Holodance

Released: Feb 28, 2020
Platforms: Windows
Last updated: 07 Sep 2026, 12:53 GMT

Updates & announcements

20 posts

18 Aug 2024Developer post
Holodance 1.5 ... at last!
Hi, I'm back! In March 2021, Andy from Ramen VR asked me if I could help port the VR MMO Zenith: The Last City to PSVR (1 on PS4). With Holodance never quite breaking through and both narayana games and I running low on funds ... my journey took a thrilling detour. And what a rid
Hi, I'm back!
In March 2021, Andy from Ramen VR asked me if I could help port the VR MMO Zenith: The Last City to PSVR (1 on PS4). With Holodance never quite breaking through and both narayana games and I running low on funds ... my journey took a thrilling detour.
And what a ride it's been! Working with the Ramen team on the massive world of Zenith was incredible — from the PSVR port to PS VR2, and everything in between. Console porting was fun, but as any indie dev will tell you, in small teams, you end up doing a bit of everything! After all, "specialization is for insects," as Robert Heinlein famously said.
Apologies for not making a formal announcement back in the day (just a message on our public Discord and later, a brief note here on the forums): Within one quick week, my life had changed from being 100% dedicated to Holodance and Beat the Rhythm to being 120% dedicated to helping building a massive and awesome VR MMO.
But now, with Ramen wrapping up Zenith development, I'm back in action with rhythm games (and also diving deeper into meditation). So, after almost four years, it's time to give you Holodance 1.5!
This update may not be as massive as Holodance 1.4, but it brings some much-needed polish, bug fixes, and—most importantly — finally fixes that osu! beatmap caching bug (sorry it took so long 🙈).
Oh, and one final thing before going into the details: If you use SteamLink with Quest, you might want to read this new guide: Playing Holodance with SteamLink
Patch Notes in Detail

Music Library: Improved state management! Now, selected items and scroll positions should be preserved, even when pausing or playing a song. Even filter changes should mostly work—though if things break, just navigate back a bit and keep going.
Music Library - Quick Access - Popular: Major improvements here! The "Challenge Me" list is now split into "Challenge Me (Own)" and "Challenge Me (Others)." More info here
Modding: Cleaned up useCache—it now only exists in Mod.json, and changes there apply to TunnelMod.json (if present). Removed useCache in PostProcessingMod.json (it was just nonsense, really).
Minor Bugfixes: Fixed two harmless bugs that were showing up in crash logs.
Quick Access / Popular / Challenge Me: Sorting was previously based on vote count, so new additions got lost in the crowd. Now, your own entries are listed first, and the most recent votes are shown at the top!
Orb Trails Finally! You can now turn off orb trails correctly. More info here
UI Polishing: Toggle-descriptions no longer block the laser pointer (yay!), and the mute button logic is inverted to make more sense—active = preview, inactive = muted. Also moved the page up/down, top/down buttons of the scrollbars back to the scrollbar. The disadvantage is that the buttons are smaller and therefore easier to miss - the advantage is that it no longer ruins the look of the UI.
UI Polishing: Added Feet to Player Location
UI Polishing: Laser Pointer Color(s) now automatically adapt to hand colors
Click & drag Polishing - Part 1: Increased the maximum time between trigger down/up for clicks from 0.3 seconds to 1 second because we have received feedback that clicks don't work.
Click & drag Polishing - Part 2: The laser pointer used to stay fixed during the entire click delay, which made dragging a pain. Now, there's a separate delay for starting a drag (currently set at 0.1 seconds).
Click & drag Polishing - Part 3: Okay, we admit, it was still annoying. So here's the fix: If a widget can be clicked but not dragged (most widgets): Click immediately (on down). When a widget can be dragged but not clicked: Drag immediately (no delay). Only if a widget can be clicked and dragged (those are the events in the Beatographer, our beatmap editor), wait for 0.3s before starting to drag, then click. So those, you do need to click fast.
Avatar UI: Combined Avatar selection (left/right rotation) with selection ("Incarnate") for improved UX.
Performance: Applied a few Performance Optimizations (e.g. 1.3 KB of allocations every 6 frames due to not caching a name)
Streamer Mode: Fixed camera animations in Streamer Mode that were slowing down during pause mode.
Updated Unity to 2019.4.21
Updated SteamVR Unity Plugin to 2.7.2
Updated Oculus Integration to 23.1.0
Localization: Major progress on localization, but it's still not fully complete.
Music Library: Fixed osu! beatmap caching—finally!
Original post
23 Dec 2020Developer post
Holodance - Steam Winter Sale Discount: 50% off!
Merry Christmas to everyone! Holodance is participating in the Steam Winter Sale 2020. If you or your friends still don't have Holodance, this is a great opportunity to get this awesome game at 50% off! And in case you missed it: We have recently had a pretty big update - check o
01 Dec 2020Developer post
Holodance 1.4 is here!
While still primarily working on the upcoming beatmap editor, we have fixed a few things, added a few things and it's time to push these things to the default channel for everyone to play with! EDIT 2020-12-05: Just a tiny hotfix (1.4.1) because using finger pointing to control t
While still primarily working on the upcoming beatmap editor, we have fixed a few things, added a few things and it's time to push these things to the default channel for everyone to play with!
EDIT 2020-12-05: Just a tiny hotfix (1.4.1) because using finger pointing to control the YUR watch was broken; this is now fixed: You can control the YUR watch using your index finger tip but we needed to change how clicking works in the general UI because we needed drag'n'drop to work much better than it did for the beatmap editor (which is still WIP and not included in this build). That change broke finger pointing.
EDIT 2020-12-06: Another tiny hotfix (1.4.2): The scrollbars e.g. in Streamer Mode jumped when clicking. They no longer do. Also, opening Streamer Mode in VR threw exceptions in the logs until Streamer Mode was activated via the checkbox. No more exceptions are being thrown in that case.
LIV SDK 1.5 - Improved Streamer Mode
This is a really big one: In our Streamer Mode, you could let the game automatically switch the camera perspectives for you based on the rhythm of the song since around 2016. We even have an (undocumented) OBS-automation that lets the game switch between different OBS scenes so you could automagically switch between our Streamer Mode and a LIV-composited Mixed Reality mode.
One very awesome feature that LIV introduced with their new 1.5-SDK is that games can now control the LIV-camera. So now you can use Streamer Mode in Holodance together with LIV much more easily. Obviously, changing camera perspectives in LIV only works with their avatars (not with greenscreen composited Mixed Reality) - but still that's a major step forward.
While working on that, I got so annoyed that our Streamer Mode can only be controlled via the flatscreen that I finally pulled it into VR. Another item that got stuck on my list for way too long finally done*!
Here's a video of both in action:
Watch on YouTube
*(file browser didn't make it into this release - but it's almost done now)
New Game Modes
Seems like every rhythm game had it since forever, now we have it, too: Life energy that you lose when you miss notes, and gain when you catch notes. The default in Holodance stays at No Fail but when you disable this, you can now fail sessions early when you miss too many notes. We also have Sudden Death for those who want to full combo a map. When that is active, the first note you fail fails the whole song, so you can retry a little more quickly.
One area where this new feature caused quite a few headaches was with modding: You can mod the post processing effects for the Arenas Trippy Tunnels and Zero Distraction. The result was that in those, there was no feedback when you were losing energy. This is now solved with a new state lowEnergy. For full documentation, check out the Holodance modding guide on mod.io.
Watch on YouTube
Also, for proper support of BSMG-maps, we had added a uniform 4x4 grid a while back. Now you can select this also for osu!-beatmaps.
BSMG Mapping Extensions
Holodance doesn't have spatial quantization of events by default: Notes can arrive at any location, and with any rotation. So, we probably should have supported this right from the start but we didn't. Now we do. For more info, see Mapping Extensions and Extended Mapping.
Story Mode: Levels 3 and 6 - Dolphins and Whales
Story Mode Level 3 has dolphins and whales ... but up until now, you couldn't hear them. Now you can. Also in Level 6. But there, only few are left.
Watch on YouTube
Scoring Bug Fixed
We have this really nice Time Dilation feature, that lets you play with time (slow down / speed up, based on the movement of your hands, and in the case of guns, also movement of your head). There's also bullet time on combo events. Obviously, it's much easier to do things when time is slowed down - so there's a multiplier based on the current time scale. Unfortunately, instead of using the audio pitch (which defines the timescale of actual gameplay), I used the global time scale. We have another feature that modifies the global time scale for very fast, and very slow tracks (above 180BPM and below 48BPM). The idea behind that feature is to make the visual effects adapt to the tempo of the song ... but this also had effect on the score. Ooops. Solution: Having the tempo of very fast (and very slow) songs effect the score actually makes sense, so we keep that as a feature. There were circumstances under which this multiplier was disabled - that's fixed, so now we have consistency. Also, the multipliers are now properly separated and named to avoid any confusion that could arise from this.
Patch Notes in Detail

Settings / Finetune Gameplay: Added new Grid Style "Square 4x4 (BSMG Style)" so you can now play osu! maps with the same grid style (aka target area) as BSMG-maps.
Feet Gameplay: Was broken. Fixed.
Casual Catcher: Fixed a faulty offset in the collider.
Major work in the backend that hopefully does not cause issues with the current builds (it's not active in those builds but you never know until you run into something unexpected).
Fixed Vayusah - AGAIN. Breaks on every Unity update, so I have to make sure I fix that poor soul after every Unity update.
Vive Trackers: Cleaned up the role setup.
Scoring: Fixed issue with tempo based time multiplier triggering slow mo / highspeed multipliers.
Scoring: We've had an orb theme multiplier that reduced the score for very large orbs (Casual Orb Theme), and increased the score for special mechanics like Beat Drop, which is significantly more difficult. But that multiplier never actually effected the score. Now it does.
Fixed Challenge Me checkbox not being properly reset to unchecked after a map had it checked.
Stats after Session: Timing offset was labeled with microseconds (μs). Nope, those are actually milliseconds.
Mixed Reality: Updated LIV SDK to 1.5.1 and integrated Streamer Mode with LIV. This is super cool! Only works with LIV Avatars, though (not with actual greenscreen based Mixed Reality).
OctaDrop-Theme: Fixed a very rare corner-case that could cause performance issues, if a map changes BPM from a comparatively high BPM to a very low value and at the same time starts a slider. The issue in this case was that too many parts would have to be instantiated (this occurred in testing when going from 140 BPM to 20 BPM and at the same time starting two long sliders).
BSMG-Support: Added support for Mapping Extensions.
Fixed controller management for scroll areas (haptics were broken).
Streamer Mode: Now has an in-VR UI.
Command Line Arguments: We let you set the Window position and size via Streamer Mode but that broke the command line arguments -screen-width, -screen-height and -screen-fullscreen. So now we explicitly parse and use those from our own code.
Added Energy System, failing songs when missing to many notes, and sudden death (song ends immediately when you miss a single note - this is super useful if you absolutely want to full combo a track).
Updated to Unity 2019.4.15
Major Change in how clicking works with the UI system because we needed dragging to properly work for the beatmap editor. Previously, "trigger down" caused the click event, now "trigger up" causes the event, and while the trigger is down, the laser pointer freezes for a moment. When you click fast, you shouldn't notice much of a difference - but it's a big change in a core system, so it does come with some risk.
Updated LIV SDK to 1.5.3 (from 1.5.1)
Added Modding support for the new Energy System. This works via PostProcessing, using the new state LowEnergy (property lowEnergy). If the state wasn't assigned, the state InObstacle is used.
Story Mode: Added dolphin and whale sounds to Level 3. Finally.
Story Mode: Added one whale, and three dolphins to Level 6. Not having any was a little too much for Level 6. That's what has happened in Level 7.
Story Mode: Fixed "Sliders" in Story Mode. These were broken a long time ago when we improved the osu!-sliders. Levels the have those sliders (but not in all tracks): 6 and 11.
Story Mode: Level 6 broke in the last update. Fixed.
Original post
24 Jul 2020Developer post
Holodance 1.3.3: Story Mode, Level 2 ... and comfort
Patch Notes Story Mode, Level 2: Due to a recurring Unity bug, Vayusah, the dragon in that level, had disappeared. What's quite annoying is that I had just fixed that specific bug quite recently - but it looks like this now breaks on every Unity update. Music Library: Fixed occas
Patch Notes

Story Mode, Level 2: Due to a recurring Unity bug, Vayusah, the dragon in that level, had disappeared. What's quite annoying is that I had just fixed that specific bug quite recently - but it looks like this now breaks on every Unity update.
Music Library: Fixed occasional issue where the Game Mechanic presets were rendered above/below the Music Library Info or Music Library Settings
Comfort Settings: Added new comfort setting for UI animations. This is enabled by default - but you can now disable it if you don't like the panels moving down below and back up on screen switches. This could be uncomfortable especially in the Zero Distraction environment.
Mutant Club: Just like Retro Clubbing, Mutant Club does have some intense flashing (in this case, of textures), so added the same warning before entering tha
Original post
12 Jul 2020Developer post
Holodance 1.3.2: Leaderboard Polishing, Challenge Me
Leaderboards One issue with the combined leaderboards was that there was no way to see which weapon another player used, and whether they played with just one hand, two hands, hands and head, or maybe even with feet. So now we have two icons in the leaderboards that make this inf
Leaderboards
One issue with the combined leaderboards was that there was no way to see which weapon another player used, and whether they played with just one hand, two hands, hands and head, or maybe even with feet. So now we have two icons in the leaderboards that make this information obvious. Here's a screenshot:
Also, our calorie-based leaderboards were also "per style" which didn't really make sense, so these are now also combined. Usually, you'll want to know how a player achieved a certain burnrate, and so keeping the styles separate was really in the way. It isn't anymore.
Also, in the global leaderboards, you can now click other players to see where they are with progress.
Challenge Me - Finally!
Aside of the beatmap editor, this is probably the feature I was yearning for myself more than any other. Finally, it's there: After playing a session, you can now click "Challenge Me" to make that map appear for other players in Quick Access / Popular / Challenge Me. We used to have a forum for this, and a Discord channel (#challenge-me). Now it's integrated right into the game. At last!
Patch Notes in Detail

Leaderboards: Added tracked appendages and weapon icons to entries to make it easier to see with which mechanic a score was achieved.
Calorie Based Leaderboards: These were "per style" but that was actually not a very good way to approach it because for fitness, you want to know what's possible and then adapt the play-style accordingly. Plus, this added a lot of leaderboards for each map. So now, the fitness leaderboards are also "any style".
Leaderboards: The rank change was broken in almost all leaderboards, plus we needed room for the tracked appendages and weapon icons. So for now, the rank changes are gone and may return at some later point in time.
Global Leaderboards: You can now click the players on the global leaderboard to see their game progression. One important thing to know about this: The leaderboard ranks shown there are rank when that player last played, so they may differ from the current leaderboard rankings.
Challenge Me: After a session, you can now activate the "Challenge Me" toggle. When activated, the map you just played shows up for other players in Quick Access / Popular / Challenge Me. Use this to challenge other players to beat you on the leaderboard.
Leaderboards: Leaderboards by default only show the best entry for each player. If you have previously achieved a higher score than in the current session, there will be two entries by you: Your top entry and the current entry. Leaderboards have a little circle on the top right - if you want to show the all scores by every person, just activate it.
Finetune Gameplay: Bugfix, Particle Effects was accidentally wired up with Timing Lasers. That had two nasty effects: 1. The obvious, you could not change Particle Effects with the Toggle. 2. During initialization, the value from Particle Effects was written into Timing Lasers, causing those to be activated. We rarely want those activated, so that was pretty bad.
Original post
10 Jul 2020Developer post
Holodance 1.3.1: Finally, Popular Maps in Music Library
Section Popular in Quick Access When you enter Quick Access in the Music Library, there is now a section Popular, right on top, with three collections of beatmaps: Played by Most Players The beatmaps played by most other players. Those are the ones you want to go to to compete on
Section Popular in Quick Access
When you enter Quick Access in the Music Library, there is now a section Popular, right on top, with three collections of beatmaps:
Played by Most Players
The beatmaps played by most other players. Those are the ones you want to go to to compete on the leaderboards. But be sure to pick one with a difficulty that will be entertaining for you. The first few are very easy and might be quite boring for more advanced players. But there are few around difficulty 5 to 6 that should still be fun for most.
Best Challenge for You
This one may not give you any maps, yet. It uses the ratings for gameplay, to avoid maps that just don't have fun gameplay, but also filters with a very rough heuristic based on your current skill level, and the skill level of other players multiplied with their challenge ratings. This will become more useful the more people actually play different beatmaps with varying difficulty levels and rate them.
Also, eventually, it will filter by the weapon and play style. It doesn't do that, yet, so you may get maps for shooting that aren't really that great for shooting.
Best Gameplay
This one just filters by the gameplay rating, so it should give you a larger variety of different maps with different difficulty levels.
Both, Best Challenge for You and Best Gameplay currently also filter by players that have actually played the map. The minimum there is three, so if you are the only person that played and rated a map, it won't show up, here ... yet. This whole area will improve over time.
Photosensitivity Comfort Setting
Arena Selection Area: Made the bright yellow snare dark orange, and also increased the minimum distance of all these items to reduce stress when there is photosensitivity. You can disable the particle effects altogether but in order to be able to do that, you first have to active the settings (via pause, by pressing the A/X/Menu key for a second), enter "Comfort" and disable flashing. This also disables quite a few other things that were flashing in the game - but I'm not sure I caught everything. But this should already make a huge difference. If you are photosensitive (i.e. if you get headaches or worse from flashing lights), you should also disable the particle effects in the performance settings because these effects also tend to "flash".
Patch Notes in Detail

Major Refactoring and Cleanup on the Server. In fact, the server just moved to a different provider with this update.
Beatmap Info: Fixed issue that sometimes, both the leaderboard and the web-based beatmap info would show up ... at the same time.
Fixed Bug: Procedural Maps would cause trouble when saving the Beatmap to the Server
Finetune Gameplay: Finally added option "Allow Catching Orbs with your Head" that you can disable if you'd rather not accidentally catch orbs or drops with your head. This is on by default because that was the behaviour we had all along. But now, you can also switch it off. But keep in mind that catching orbs with your head can also give you a decent bonus.
Photosensitivity Comfort Setting ("likes flashes disabled"): Arena Selection Area: Made the bright yellow snare dark orange, and also increased the minimum distance of all these items to reduce stress when there is photosensitivity. You can disable the particle effects altogether but in order to be able to do that, you first have to active the settings (via pause, by pressing the A/X/Menu key for a second), enter "Comfort" and disable flashing. This also disables quite a few other things that were flashing in the game - but I'm not sure I caught everything. But this should already make a huge difference. If you are photosensitive (i.e. if you get headaches or worse from flashing lights), you should also disable the particle effects in the performance settings because these effects also tend to "flash".
Quick Access: New section Popular, with lets you browser the most played beatmaps, as well as a very early prototype of rating-based recommendations. These do not take into account your playstyle, yet, so especially the gameplay ratings might be very off. But it's a start. This currently gets updated when you click the "Quick Access" button, and due to the system not having a lot of ratings, yet, songs that you have just rated may shop up immediately - if they were played by a minimum of three players.
Original post
07 Jul 2020Developer post
Patch Notes since November 25, 2019
During Early Access, each official update included a list of all the patch notes I made during development. In fact, I even often did this for the updates that only went to the alphadev and beta channels. We haven't done that in a while, and I believe most people probably actuall
During Early Access, each official update included a list of all the patch notes I made during development. In fact, I even often did this for the updates that only went to the alphadev and beta channels. We haven't done that in a while, and I believe most people probably actually prefer a more prose-style approach ... but I might be wrong, so let me know. As this list is a particularly long one, I'll throw in a video now and then. So it's perfectly fine to just scroll down and watch the videos if this would be too much reading.
In case you missed that last big update - here's a more visual and verbal description: Holodance 1.3 is here! And still on #SteamSummerSale (50% off)
For the unfiltered, chronological list of all changes since November 25, 2019 (Holodance V0.9.2: Tech and Scoring Update), continue here:
Holodance 1.0 (Official release, Feb 28, 2020)
So there are the changes we've had from 0.9.2 until 1.0.0. We've had a 0.9.3 in-between but that only went to the beta/alphadev-channels.

Arena: Meeting Mother Akash is now called Home of Mother Akash and can be used to play in Free Mode. The price to pay for that was that Mother Akash no longer blesses you with a visit in Free Mode (she still does in Story Mode, though).
Home of Mother Akash: This location is 4500 meters above sea level. But that creates floating point rounding errors that caused significant stutter in tracking. So now we'll just imagine it's 4500 meters above sea level but keep actual coordinates within technical limits.
Home of Mother Akash: Polished that whole Arena a lot, including new particle effects to make those chakras sparkle.
Added Arenas for Levels 4 and 8 to Free Mode, with a new cloud system.
Unlocking Arenas: Home of Mother Akash was previously unlocked at 2,000,000,000, we reduced this down to 1,000,000,000 now that this Arena is actually playable (and apologies to everyone who was disappointed when they got there and then couldn't actually play). We currently have 24 players with that score (only 7 above 2 billion). One will just need to play one more time, and 6 who need less then 200,000,000 to get there. The Steam leaderboard caps at 2,147,483,647 - but you can see the actual scores in the in-game leaderboard (UPDATE 2020-07-07: Well, you could until we removed that old Steam-based leaderboard and replaced it with a shiny new leaderboard based on our new community server). The new Arenas Desert High and Icy High become available at 200,000,000 (currently 97 players have this), and 300,000,000 (currently 70 players have this). The should make the journey towards 1,000,000,000 a little more interesting. Plus, there's something special coming for those clouds levels (but I still need to make sure they run on all hardware - right now, these two even overwhelm my 2080 Ti, at 100% SS which is 50% less than what Steam uses as default).
Level Loading: Fixed audio glitch where music stopped playing abruptly instead of properly fading out. Also fixed issue that music faded in way too slowly when entering arena selection area.
Catchers: Reduced trail length; I had considered removing those trails altogether (or making them optional) but haven't done this, yet. But I'm still open to this possibility, so if you find these trails annoying, let me know. You can already disable those trails by disabling the particle effects - but that disables a lot of other particle effects as well, so probably not what most people want.
Oculus native SDK: Improved Touch haptics for catching orbs. Sliders are still a bit wonky.
Haptics: Almost completely redesigned how haptics work in the game. This was necessary because over time, even SteamVR changed how this was handled, so did Oculus, and each time a new approach came through hardware or drivers, I patched it just enough so that it would still work but never really took the time to look at all the different approaches and build one properly designed solution that handles all of them. Until now. It should feel better now - but if it feels worse, please let me know.
Fixed issue that changing the environment broke the selected mechanic (this was due to the arena selection accidentally behaving like Story Mode, and Story Mode using its own presets).
Haptics: Haptic intensity setting (on the Style & Mechanics / Guidance settings screen) now properly works for the Rift, regardless of whether you're using native Oculus, or Oculus via SteamVR.
Avatar System: Fixed issue that Avatars were rotated when the world was rotated (actually, the Avatars were not rotated but the world was, or more precisely, the world never is rotated but the player reference space is rotated which makes it look as if the world is rotated, and then, when the Avatars are not rotated with the player reference space, it looks like the Avatars are rotated ... but that's just a technical detail). One important note about this: The avatar preview does not automatically adapt to the rotations. That way, you could load them, rotate the world around 180 and then see your avatar from the back, when facing forward. This is by design. If you want the default view after rotating the world (or UI), use Reset Avatars to re-layout the preview (with the new rotations compensated for).
Level Selection: "Settings" are actually "Instructions", and now they are also called that. Cleaned up the instructions, too. Story Mode moved down and added "Preview" because this is just a preview now.
Library Settings: Previously called "Browser Settings" but we call this area "Music Library", so Library Settings seemed like a more appropriate name. Also, the settings are easier to understand when the source is first, so moved osu! to the beginning of each setting that is related to osu!. And added BSMG Maps to the list of possible sources.
Music Database: Major refactoring in the file scanners. This was necessary because the "MP3FileScanner" which had been introduced when we added procedural mapping was done quick'n'dirty by copying the OsuFileScanner and adapting the code to work for scanning audio files. As we're adding more file scanners now, that approach needed to be cleaned up (otherwise, we'd have three and more similar but different versions of the code, and figuring out the common code paths of three such things would have probably taken exponentially longer than doing it now).
Library Settings: One common user error was changing the settings but not doing a Full Rescan. We now check if there were any changes in the music sources since the last full rescan, and if there were, we do that rescan (when you close the Library Settings).
osu! File Scanner: There was a change in the osu!.db file format, which broke reading the osu!.db file directly. Step 1: We also have folder scanning which reads the beatmaps directly instead of relying on osu!.db. It is much much much slower and cannot get some data that is only available in osu!.db but it's better to use this fallback than failing. So, now, that fallback is used in this case, with a warning logged. A proper fix is also on the way.
Library Settings: Fixed several corner cases where different combinations of song sources would not be appropriately handled.
Music Database: Fixed issue that Full Library was not activated when using "Full Rescan!"
osu! File Scanner: Updated osu-database-reader to version from 2019-11-08, which has the proper fix for reading the osu!.db file in current osu!-versions. The library has been significantly refactored, so this required quite a bit of fixing in Holodance to make it work again.
Music Library: Fixed issue that beatmaps were not sorted by difficulty (they were sorted by version, which is the tag for the difficulty - but alphabetically sorting by those tags didn't make sense and therefore was a bug ... that is now finally fixed).
Music Library: Fixed issue that beatmaps were not properly grouped until the settings screen was opened (which people usually don't do).
Core Gameplay: Reactivated the "handedness" feature that we disabled in 2015. By default, orbs can be caught with "any", but if a beatmap defines handedness for orbs (catch this one with left hand, that one with right hand), it does now make it so and catching with the wrong hand is treated like a timing failure.
Scoring Algorithm: Originally, the rotation bonus was based on the maximum rotational velocity of the controller between catching two orbs (like the positional velocity bonus). After introducing directional orbs/drops, the difference between the intended rotation and actual rotation was the only possible source for rotation bonuses - even though it only actually is relevant in a very specific gameplay mode. Now, when an orb does not define a rotation, we're back to the old behavior (maximum rotational velocity), and only for direction orbs/drops, the rotational difference matters.
Core Gameplay: If an orb/drop defines a rotation, being too far off now fails that event. Also, the OctaDrop theme now has explosions for failed events.
Scoring Algorithm: Also, ouch, the rotation bonus calculation between intended and actual direction was seriously buggy. Fixed.
OctaDrops now explode when they are not caught with the correct timing, or with the wrong hand (when handedness is active), or when the direction is very wrong.
OctaDrops now also support a PickupType "None", which essentially turns them into "avoid" orbs (like mines in StepMania, or bombs in other rhythm games).
General UI: Fixed one issue that could cause the UI to break (laser pointer no longer selecting anything).
OctaDrops: The new tracer/slider implementation messed up the combo indicators. This should be fixed now.
Controller Haptics (for Sliders): This broke during the refactoring, more polishing on all platforms (SteamVR with Vive wands, Valve Index, Oculus Touch, Windows MR, Oculus native with Rift and Quest via Link)
Scoring: OctaDrops are direction-sensitive, so playing with the OctaDrop-theme is actually more difficult than with regular orbs. So the OctaDrop score multiplier has been changed from 0.9 to 1.0.
Haptics ... again ... fixed the bug that haptics didn't work properly for sliders when using SteamVR. Also did quite a bit of experimentation with different hardware (Vive wands, Valve Index controllers, Rift Touch controllers, Quest Touch controllers, Windows MR Acer controllers). Interestingly, Rift Touch and the Windows MR controllers behave best, even though both don't properly support changing the frequency (Rift Touch has two "frequencies", a low one, and a high one). Valve Index controllers provide best control (frequency works really well, one could basically play a song; intensity isn't as good as with Rift Touch, though) and I think they work pretty well. Vive wands work okay. Quest via Link is frustrating: Haptic feedback is barely noticeable even at maximum intensity (UPDATE 2020-07-07: This was apparently fixed by Oculus by now). Frequency does seem to have an effect but it's hard to say for sure if it really is an effect on frequency. Also, they frequently just stop vibrating when the vibration is "too long", or the frequency is too high.
Laterality: Implemented proper handling of handedness/laterality by checking whether or not the beatmap has notes that are specific to left or right (hand or foot). This now also determines whether left and right hand controller have the same color, or two different colors.
Directionality: Is now also properly determined from the beatmap.
Obstacles: Obstacles are now fully supported. Currently, only BSMG maps define obstacles.
For Slicing, we now have a plane-based target area, instead of the usual radial / sphere based target area. This was necessary to be able to properly align the obstacles
Obstacles: Much improved how entering obstacles is handled. This is definitely worth trying.
Settings - Cleaned up "Style Menu": "Presets & Themes" was a fairly misleading name for what that was. This is now called "Finetune Gameplay", which is what you can do there. Also, both "Gameplay" and "Guidance" didn't really have settings that were not already available via "Finetune Gameplay", so these were removed. We did keep "Old Tweaks" so you can still make some changes to how sliders are rendered and get some more info on what some of the settings in Finetune Gameplay mean, but this will probably be removed in a future version (and the settings will be put into a config-file for those who still want to mess with them).
Settings - Finetune Gameplay: Re-arranged "Guides and Feedback" so that the items appear in the order of importance (I searched "Haptic Intensity" a few times because it was hidden at the bottom of that screen). Also added direct link (button) to Audio Mixer from Hit and Miss Sounds.
BSMG Mapper: For punching, the positions of the drops aren't that great when we use the same as with laserblades, so the mapper now knows the mechanic that the map will be played with and automatically changes the locations accordingly. For punching, we multiply X-position with 0.9, and Y-position with 0.8 (obstacles keep Y as it is). As we use a (0,0) = center based coordinate system, this automagically results in the correct results (that kind of coordinate system also makes it very easy for us to flip maps horizontally and vertically).
BSMG Mapper: For shooting, things are a lot more complex because not only do we need to skip double, triple and quadruple notes on a single hands at the same time (that one was trivial, of course) but also, obstacles and avoid notes (mines/bombs) need to be handled entirely different from the drones that are to be shot. Fortunately, the way our orb themes are designed, this was quite easy to add.
Avatar System: Added support for the new Vive tracker roles for elbows and knees (available in SteamVR starting at 1.10.9 (currently in beta).
BSMG and osu! Integration: Added an (i) info button to the beatmap details that opens the beatmap on osu! or bsaver.com with details on that specific map.
Added a full Web browser with a few buttons to quickly browser to relevant pages to the flatscreen UI. This is useful for logging in to the various sites that we show with the (i) button.
Progress: Fixed the progress display which sometimes got stuck even though there no longer was any relevant progress.
Polished the main Flatscreen UI.
Shooting Mechanic: That one was quite frustrating because pulling the trigger always creates a bit of controller vibration, and that causes unfair misses. When pointing at a drone/orb, that drone/orb is now kept in the buffer for a brief moment, so losing it while shooting will no longer cause such unfair misses.
Shooting Mechanic: Also, the targets were too small. Now they are larger.
Added support for 360° gameplay on custom maps: We've had 360° gameplay in Holodance since 2017 but until now, this was linked to the native songs in Story Mode (Levels 3 had and still has this), and to a few arenas that triggered the rotations every 8 bars (this has been the case in Sci-Fi Attack, Robots Attack and 360° Craze). Now, the rotation information from BSMG maps is also used: In arenas that have enough space for 90 or 360 degrees and just the generic flying notes source, the rotations are directly applied. In the arenas that have flying note sources in different locations (i.e. for specific rotations), the one closest to the current rotation is automatically picked.
Music Library: Changed layout of main buttons to make it more obvious what to click. Also removed some useless clutter.
Music Library: Added filters for Standard, Single, No Direction, 90 degrees and 360 degrees.
Music Library: Changed layout of Quick Access area.
Music Library - Full Text Search: Fixed a few bugs in the full text search. I'm honestly embarrassed about this one: Those were three bugs that completely broke the full text search in all but a few edge cases (read that correctly: it worked in edge cases and did not work in most cases). It took about half an hour to fix all of them. I had noticed that something was going wrong in that search but adapted by simply only ever typing the first three letters for one specific search. Ouch!
Upgraded to Unity 2019.3.1
Music Library: Added support for osu! collections and BSMG playlists.
Music Library: Improved how image loading is done to avoid framedrops in VR. This had already been heavily multithreaded to do anything that doesn't need to be done on Unity's main thread on separate threads. Unfortunately, when calling sub-coroutines from async-coroutines naively, they end up being regular coroutines (i.e. they run on the main thread). For cases where this was the incorrect behavior while loading images, this is now fixed.
Music Library: Improved how selections are visualized on buttons.
Music Library: Button layout now automatically adapts to the button's contents. When there is only the title, that title gets a very large font. Title and one subline has a large title and large subline (but the title font being larger, and also bold). Only when two sublines are really necessary, we keep the old layout where all the text is comparatively small, and the title is only more dominant by being bold (and having a slightly larger font). This should make navigating the music library much more convenient.
Music Library: Removed redundant information, e.g. with Browse Music, we have the number of artists, songs and beatmaps already on the main button (below the text "Browse Music"), and then again on the "Artists" and "Songs" buttons, just in different arrangements. That was just visual noise.
Music Library: Fixed a really old and annoying bug that could cause artists being messed up in the artist lists (getting the song titles where the artist name should be, and the artist being in the small section where in this context, the song title should be).
Music Library: Finally added skipping directly to the beatmap list when an artist only has a single song. Previously, one would first have to select the artist, and then the single song, which was a waste of time but the initial attempt of solving this caused too much trouble. Now it just works.
Music Library: Added browsing by beatmapper.
Time Dilation: No longer overriding when selecting a game mechanic preset. When we set time dilation, we want to keep time dilation.
Scoring Algorithm: The directional OctaDrops based on osu! have a tendency to be unfair / uncatchable. This is very different from BSMG-maps that are designed for directions. Therefore, directional orbs from osu! maps cannot be failed. They do, however, give you a pretty severe score penalty (total score is reduced to 10% of the original score, so basically, failing an osu! directional orb does not break the combo, but also gives you almost no score, which I believe is a fair solution - if you want to maximize the score, you do have quite an edge when you manage to catch them).
Play Sessions: Now keeping the flying note theme (regular orbs, OctaDrops, drones and so forth) in the play sessions and also leaderboards, as these are relevant for the scoring.
Play Session: Fixed issue that compressed replay-data stored the whole buffer instead of just the actual data, resulting in unnecessarily large files. Fortunately, due to the compression, the file size didn't increase much ... but still, it was a waste (and also made processing those files in regular text editors like, um, Visual Studio, quite inconvenient.
Ok, this was just the stuff between November 25, 2019, and February 28, 2020. Ready for more? Here's something fun to watch to cool off from this wall of text before running into the next one:
Watch on YouTube
梅雨野おもてぃー (omotea) is a VR & Music Gamer, and YouTuber from Japan that had a few Holodance videos on Twitter and YouTube (and probably Instagram - but I hardly ever checked Instagram until recently ... wait ... nope, there's another person that hardly uses Instagram - only has 7 posts there, I like).
Holodance 1.1 and 1.2 (Ninja Updates I told no one about)
Often, after a release, bugs show up that no one noticed before. Happens to me, too. Didn't have much time to write release notes in that phase. Well, ok, I'll admit I also silently added new features (I did post videos about those, though).
This covers the time from Feb 28 until April 10.

Guns: Fixed sound for guns appearing and disappearing.
Fixed Issue that in-game Play Area no longer adjusted properly to real world play area.
Levels 4 and 8 (Desert Clouds and Icy Clouds): Made the airplanes shootable, added new achievement: Flygskam - Paying attention in Desert Clouds and Icy Clouds and symbolically, you have removed the yearly traffic of 12 airplanes, significantly reducing CO2-emissions! Also, you understand that while blowing things up in VR is fun, true warriors improve the world without using violence. Shooting airplanes in Holodance is actually choosing not to fly.
Game Mechanic Presets: Added two experimental mechanics in Finetune Gameplay, Beat Orbs and Beat Drops. These two have the orbs not flying at you (or at least, not in a way that you could just put your controller where the orb lands and the timing will be right). Instead, it's more like a drum, where the orb is there, and you need to hit it in the exact right time. This only works for beatmaps that don't have too many events. (UPDATE 2020-07-07: These are no longer hidden)
Modding: There was an issue with the mod buttons showing up, so it looked like no mods were available. Fixed.
BeatSaver-maps: Quite a few of these maps have the artist in the creator field, and the artist field empty. That one's fixed. Some also have the two mixed up (but both filled); that's tough to fix on the fly without an artist database, which we don't have, yet. So that needs to be fixed at some later point in time.
Avatar System: Added Avatar placement points to desert arena. Now it's possible to add avatars to the arena to make it more alive. Currently, this only works in the desert arena, and only with precalibrated tracking (hands, head, no feet, waist etc., yet). I'll continue working on this tomorrow.
Avatar System: Full tracking support added. (UPDATE 2020-07-07: Huh? Didn't we always have full tracking support ... ah, ok, context: Before I added that, the avatar alter egos only used the precalibrated tracking for head and hands, now they can use the full calibration with feet, knees, hip, elbows ... if you have so many Vive trackers)
Avatar System: Added placement points to all arenas/environments, tweaked for levels 1, 2, 3, 12 bonus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, Zero Distraction. So this now works for: The Desert (5), Paradise Beach (1), Above the Clouds(2), Dolphin Party(3), Sci-Fi Attack (B1), Retro Clubbing (B2), Sci-Fi Tunnels(B3), Mutant Club(4), Trippy Tunnels(5), Spooky Town(7), Zero Distraction.
Avatar System: Added placement points to the remaining arenas: Levels 4 and 8 (Desert High, Icy High), Levels 6 and 7 (Underwater World, Submarine Nightmare), Level 9 (Ice Desert), Level 10 (Robots Attack), Level 11 (Asteroids), Level 12 (Home of Mother Akash) and Full 360 Craze.
Arenas: Polished Full 360 Craze. Before, it was barely a demo. Now, it's an actual arena.
Avatar System: For some reason, Kohaku didn't behave with the new place avatars in arena feature. Helped her play nice.
Music Library: Fixed issue that sometimes, Game Presets didn't show up.
Laterality: Checking for left/right hand breaks the "kicking drops with your feet" mechanic. But really, it's always fine to kick a drop that was meant for your hand. But you do need to use the right foot (i.e. drops for the left hand need to be kicked with the left foot).
Laterality: BSMG-maps now automatically adapt when you can only use one hand (for whatever reason, including having selected one of the single-hand mechanics). This is also useful for practicing more advanced maps with only one hand at a time.
BSMG-Maps: Now also searching for available custom songs in Oculus paths, so now your custom level library should also be automatically picked up if you have BS installed via Oculus home.
Improved how walls are handled. Especially in Full 360 Craze.
Windows MR: Previously didn't support skeletal input which broke our Avatar system and the hands. Now, the Windows MR drivers support skeletal input but we still had to add this properly to our bindings for those controllers.
Windows MR: At the moment (2020-04-10), haptics do not work due to a bug in Windows Mixed Reality for Steam. This was fixed in the WMR for Steam Beta from 2020-04-03, so if you don't get haptics, you might want to switch to the beta channel.
Gun Mechanic: Fixed that laterality wasn't properly recognized for the drone orbs, resulting in gun gameplay not being sensitive to left/right.
Guns: Fixed flickering of the decals in arena The Desert.
Avatar System: Made more robust, auto-calibration now also works when only one controller had been switched on during calibration / incarnation. When the second controller is then switched on later, it all works.
Ok, here's another video, this time by チャイロ - Chairo. And it seems I'm in the perfect flow of timing because this video has just appeared a minute ago on YouTube (no kidding ... I basically just typed Holodance into YouTube to find those videos ... the ones by 梅雨野おもてぃー, I had already known ... this one is new to me, even though it's apparently a repost. Well, still makes me super-happy because this seems to be one of the few YouTubers actually using BSMG-maps when playing Holodance (even though it's the orb-theme, which is so old and I kind of don't like it anymore).
Anyways, here's something to cool off for before next wall of release-notes text:
Watch on YouTube
Make sure to watch it, like it, share it. Too few people post videos of Holodance.
Holodance 1.3 (released yesterday)
Ok, the final stretch. I actually spent most of the time between April 10 and yesterday working on our beatmap editor. But there's still some good new stuff.

Settings: Added Particle Effects checkbox to Finetune Gameplay because it's not obvious to search for this under Performance where it previously was (and still is).
Settings: Fixed issue that Particle Effects preview didn't properly react to changed setting (particle trail kept on emitting particles even when disabling Particle Effects).
OctaDrop Theme: Fixed issue that fail explosions were not effected by Particle Effects setting (i.e. the kept exploding even though the setting was disabled).
Updated Unity to 2019.3.12
Fixed Catcher appear and disappear animations. These had been broken for a very long time due to an internal offset that we added (which changed the hierarchy, which breaks animations in Unity). While at it also fixed the issue that the animation overrode the catcher-colors.
Mutant Club: Major visual improvements. This one previously had an opaque floor, with some ugly artifacts. Now that floor is mostly transparent and lets you view the structure below, which now also rotates based on the combo. Also, a few of the walls had messed up UVs - those are fixed now. And tweaked a few of the textures.
Major cleanup of the gameplay objects prefab (which previously only was half a prefab). This is primarily in preparation of the beatmap editor and multi-mechanic beatmaps, and also simplifies development in this area quite a bit ... but also had the risk of breaking things. So if anything with the controllers no longer works the way it did before, make sure to let me know!
Streamer Mode: Fixed issue that postprocessing effects didn't work at all on the flatscreen when Streamer Mode was active.
Tightened behavior of laser pointer holder: Previously, this would sometimes begin point in the wrong location, e.g. when enabling/disabling the catchers, or even during startup. Now this should always use the correct origin/direction in any given state.
SteamVR 1.13.2 Issue: Most likely due to OpenXR support in SteamVR changing some of the values that were returned from the API, our logic for setting up the play area size broke.
Added proper hand poses for all weapons (currently only supported via SteamVR, and in fact, only when you grab the weapons using Gravity Grip, which isn't available in Holodance, yet)
Added YUR Integration (YUR.watch)
YUR integration gives us: New leaderboards that are based on calories and burnrate, the uber-cool YUR.watch
Updated integrated Web Browser: Was broken because Unity broke it, update of the browser fixed it. Me happy!
Streamer Mode: Made "Smooth Player Perspective" much smoother, and much more like the player perspective.
Added Rich Presence for Steam
Added Rich Presence for Discord
Updated Facepunch Steamworks to 2.3.2
Updated Steamworks.NET to 14.0.0
Made Global Leaderboards available via Game Progression
Removed the old Global Leaderboard from 2016 and replaced it with the modern one from Game Progression (because Game Progression is kind of hidden).
And I'll end this with an awesome video by Sean Driskel aka Cmoche (on our official Discord), who is one of the few people that frequently streams Holodance on Twitch and also has quite a few Holodance videos on YouTube. Make sure to follow, like, share!
This one is a song by Muzzy, one of my favorite artists (and one that I, in fact, found out about through Holodance, while looking for awesome osu! maps). And it's in my favorite mod of Trippy Tunnels (we need more psychedelic mods like that, pretty please!)
Enjoy!
Watch on YouTube
Original post
05 Jul 2020Developer post
Holodance 1.3 is here!
I'll be honest: Large updates like this are scary. It's always fun to put out new things on the alpha and beta channels where people kind of expect that sometimes, things may break. But having everyone try an official new version is a different story. Like, the first time I tried
25 Jun 2020Developer post
Holodance Summer Sale: 50% off!
For those of you that don't own Holodance, yet, this is an awesome opportunity. As I'm in the middle of working on a pretty big update coming to Holodance in the next few days, I'll keep this unusually short: Some of the upcoming new features, like the Mutant Club upgrade are alr
28 Feb 2020Developer post
Holodance leaving Early Access, 30% off, New Arenas - and BeatSaver-Map Support
If you have never heard of Holodance before, here's ... A Little Bit of VR Rhythm Game History When I began development of Holodance in early 2015, the original idea was to create a synesthetic Virtual Reality clubbing experience with trippy visuals, and twelve songs produced spe
24 Nov 2019Developer post
Holodance V0.9.2: Tech and Scoring Update
Crash bugs are ugly. Especially when they occur all the time, while the game is starting. While we did only receive a single report for such a crashbug, the hardware of that player seemed fairly standard so it's very likely that other players were also effected. After several day
Crash bugs are ugly. Especially when they occur all the time, while the game is starting. While we did only receive a single report for such a crashbug, the hardware of that player seemed fairly standard so it's very likely that other players were also effected. After several days of searching, it turned out that this one apparently was a Unity-bug that got fixed with Unity 2019.2.
Other than that, we silently pushed a few minor feature updates since the last patch notes: Spooky Town is now an official arena of the game - you just need to have a minimum score of 3,000,000 (which is quite easy to achieve). We also added a new experimental game mechanic after a little conversation on Reddit. Here's a video:
Watch on YouTube
This one only works with very specific beatmaps, so use with caution. But this will eventually turn into something really exciting ;-)
Also, due to player feedback, we fixed a few things about the scoring, and also Zen-Mode.
The changes in detail:

Moved Spooky Town into the Free Mode Arena Selection area, gave it a 3,000,000 minimum score, and reduced the minimum score of Trippy Tunnels from 2,000,000 to 500,000.
Fixed Valve Index HMD default binding (the controller_type was correctly set in the bindings file but not correctly set in actions.json)
Updated SteamVR Unity Plugin to 2.5.0
SteamVR Integration: Added buttons to show controller bindings, and edit controller bindings to the player calibration panel
Player Calibration Panel: Redesigned this quite a bit; Check Tracker Roles now only shows up when using SteamVR
Bounce Back Theme: The idea of the bounce back theme was actually to have a much "timing sensitive" mechanic. Unfortunately, I had used a linear movement curve, so that didn't really take place. Changed this due to a conversation on Reddit with /u/rolliejoe. Also, this being significantly more difficult mechanic, you now get a 1.5 multiplier with that theme. Hardcore osu! maps with streams (which yield high scores) are impossible to play with this, so this does not make it unfair (in fact, it makes this much more fair than it used to be).
Casual Scoring: Decreased the penalty for large orbs, and the OctaDrop, and ghosts from 0.75 (25% penalty) to 0.9 (10% penalty). And the penalty for the larger Casual Catchers from 0.8 (20% penalty) to 0.9 (10% penalty). This still makes sure that the maximum scores are only available using "Catch Orbs" (instead of Casual Mode) - but the score penalty isn't that frustrating anymore. Also, "Style Mode" (which is a little less strict with timing) now gives you only 10% penality (instead of 20%). The thing is: All of these not only "add up" but "multiply up", so before, this ended up as a 0.48 multiplier (52% penalty). Now it's still 0.729 (27%) if all of these are active.
Gun Mode Scoring: Gun mode is significantly more difficult, so this now gives you a 2x multiplier for the scores.
Updated to Unity 2019.2.13 hoping that this will fix a mysterious crash bug (that one player reported) ... and it did fix that issue, hooray!!!
Updated DOTween to 1.2.280
Fixed that selecting a game mechanic preset, radial orb source and Zen-Mode were overridden.
Original post
28 Oct 2019Developer post
Holodance Halloween Sale: 50% off!
It's that time of the year where even pacifist, vegetarian game developers that have dragons throwing friendly magical orbs at you so you could tune into the rhythm of nature and save the world suddenly start punching ghosts to gory pulp as pumpkin-headed Halloween monsters. Also
24 Oct 2019Developer post
Holodance V0.9.1: Halloween, Modding, and all the Beta-Updates
Working a lot on our upcoming game Beat the Rhythm (and porting most of the improvements immediately to Holodance for you to play with them), I apparently got a little confused between Beat and Beta . Our last update to the default-branch that most people are playing on was ... O
13 Oct 2019Developer post
Preparing for Halloween: New Build on Beta-Branch
We're about to push one of the biggest updates in the history of Holodance to the main branch before Halloween, to celebrate this spooky season with all of you! And you can already try it on the beta-branch and help us find any issues that may still be in there (in addition to th
11 Aug 2019Developer post
Holodance V0.9.0b21 (beta): Tech Update, Mixed Reality, Bugfixes
During the last few months, I worked primarily on the in-VR beatmap editor. Unfortunately, this isn't ready for this release, yet. However, we also did quite a few technology updates and bugfixes that we silently pushed to separate branches dedicated to different Unity versions a
During the last few months, I worked primarily on the in-VR beatmap editor. Unfortunately, this isn't ready for this release, yet. However, we also did quite a few technology updates and bugfixes that we silently pushed to separate branches dedicated to different Unity versions and eventually also (finally) updated to the new SteamVR Unity integration which has SteamVR Input 2.0. This lays the foundation for full Valve Index support. For now, it gives you the ability to re-bind input according to your preferences.
Update Highlights

LIV Mixed Reality support is finally working again
Story Mode Level 1 / Paradise Beach has significantly improved performance and also looks better (the Ocean and sky in particular)
Slicing OctaDrops works much better now
The stats shown in Game Progression can now either use the legacy system (Steamworks), or our new server. For more details on what is changing here, see: Building Our Own Backend Server
Story Mode: Fixed the one event that was broken that prevented the "Knows The Secrets" achievement from being unlocked. This is secret is hidden in the tutorial.
Chronological Changes List

Updated to Unity 2018.4.3f1.
Removed old UNET (Unity Networking) code and promised myself to never ever touch a networking solution by Unity again.
Ported from using WWW to using UnityWebRequest; this should also solve some image loading hiccups in the Music Library.
Updated PostProcessing v2 from 2.1.4 to 2.1.7
Updated Oculus SDK from 1.29.1 to 1.36
Unity to Unity 2019.1.9f1.
Story Mode Bugfix: In Level 11, there were several fires where the background transparency was broken. Fixed.
Story Mode: Level 12 - this is a huge level but almost everything the player sees is at a large distance, so reduced lightmap resolution from 0.8 to 0.05 to improve baking time and significantly reduce memory consumption. This reduced the project asset
size from 750MB down to 40MB (in the build, the difference is much smaller but haven't checked the build size, yet).
Story Mode, Level 9 (Ice Desert): Optimized lightmapping for higher quality with lower memory consumption (this is also a huge area, and we have increased the detail right around the player, while significantly decreasing the detail in the wider area). This reduced the project asset size from 300MB down to 200MB. Altogether, the build size went from 6.3 GB down to 5.9 GB, download size from 2.3 GB to 2.2 GB. So that's nice.
Updated to Unity 2019.1.10 - this fixes the Toggle issue that caused our language selection to go crazy (I already had a workaround implemented but that workaround unfortunately didn't fix the issue as reliably as it should have).
Updated Volumetric Fog to 10.4
Updated HxVolumetrigLighting to 1.3.6e
Performance UI Polishing: Retro Clubbing and Triggered (available in Beat the Rhythm) have flashing lights that are always disabled when Flashes are disabled in the comfort settings. This could be confusing when the performance option is switched on but overridden by the photosensitive comfort setting. To prevent that kind of confusion, the performance Toggles are now disabled (non-interactive) when the comfort-setting has Flashes disabled, and an explanatory message is shown.
Updated LIV SDK from v0.1.0 to v0.1.5
Fixed LIV support
Fixed LIV-Issue: Progress from compositor showed up permanently in Mixed Reality because LIV SDK uses its own layer masks; fixed by adapting our approach (using VR-camera as base, and then adding/removing layers as needed, via two properties; we only need to remove one single layer)
Added Mixed Reality UI (LIV-logo, Mixed Reality label etc.) also to our Minimal UI because Mixed Reality might "kick off" already before entering "Streamer Mode".
Very nice: Using PostProcessing v2 instead of v1, bloom and color grading is now compatible with Mixed Reality. That is so cool!
Stage Paradise Beach / Story Mode Level 1: Massively improved quality of the sky while at the same time making the file size significantly smaller.
Applied similar changes to Level 2 ("Above the Clouds") and Level 9 ("Freezing Cold").
Removed the brief cleanup pause before and after songs because it was disorienting and should no longer be needed with Incremental Garbage Collection.
Time Dilation: For slicing, we had moved the Velocity Tracker into the blade - because that's usually what we want to derive velocity from. For Laserblade Time Dilation, however, the fun is in allowing intense rotations of the blades without speeding up time, and only speeding up time when the handle is moved quickly. To restore this feature, we now have two Velocity Trackers attached to the laserblades: One in the handle, for Time Dilation, and one in the blade, for everything else.
OctaDrop Orb Theme: Added proper physics for punched OctaDrops when they hit the ground.
OctaDrop Orb Theme: Added pretty decent physics for sliced OctaDrops when they hit the ground
Level 01 / Paradise Beach: Replaced PlayWay Water with Crest Ocean Renderer. Looks better, has much better performance, causes a lot less trouble.
Level 01 (Story Mode) / Paradise Beach: Major improvements to the look of the water; also fixed several issues in the environment (like, the beach falling off like a pool).
Retro Clubbing / Sci-Fi Attack: Fixed issue where fog was uniform instead of noisy. That bug had been introduced just recently.
Porting to SteamVR Unity Plugin 2.0 (SteamVR Input 2.0): Step 1: Package-ified SteamVR Unity Plugin 1.2.3 to make switching easier.
Performance Optimization: Removed roughly 0.5KB of memory allocations each frame.
Porting to SteamVR Unity Plugin 2.0 (SteamVR Input 2.0): Step 2: Switched to SteamVR Unity Plugin 2.3.2, fixed all the compilation issues (those were quite a few), adapted code to a simplified version of the actions. Works. Yay!
LIV Integration: Updated LIV-Logo to new style.
Porting to SteamVR Input 2.0: Step 3: Proper implementation of different actions (instead of faking them). We now use: InteractUI, Pause, Skip, LetGo, Scroll and Fire. Pause and Skip can be mapped separately for "playing". Fire should only be in the Action Set "gun" (for the gun mechanic) but due to an apparent bug in the Input system, added a fallback in the default Action Set for now.
Cleaned up the whole startup procedure: This fixes several warnings and errors during startup and made the whole thing more reliable.
Game Progression: Added an option to display the old Steam data.
Avatar System: Fixed a few issues, including a crash when selecting Jane. We had to remove the arms length setup. Eventually, we'll replace this whole system with something way better.
Updated Oculus Desktop from 1.36 to 1.38.1
Updated XR Legacy Input Helpers from 2.0.4 to 2.0.6
Performance: Minor memory allocation fixes (partially introduced with SteamVR 2.0)
Story Mode: Fixed the one event that was broken that prevented the "Knows The Secrets" achievement from being unlocked.
Original post
18 Mar 2019Developer post
Holodance V0.9.0b19 (alphadev/beta): A *lot* of Update ;-)
So this is kind of a huge one, because the last patch update was in June 25, roughly 9 months ago. We did post some updates to the alphadev channels and also beta channels but announced them only via our Official Discord . But this current version will probably go to the default
So this is kind of a huge one, because the last patch update was in June 25, roughly 9 months ago. We did post some updates to the alphadev channels and also beta channels but announced them only via our Official Discord. But this current version will probably go to the default channel in a week or two, so it would be awesome if you could opt-in to the alphadev or beta channel, try it, test it and let us know what you think about it (ideally in the forum to keep things organized).
This is a really long list, so here are some of the highlights:
Settings / Themes / Game Mechanics / Presets
This has been completely re-designed to make the different game mechanics easier to find and activate. Also, we previously had quite a few implicit changes in the settings (e.g. when you activated Laserblades or Guns) that did make sense when we originally introduced them but became pretty annoying over time, as development evolved (like, choosing guns would always activate the balloons - but actually shooting drones is more fun than shooting balloons ;-) ).
We have consolidated almost all the settings into one screen (Settings / Style / Presets & Themes), and have added a few presets that set up everything in a consistent way that hopefully makes sense. After activating one of the presets, you can still fine-tune everything according to your likes and dislikes. Here's the current list of presets:

Casual Mode
Catch Orbs
Punch Drops
Slice Drops
Shoot Drones
Shoot Balloons
Gun Mechanic
We've had this in the game for a long time but polished it a lot during the last few months:
The explosions are now based on how perfectly you time shooting the drone. If the timing is perfect or near perfect, the explosion is very quick. If, however, the timing is a little off (a little too early, or a little too late), you get a longer explosion as a penalty. Before, the explosions were random and the longer explosions would unfairly obstruct the view. Now this is "by design" if your timing is off.
Also, all explosion effects were polished and optimized to work really well with the drone and gameplay.
The gun mechanic will still get proper support for sliders and spinners.
New Slider Visualization
This comes with the new OctaDrop theme (see below). We've had that theme in previous builds - but the slider visualization is new. It's true 3D: Sliders in the OctaDrop theme are now streams of the OctaDrop outline. ;-)
OctaDrop Theme
This now has its own hitsounds, also for sliders and spinners, and full support for punching and slicing as well as directionality. The OctaDrop theme will be the default theme for Beat the Rhythm but we'll also keep this as an option in Holodance as well. We're still polishing the OctaDrops and will make some of the mechanics more strict. But it's already close ... at least in our opinion ;-)
Improved Handling of Tempo Changes
Notes are now properly looking ahead so they use the tempo while they play for the buffered ahead spawning. Previously, the orbs were speeding up just when the tempo of the song already had increased. We need this for the original soundtrack of Beat the Rhythm which has quite a few tempo-changes, and even switches back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4 in one song.
Backend Server
This is currently only visible in the leaderboards that show up after a session. The leaderboard when you select a beatmap and the leaderboards in Story Mode are still the Steam Leaderboards, so currently, in some places, we have two different leaderboards, an old one, and a new one. That server not only has new leaderboards but will also let us do things like song ratings, beatmap ratings (in terms of "how fun is it"), and difficulty ratings and will also be used to host beatmaps you create with our upcoming beatmap editor. It will also let you do things like in-game "challenge me". The possibilities are literally endless, so this will evolve a lot over time.
Important: We might reset our backend server a few times until the release of Beat the Rhythm. But you won't lose your skill on such a reset ;-)
Scoring: Velocity and Directionality
In the first early versions of Holodance, the velocity bonus used the velocity on impact. Then, I thought using the maximum velocity between catching two orbs was a good idea. It wasn't. So that's reverted, and velocity on impact is what matters again. This is coherent with moving from primarily catching orbs to primarily punching orbs. You can still catch orbs - but punching is more fun and will give you the higher scores.
The OctaDrop theme also has directionality, so some of those drops will come at you with a direction (very short sliders in osu! beatmaps are converted into those directional drops). We had a rotation bonus but that never really felt right because how does wildly rotating your controller really matter in the game? Well, now that bonus is based on how well you are in tune with the rotation of the drop. Makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?
Tracked Appendages:
One really special thing about Holodance from the beginning was that you could also catch orbs with your head. One problem with this was that it gave you a bonus, so it does give you an advantage with your score - but not everyone enjoys this mechanic. So now, we're properly tracking which appendages you use: Two Hands (TH), Head and Hands (HAH), Head Hands and Feet (HHAF), Head Only (HO), Hands and Feet (HAF), Single Hand (SH), Two Feet (TF) or Single Foot (SF). And each gets its own leaderboard. While in principle, you could play each map in any way, maps designed for a specific gameplay style will also be preferable, so Beatographer will let you say what style a map was designed for. With guns, laserblades and bow and arrow, there are only single hand and dual wielding, or in the case of bow and arrow, obviously, only single hand.
Localization
We have started localization. We have quite a bit of Chinese already done, Japanese, Korean and Russian are there but very incomplete, and the translations we have were done using Google translate (so expect some weirdness). As many of the texts are still changing, we'll do a professional full translations when things have stabilized a bit.
Game Package Size
The game package has become much smaller, going from 9.5 GB down to 6.3 GB.
Lots of Bug Fixes and Unity Updates
A lot of bugs were fixed. A lot of new bugs were introduced by incrementally updating Unity, and then fixed (either by more Unity updates, or by implementing workarounds). But using Unity 2018.3 significantly improves the development process, especially due to the new nested prefabs workflow. I wish I had done this much earlier.
Also, ported PostProcessing from v1 to v2. As the color grading set up works differently in v2 compared to v1, there will be some changes in the color grading. Also, v2 has a new bloom effect that provides higher quality, at the cost of lower performance. But it has a "Fast Mode", which you can activate via the performance settings. We have both versions in a current builds, so you can easily switch between the two. But eventually, we'll remove v1 from the project.
Full Chronological Changes List:

Sliders: Now also play a hit sound the first time you touch them. Not having this was mildly disorienting.
Sliders: A completely new way to visualize Sliders - they are now streams of the OctaDrop outline.
Directional Drops: Part of the black magic hackery for the tracers is that very short sliders are now automatically converted to directional orbs.
OctaDrops: Moved spawning particle closer to player to prevent interference with screens.
Leaderboards: We had two release on alphadev with the new OctaDrops where we had storing your scores to the leaderboard disabled (because the new OctaDrops tracers, which are a new visualization for sliders, were still very experimental and I wasn't perfectly sure they wouldn't give you ridiculously high scores ;-) ). This is all safe now, so leaderboards are stored again.
Orbs / Drops / Flying Notes: We did some major refactoring to clean up years of adding cool things and make the whole thing much more modular. Still not quite perfect working towards that.
Directional Orbs: Moved logic that converts sliders into directional orbs from our new Tracer implementation to the beatmap parser which is a much more appropriate approach and solves several issues we've had previously.
OctaDrops: Orbs that were missed now properly dissolve instead of just disappearing; or worse, bumping to the floor causing plenty of physics action (we still have this for the old orbs).
Core Engine: Notes are now properly looking ahead so they use the tempo while they play for the buffered ahead spawning. Previously, the orbs were speeding up just when the tempo of the song already had increased.
Directional Orbs: We now use both, a minimum time and distance for sliders to determine whether we convert them to directional orbs. Only if both criteria are met, the slider is converted to a directional orb.
Core Engine: In some maps, we have fairly massive streams which both is a problem for visibility of the next notes and also can be a performance issue. For that, we now keep track of the distance and time between the current note and the next note, and if they are too close, we can use alternative visualizations. With this, we could even convert streams into sliders, which is more appropriate when we focus on punching instead of catching (with orbs; obviously you can't punch a slider).
Flatscreen UI: Fixed a bug that we have had in the game since forever which caused sliders and range sliders (the UI element) to not work when trying to control them via mouse. The problem were our UI audio events that didn't properly bubble the events. Interestingly, this only caused an issue with dragging - everything else always worked just fine.
OctaDrop Tracers: Now flash in and out like the full OctaDrops.
OctaDrop Tracers: Now have much improved particle effects for tracers - instead of emitting a turquoise old-style particle effect at the end of a tracer, you now get particles emitting from the catchers based on the catcher velocity during following the tracer, and one final effect based on the completion, and emitted from the catchers, at the end.
Main Score HUD: This went through a few iterations, from the "big smiling face" via the more sci-fi style HUD that we use in all the new environments. The truth, however, is that the tech we used for this was never really designed for that purpose (it was a good test-case for what can be done with our ScoreFlash Asset Store package, though). For the new Beat the Rhythm "Triggered" environment, we now have a shortcut that simply puts the information into UI elements that are part of the environment. This is not quite as flexible, so the old approach will remain for where we need the flexibility. But step by step we'll move some of this UI into appropriate styles and places for the environments where we can do that, which are most.
Main Score HUD: Fixed small glitch that caused the score per drop / slider to not be shown for sliders until the next note was caught again, after a note was missed (only in the special new shortcut approach).
Flatscreen UI Part 2: Range sliders were actually still broken, the fix for normal sliders didn't work for those. Reason was that for some unknown reason a OnPointerUp was sent, and Range Sliders used that to reset the state. They no longer do, and so now they work.
Localization: Started globalizing (= preparing for localizing) the UI. Used Google Translate to Chinese for testing. This is a pretty big one, including re-baking some of the fonts - there is still a lot of work to do ... but I made some really significant progress.
Beat the Rhythm / Beat Challenge: Fixed Gun Mode (using drones and showing the orb score huds). Particles still don't show up.
Play Area Calibration: Combined World Rotation / Movement and UI Rotation into one Element, added reset for the rotation (for some reason, only the position got reset, essentially making reset not have any effect on world/ui rotation). Also added a Recenter-Button - but only for hardware that actually has Recenter (we currently only use standing / room-scale setups).
Localization: We're currently in the process of localizing the whole game. We won't localize the voice acting in Story Mode for now, but all texts in the UI and messages during gameplay will be localized. For now, we start with Chinese. Japanese, Korean and Russian will follow very soon. If you want the game in your language, please let us know!
Analytics: Slowed down sending some of the analytics so they will hopefully get through more reliably.
Performance: Significantly reduced allocations, especially with the new OctaDrop theme and the new tracers.
Music Library: The "range sliders broken on flatscreen UI broken"-fix caused a new bug in VR, where clicking a button in a list would start dragging and basically scroll to the beginning of the list on each click. That issue only was on the alpha channel but boy was that an annoying one. Fixed.
Music Library: There was one super-annoying bug that sometimes occurred where you'd click on invisible panes and instead of getting what the button you clicked on shows (e.g. Favorites), you'd get what the button at the same location in another screen shows (e.g. Genres). This should be fixed now. Also, panes reacting to pointing and button presses when they are actually hidden below you should no longer happen.
Community Server: To cut dependencies on Steamworks, we are building our own community server for leaderboards, player state, achievements and also most popular and so forth. This is a larger project but we're making progress - players are now registered with the server ;-)
Gun Mode: Removed trails and multiplier rings from gun. Those looked pretty dumb and didn't really serve that much purpose.
osu! beatmaps: Fixed a bug that kept the slider velocity multipler of inherited timing points when there was another timing point. osu! handles this differently: Each timing point resets the multiplier to 1x and you need another inherited timing point to change it (if you want to change it). This had created issues with our Eternity map (Eternity is the last song of Beat the Rhythm and now I'm kind of glad I'm still using the osu! beatmap editor to build this one because our own, native beatmap editor isn't ready, yet)
osu! beatmaps / procedural maps: Fixed a few pretty nasty issues that caused wrong counts of total notes, especially with the new OctaDrop theme, which could, among other issues, trigger a "full combo" in the middle of a song.
Difficulty: This is a rather "hot" subject because we use the calculated difficulty as basis for the skill and style level. There were some rare cases, where the difficulty would use outdated data. While we still do display this outdated data, we make sure to use the actual mapping data, with any tweaks (e.g. the quick repeaters replaced with actual orbs in the OctaDrop theme), for the final calculation that will be used to determine skill and style levels.
New leaderboard UI: Finally upgraded the leaderboards to our new UI style (we had this integrated with the new UI style for quite a while - but it was very very hacky). The Steam leaderboards, however, still use the old UI (and will eventually disappear).
Smart Leaderboards: The new leaderboard lists are simplified and have less information and automatically show the most relevant entries: If you are in the top 10, the top 10 are shown. If you are below that, the top 1 and, depending on the number of entries available in the leaderboard, top 10 entry are shown, then the two ranks directly above you, and the ranks below you. This is linked to the new leaderboard community server. The leaderboards also show how your score has changed compared to your last session.
Tracked Appendages: One really special thing about Holodance from the beginning was that you could also catch orbs with your head. One problem with this was that it gave you a bonus, so it does give you an advantage with your score - but not everyone enjoys this mechanic. So now, we're properly tracking which appendages you use: Two Hands (TH), Head and Hands (HAH), Head Hands and Feet (HHAF), Head Only (HO), Hands and Feet (HAF), Single Hand (SH), Two Feet (TF) or Single Foot (SF). And each gets its own leaderboard. While in principle, you could play each map in any way, maps designed for a specific gameplay style will also be preferable, so Beatographer will let you say what style a map was designed for. With guns, laserblades and bow and arrow, there are only single hand and dual wielding, or in the case of bow and arrow, obviously, only single hand.
Hitsounds and Effects: The OctaDrops and Laserblade/laserbeam deflection have new hitsounds, and the gun also has a new gun sound.
Gun Mechanic - Shooting Drones: The explosions are now based on how perfectly you time shooting the drone. If the timing is perfect or near perfect, the explosion is very quick. If, however, the timing is a little off (a little too early, or a little too late), you get a longer explosion as a penalty. Before, the explosions were random and the longer explosions would unfairly obstruct the view. Now this is "by design" if your timing is off.
Gun Mechanic - Shooting Drones: All explosion effects were polished and optimized to work really well with the drone and gameplay.
Tracers (Sliders) & Spinners: Added possibility for looped sounds while following tracers and spinning spinners. For now, this is only used by the OctaDrop theme and we use the same loop for both.
OctaDrop Orb Theme / New Slider Visualization: Fixed a bug that caused sliders where you didn't catch the head caused a miss, breaking the combo. Finally, the new OctaDrop theme is fully working as intended ;-)
Added a little "cleanup phase" before and after each song, to avoid nasty things (framedrops) from happening while playing songs. This drops into the compositor; we'll probably remove that once we switch over to Unity 2019.1 which has incremental garbage collection.
File Scanners (MP3 / osu): In earlier versions of our file scanners, there were quite a few cases that could cause inconsistencies in the data, so we had a "do a full rescan every week" logic, that would make sure that if there were inconsistencies, they would be remedied within a reasonable time. That was added a long time ago, before we had a button to do a "Full Rescan", which does the exact same thing but by clicking a button. Also, inconsistencies should now be rare and really only occur when you change the library sources (add or remove local osu library, or local music and so forth). Long story short: We don't do automatic full rescans just because a week has passed. If you change the sources, do a "Full Rescan". Also, if you run into "Beatmap not found" errors when trying to start a song - do a "Full Rescan".
Community Server: Prepared logic for popular and recently played.
Story Mode: Fixed a long standing bug that caused all start/stop events to be called twice in Level-01.
Music Library: Fixed issue where locally loaded images were flipped upside down.
Music Library: Fixed a few more issues with image loading, some of which were introduced during the current iteration.
Leaderboards: Fixed problem that caused player avatar images to not be loaded.
Fixed issue that caused total notes to be off by one (one too few), which also resulted in full combos being triggered when players missed exactly one note, and this also threw off the leaderboard logic.
OctaDrop Theme: Polished hitsounds.
Player: Fixed issue that player height and player chest height (this is where the target area is) was not stored correctly.
Music Library: Fixed RecentlyAdded sorting issue (the most recently added songs were at the end of the list).
Audio Files (osu! beatmaps and local music): Fixed an issue that would have songs muted half way into the song. This was fairly rare but it did happen with a few osu! beatmaps, in particular when the audio files were mono. This should no longer happen now.
Music Library: Improved error message when beatmap files are not found (which is usually a result of changes to the folders and no 'Full Rescan' having been done).
Leaderboards: Fixed nasty issue that broke the "per beatmap" leaderboards
Added initial Oculus SDK support, using Oculus Integration 1.32.
Made controllers work properly with native Oculus support (tracking, position offsets, buttons).
Made haptic feedback on controllers properly work with native Oculus support.
Proper support for Dash (Holodance automatically goes into pause when Dash is activated).
Adapted loading screen to native Oculus SDK ... but that doesn't work too well because OVROverlay apparently is kind of buggy and also it seems the Oculus compositor lacks quite a few nice features that the SteamVR compositor has (fading things in and out conveniently, suspending rendering, working reliably).
Oculus Guardian system is now properly used to determine the Play Area.
Fixed broken Player Height check when using native Oculus SDK.
Now the haptic intensity slider also has the expected effect when using native Oculus SDK.
Fixed several issues in the loading screen when using Oculus SDK.
Fixed remaining issues with loading screen when using Oculus SDK: The progress and floor hadn't shown up; we had used a single texture for the logo instead of the 3D multi-billboard logo we used in SteamVR; there was no fading (in SteamVR, we crossfade, with Oculus SDK, due to limitations in the API, we have to fade out, switch to the compositor, then fade back in); and the overlays were in the wrong locations when entering levels where the player platform is not located at the origin (e.g. Paradise Beach).
Initialization on Game Load: Avoid unnecessary wait times.
Loading Screen: Fixed a really annoying bug that caused one progress bar to start up with the Beat the Rhythm color theme.
Music Library: Added UI-based universal keyboard. This still needs more input options but at least it's a start.
Native Oculus SDK: Fixed head gameplay objects not being tracked when not using SteamVR.
Music Library: Fixed theme-issue with keyboard that caused exception spam which also resulted in severe performance degradation.
Fixed automatic performance settings for 2080 (Ti), 2070 and 2060
Ported project to Unity 2018.2.20f1 - it was a bit of a hassle but it seems that almost nothing broke, so that is quite nice.
Ported project to Unity 2018.3.3f1. More hassles, and a few things did break (including a few fairly nasty crash bugs), but it seems there's nothing we can't handle.
One of the things that caused crashes was that we frequently used MeshFilter.mesh instead of MeshFilter.sharedMesh, when actually not really needing a new Mesh instance. Changing this not only fixes those Unity 2018.3 crash bugs but also slightly improves performance.
Story Mode almost completely broke in 2018.3.3 ... fixed all issues that I found: No audio, no voice acting, first orb thrown by Pritvitej didn't work, high five, fist bump, stroking and tickling didn't work, and a few more.
Another crash occurred more sporadically when storing the sessions; this is now hopefully also fixed.
Changed all Rigidbodies to "Continuous Speculative" which should be both, faster and more reliable.
Removed Slider/Tracer Themes because we only had two themes, and the non-default one was broken.
Added option to disable the orb trail particle effects (Themes / Orb Trails (Particles))
Ported project to Unity 2018.3.5f1, which fixed one extremely nasty "system crash" bug that happened both with the built game and the Unity editor: When closing the game, it would freeze for a while, then other running applications would randomly crash, the screen would go black, and usually, a hard reset would be required to continue working. This bug was specific to Unity 2018.3 and didn't occur on 2018.2 or 2019.1.
Ported PostProcessing from v1 to v2. As the color grading set up works differently in v2 compared to v1, there will be some changes in the color grading. Also, v2 has a new bloom effect that provides higher quality, at the cost of lower performance. But it has a "Fast Mode", which you can activate via the performance settings. We will have both versions in a few builds, so you can easily switch between the two - but eventually, we'll remove v1 from the project.
Major shader and shader keywords cleanup.
Major texture cleanup; took full game from 9.3 GB down to 6.3 GB. This should also speed up some of the level (environment/stage) and avatar loading times.
Using current velocity instead of max velocity (since last punch) for calculating the bonus. Using maximum velocity made sense when "catching" - but we're back to punching, and there, the current velocity on impact is best.
Made laserblades shorter - 80cm are long enough (that's just the blade).
Rotation is now based on direction of punch / slice vs. direction of the orb. With all themes except OctaDrop, the expected direction is "forward" (the opposite direction into which the orb is flying).
Finally, finished implementation of slicing.
Completely re-designed "Themes" UI: Added six presets (Casual Mode, Catch Orbs, Punch Drops, Slice Drops, Shoot Drones and Shoot Balloons). This also no longer makes arbitrary changes when changing the mechanic (it did this before - that's what the defaults are used for now).
Original post
06 Feb 2019Developer post
Holodance 50% off ($9.99) in Lunar New Year Sale and Updates!
Hey everyone, just in case you missed it: Holodance takes part in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale, so if you don't have it, yet - now's a really good time to get it at a 50% discount (so that's $9.99 instead of $19.99). Please let everyone else know! ;-) And those coming in from th
04 Feb 2019Developer post
Update: Building Our Own Backend Server
This was (and still is) a big one! I actually knew we needed our own backend server for a very long time: One reason Holodance is still only available on Steam is because I heavily relied on the Steamworks backend for leaderboards, achievements and keeping state for players (i.e.
This was (and still is) a big one! I actually knew we needed our own backend server for a very long time: One reason Holodance is still only available on Steam is because I heavily relied on the Steamworks backend for leaderboards, achievements and keeping state for players (i.e. progress in the game, mostly for Story Mode). In order to let you play with people on other platforms, like Oculus Home, Windows Store or PlayStation Network, we either need to use a third party service (there are some, like PlayFab or GameSparks, or roll our own.
With our second game, Beat the Rhythm VR, we not only want cross-platform but cross-game: All the community features, like leaderboards, song and beatmap quality rankings, session streams and so forth should be consistent and shared among both games, so that we can have one (hopefully) large community for both games, instead of two smaller, isolated player communities.
And there’s another thing: I’m still working on our own in-VR beatmap editor and the fun with that really only starts when you can conveniently share your hard mapping work with your fellow players. Which opens a whole other can of worms and tricky challenges that need to be faced.
Having our own backend server solves a lot of these issues; even if solving some of these issues makes developing that backend server significantly more complex than just a leaderboard-system.
A little Personal History
Before I started working on VR games full-time in 2015, after several years of doing it “on the side” (since 2007), as freelance software-engineer I had a really decent income. Which was really cool! But that was due to taking whatever software-engineering project came along. That was still kind of fun. But when I’m totally honest, this wasn’t really what I was here for, and I had known that for sure at least since 2007 … but really, as a hunch much much longer. Most of my time, I spent working with databases, Web frontends, early Java days mobile apps, some of which I developed from scratch on my own, some large and complex systems that had grown over many years, that I worked on in small teams.
One reason it took a long while to get started with this was because I knew I’d be facing some old demons when getting back into this, and I honestly wasn’t looking forward to that. While I know I can do these things, and actually do them quite well, I’d honestly rather have paid someone … except I know how much that would cost, and we have to be super-careful with our budget (2018 was twice as good as 2017, and 2017 three times as good as 2016 — but we* still have very little liquid cash and roughly €100K open loans … also, it’s not so hard to double and triple your revenue when you start from a base of roughly €10,000 … per year … revenue).
*we currently actually only means me, working from my basement to be able to sustain the company
When I finally did get started, I first spent a lot of time figuring out which technology stack to use, and learning to use that technology stack. That was fun — I love learning new things, and in terms of server backends and Web development, I was living at least 10 years in the past, probably more like 15 years. Eventually, I got it rolling and we have now had the new leaderboard and progress tracking on the alphadev branch of Holodance for a little while, we also already use it for a little side project based in Beat the Rhythm that I did for money called Beat Challenge or 节奏激战 (this one’s currently only available in China, for the Lenovo Mirage AR headset), and the internal builds of Beat the Rhythm. This is on the beta now for Holodance, so by the time we release Beat the Rhythm, it will have been in production for a little while (you may have noticed that we just pushed the release of Beat the Rhythm from “Fall 2018” to “Spring 2019”).
It’s done … well … almost!
(and we all know what that means ;-) )
The hardest parts are done. Obviously, there is still a lot more work on this end, but I am super-happy that the foundation is there and I can now build out the various systems step-by-step, one at a time.
There was a price to pay: One of the things I really enjoy about developing games is that it’s an incredible creative and lively process. Sometimes, I have an idea of my own, or a request coming in from a player in the middle of the night (Hello Discord), start coding in the morning, and can play test this new idea in the afternoon, to share it with you in the evening. Then, of course, there’s usually several days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months of polishing until it behaves in the most fun way — but it’s usually a fun process that involves designing game play mechanics, coding, visuals and effects, sometimes audio.
I have been missing that during the last few months, and after my last meditation retreat, I took a little break from the server work to play with something new. That will go into Devlog 3, so stay tuned!
One (fairly big) concern …
One final thing, also to get a little discussion going: Until recently, I wanted to use the game play data that we have been keeping on player’s PCs to rebuild the complete history on our server. In other words, upload your game sessions, rebuild the leaderboards from that, basically “migrate” everything. Technically, this is possible, and I could still do it … but there are a few concerns:

First of all, it does add a lot of complexity. There are a lot of things to be taken care of, and it would add a significant amount of time just to set up a reliable synchronization mechanism that can handle years worth of gameplay data without interrupting gameplay. We also changed the data format a few times, so that’s also something to be careful about.
Then, that data is not necessarily complete or reliable: You can disable recording the movement data, or you might have deleted the GameData folder — when it’s gone, it’s gone. So, the restored history would not be as complete as one would wish for.
A related issue: Without the movement data, there is a bit of potential for cheating by messing with the session data. With the new system, we’ll only record your session for the leaderboards if you opt-in to including the movement data. That way, cheating becomes near impossible. But handing that for lots of past (and partially incomplete) data is quite tricky.
Finally, there’s the privacy issue: I honestly don’t feel comfortable uploading up to three years of gameplay sessions to a new system without asking (and under current EU privacy laws, that would be illegal, too). But when I ask, I kind of invite people to cheat (say “no” now, mess with the data, then say “yes”). This is much easier with current / future data that is generated while playing.
So, at the moment, I lean towards making this a fresh start, probably even with a few resets during beta, to be able to polish how we store things without having to carry the burden of migrating. When I made some changes to how scoring works, player feedback on “wiping the leaderboards” was fairly positive — Holodance is still in Early Access, Beat the Rhythm not even released, yet, so that kind of thing is not totally unexpected. But still, it’s something I’m not taking lightly (which is also the reason why I haven’t updated the default-branch and only did alphadev- and now beta-updates for about six months).
Let me know what you think!
Original post
24 Jun 2018Developer post
Holodance V0.9.0b12: Major work on Beat the Rhythm Orb Theme
When we started developing Holodance, which was originally called "Holodance Episode 1: Dancing with Dragons", after a few early prototypes, we fairly quickly moved into what is now called Story Mode and then, a lot of time went into building environments, modeling and animating
When we started developing Holodance, which was originally called "Holodance Episode 1: Dancing with Dragons", after a few early prototypes, we fairly quickly moved into what is now called Story Mode and then, a lot of time went into building environments, modeling and animating dragons, voice-acting, making it all work together.
Of course, we also did polish the actual gameplay mechanics, added the target grid, added various ways of showing you how your score came about and even added orb themes and orbs with different shapes and materials.
But there were always a lot of other pressing things that needed to be done: Free Mode, properly handling osu! beatmaps, a music library so you could conveniently find music that you enjoy playing. Procedural mapping. More environments. Laserblades, guns ... lots of stuff a lot of people (including myself) enjoy.
Long story short, for Beat the Rhythm (and most of this work also immediately goes into Holodance), I'm kind of going back to the drawing board - with almost three years of VR rhythm game development (and playing ;-) ) experience. What I'm striving for is figuring out the most fun ways to interact with the music - and building the design and visual effects (and later also audio-effects) around that.
I have already talked a little about the new "orb theme" that we're building for Beat the Rhythm, which is also already available in Holodance in the V0.9.0b10 release notes.
Here's quick look a little tool I'm building to improve iteration times, test various color schemes and different ways of "dealing" with those orbs (if you click it, you get to the full YouTube video):
Let us know what you think in the comments!
Full Release Notes

Beat the Rhythm: Small Fixes in BtR Octagonal Drops (now called OctaDrops) - sliders and spinners are no longer completely broken with this theme but they are still using the old style and logic; that will change soon (and be also available for the old orb-themes).
Fixed file paths: Originally, we kept everything next to the game folder - but this does not work on all platforms, so this was now changed to a more appropriate location. Existing game installations should not be effected (spoiler alert - they were and the change that made this happen went live with the previous release, ooops :-/ ).
Cleanup: Removed "resources" which are automatically included in the builds, even if not used or not even working on a given platform, quite aggressively. I had done some of this before - but unfortunately, those changes got reverted in one of the updates.
Fixed file paths 2: Due to an earlier change, Configuration.json could land in Holodance_Data instead of the main game folder (the parent folder of Configuration.json). This no longer can happen - we now use the game folder again, and also do some cleanup in case players had run this version. If you made changes in Holodance_Data/Configuration.json and also had the file in the original location, Holodance will use the original file again and clean up the one in the wrong folder. If you only had the file in the wrong folder, Holodance will move it to the correct location and use it from there.
Beat the Rhythm "Octagonal Drops" / Octadrops: Major work on making appearing, disappearing and slicing those octagonal drops look awesome.
Original post
18 Jun 2018Developer post
Holodance V0.9.0b11: Initial Game Progression and Accumulated Score
This is another fairly small release but it fixes one important issue and adds something fun: It's kind of common to use 32-bit integers to store scores. In fact, it is so common that this is also how they are stored in the Steam leaderboards. The problem: We keep track of an acc
This is another fairly small release but it fixes one important issue and adds something fun:
It's kind of common to use 32-bit integers to store scores. In fact, it is so common that this is also how they are stored in the Steam leaderboards. The problem: We keep track of an accumulated score, each session can give you up to a few million, and (this is not a problem but awesome): We have some very active players. So, currently, three players "hit the ceiling" when it comes to the accumulated score: MechanicaL, koolaide95 and liqiyang.
This version changes how that score is stored internally, and also added a little hacky patch to at least display the correct score in-game, even when it's above 2,147,483,647 (maximum value a signed 32-bit integer can have).
While I was at it, I also added a first version of our "Game Progression" page:
The numbers in parenthesis are your rank in the leaderboards ... and yes ... we've had Style and Skill leaderboards for a little while but they are not shown in the game, yet.
You can view your progress at any time either via Pause or Game Settings:
... and ... I figured you'd usually want to see this right after playing a session, so I also included this pane in the after session stats, and re-arranged the layout a little:
So, while this is still kind of a small update, I hope you'll enjoy this new feature. Eventually, Game Progression will also let you access various leaderboards (which will also get a major visual polishing round), become more graphical and give you more convenient access to the different game mechanics.
Meanwhile, I'm also working on native Oculus and Windows VR (aka WMR) support, and multiplatform and making very nice progress there as well.
Full Release Notes

Accumulated Score: As we were using integers to keep track of the accumulated score (32-bit signed, to be precise), the maximum possible accumulated score was 2,147,483,647. We currently have three players (MechanicaL, koolaide95 and liqiyang) who hit that limit. Internally, this update moves tracking that score to a floating point value, which lets us go into numbers of any size - at the expense of some precision. The problem: Steam's leaderboards also use int. But with a little hack, we can display your actual score even there.
Game Progression: At any time via the settings, and also after each song, you can now check some progression stats: Your accumulated total score, how many notes you have caught (orbs, sliders, spinners), how many sessions you played (playing the same song multiple times counts multiple times), how many full combos or perfect sessions you have had, how often you started the game, and your current skill and style level, as well as the last skill / style level. Accumulated score, and skill and style level also have your current rank in the leaderboards.
Original post

Updates & announcements

Hi, I'm back!

Patch Notes in Detail

LIV SDK 1.5 - Improved Streamer Mode

New Game Modes

BSMG Mapping Extensions

Story Mode: Levels 3 and 6 - Dolphins and Whales

Scoring Bug Fixed

Patch Notes in Detail

Patch Notes

Leaderboards

Challenge Me - Finally!

Patch Notes in Detail

Section Popular in Quick Access

Played by Most Players

Best Challenge for You

Best Gameplay

Photosensitivity Comfort Setting

Patch Notes in Detail

Holodance 1.0 (Official release, Feb 28, 2020)

Holodance 1.1 and 1.2 (Ninja Updates I told no one about)

Holodance 1.3 (released yesterday)

New Teaser and New Trailer

Song and Beatmap Ratings

YUR.watch to Maximize Your Fitness

Game Progression and Leaderboards

Play Session Stats

Rich Presence on Steam and Discord

More Done, and More to Come

A Little Bit of VR Rhythm Game History

Spooky Town

New Avatar System

Modding

Spooky Town

New Avatar System

Modding

So much other new stuff

Where are we going next?

Update Highlights

Chronological Changes List

Settings / Themes / Game Mechanics / Presets

Gun Mechanic

New Slider Visualization

OctaDrop Theme

Improved Handling of Tempo Changes

Backend Server

Scoring: Velocity and Directionality

Tracked Appendages:

Localization

Game Package Size

Lots of Bug Fixes and Unity Updates

Full Chronological Changes List:

A little Personal History

It’s done … well … almost!

One (fairly big) concern …

Full Release Notes

Full Release Notes