steady look left or right could read as "centre, left, centre, left" instead of one fluid turn while playing with keyboard and mouse. A timing value was being recomputed from a jittery measurement, and the wobble reached the stick.
- A profile switched automatically when a game launched only applied part of itself. Your keymap, haptics, touch settings and emulation target were left on whatever was there before, so the Emulation page could appear to change its own settings.
- The same defect existed on the path that restores your previous profile when the game closes.
- Applying a preset silently discarded parts you had hand-painted, and reset the overlay's layout, with no warning and no undo.
- The Sticks page did not count Gyro Aim as something driving a stick, so its note could contradict what you had set up.
- Closed a hole that let anyone write to the website's visitor counter.
Skins that move
A theme used to mean a set of colours. This release adds finishes that are alive: a nebula with dust lanes drifting across the shell, glowing seams breathing under dark volcanic crust, thin circuit traces with pulses of light running along them, gold flowing through the cracks of a piece of broken ceramic.
They are not videos or images laid over the controller. Each one is drawn by the graphics card, on the actual 3D model of your pad, so the pattern stays stuck to the shell as you turn it and follows the curve of the grips. That is also why they work on every controller OmniControl supports without anyone drawing artwork for each one: each model is measured, and the effect fits itself to what it finds.
There are thirty-eight of them, deliberately not thirty-eight versions of the same idea. Some are space, some are fire, some are materials - brushed damascus steel, liquid chrome, an oil slick shifting colour as it turns. Some are technological, like falling code or an accretion disc. They sit in their own section of the Themes list, next to the plain colour presets, which are all still there and unchanged.
Pick one and its own controls appear: speed, the colours it uses, how strongly it takes over from the paint underneath, and how large the pattern is. Only the controls that particular effect actually uses are shown, so nothing on screen is a slider that does nothing.
A few of them respond to you rather than just running. Thermal draws your controller as a heat camera would, cool at rest and hot where you are actually gripping and pressing. That is off by default on every preset, because it should be a choice.
They are built to be watched for hours, not for a screenshot. Nothing strobes, nothing flashes the whole surface at once, and every effect keeps your buttons and sticks readable - a skin that hides the controls would be a worse skin however good it looked. They also stop drawing entirely when the page is not on screen, so an effect you are not looking at is not costing you frames in a game.
A theme that follows you
Your theme previously stopped at the overlay. You could paint a controller white and it would be white on the overlay and stock black everywhere else in the app.
It now applies wherever OmniControl draws your device: the Dashboard, Sticks, Controllers, the tuning screens, and the overlay. Your press colour and your input effects travel with it.
There are two deliberate exceptions. The screens that use the controller as an instrument you are reading - Mapping, where the pad shows which button you have selected, and the guided tour, where it points at the control being explained - keep the app's own highlight colour. A theme should not be able to make a page harder to use.
The keyboard can be themed for the first time. If your overlay shows a keyboard rather than a controller, it now takes the animated skin behind the keys and lights individual keys in your press colour.
Your controllers keep their own colours
Painting has always been per controller: colour a DualSense Edge and a plain DualSense stayed as it was. Applying a preset did not follow that rule - it wrote one set of colours to every controller you own, and quietly discarded anything you had hand-painted.
Both now behave the same way. A preset applies to the controller you are looking at, named on screen underneath it, and your other controllers keep what they had. Applying a preset also no longer resets your overlay's layout, which was never something the Themes page should have been touching.
The stick that stuttered
Several people described the same thing while playing with keyboard and mouse: a steady turn that felt like "centre, then left, then centre, then left" instead of one continuous movement, with large mouse movements worst.
The aim system works by holding a value over time rather than reacting to each mouse sample, which is what makes a slow turn smooth. The length of time it holds for was being recalculated from a measurement that jitters slightly from one moment to the next, and that jitter was reaching the stick. The value is now pinned rather than recomputed.
One number changed that you may notice. The floor on Fast turn is now about 40ms rather than 35ms. If you tuned your settings right against the old floor, it is worth a look.
Profiles that switch all the way
When a game launches and OmniControl switches to that game's profile, it should apply that profile. It was applying some of it. Your keymap, haptics, touch configuration and emulation target were left on whatever was set before, which is why the Emulation page could look like it had changed its own settings while a game was running.
The cause was a copy: the code that applies a profile on game launch had been written out separately from the code that applies one when you click it, and the copy had fallen five changes behind. It now calls the same path. The route that restores your previous profile when the game closes had the identical problem and is fixed with it.
This is a behaviour change worth knowing about. An automatically switched profile now genuinely changes more than it used to, so a setup that depended on part of a profile surviving a switch will behave differently.