Project Hearbteat 0.3.0 is now available for all to enjoy, this new update took longer than expected due to me suffering a thumb tendon injury.
NEW CONTENT
New artwork for Imademo 2012...
Due to external reasons the artwork for Imademo 2012 was left unfinished and is the oldest (and most unfinished) artwork in the game, Emmilly has been hard at work doing new art, this is probably one of her best works yet, and it shows.
NEW FEATURES
Extended notes
New note types are landing in PH, these are called extended notes. They create a different type of gameplay and in theory you shouldn't mix them with multi notes or holds, but I know you will so I made sure that they all worked together nicely.
No official charts use them (yet) but we will be releasing new songs with the new notes in the future.
Heart notes
Heart notes are like slides except they don't care about direction, you can even flick your stick up and down.
Double notes
Double notes require you to press the same direction on two buttons, if you are playing on a controller you would press d-pad left and Y or Triangle at the same time.
Heart notes can also be doubles, so you would have to flick two sticks in the same direction.
Sustain notes
Sustain notes require you to press the note on time and hold it, after that you will need to release the sustain on time.
How to play section
A new how to play section has been added to the main menu, this will give new users a rundown of what's in store for them.
New slide chain mechanics
Slide chains have changed, they now progressively turn blue when you hit them, so you can let go when all all blue and it will clear the slide automatically.
You can also hold the slide before the time to hit it comes to hit it automatically.
Favorites tab
Due to growing song libraries we've added the ability to add songs to a personal favorites tab.
New trails
Trails have been updated, they are now drawn in a hybrid fashion, the game creates a mesh for them and fills them incrementally using a shader, this new approach has not been implemented in multi-note lasers yet, but will eventually be used to improve performance of those as well.
The new trails also include anti-aliasing, working around a previous engine limitation, this makes the borders of the notes be much smoother.
We originally launched them shortly after 0.2.8 was released as a fully GPU solution, but it didn't work well, so I spent 4 days working on them for hours (which led to my injury) but I made it in the end.
Massive performance optimizations
A lot of changes have been made under the hood to make PH not only faster but also less prone to errors (specially around slide holds) and more consistent, I hope this upgrade is enough to allow people with the more modest computers to play the game.
I hit around 60 fps playing back 720p 30 fps video backgrounds on my dual-core Intel HD 3000 machine for reference.
New accessibility-friendly default keyboard settings
Accessibility is a recurring theme in Project Heartbeat lately, with the new note leading line features and the new timing circles replacing the clock arms.
This time we are shipping new saner keyboard defaults allow everyone to play the game one-handed, thanks in part to my wrist injury for the inspiration.
VP9 video decoding
PH now ships with statically linked FFMPEG to use VP9 video decoding, VP9 is one of the many modern open formats that are widely used in the web, YouTube for examples makes use of it together with AVC1, although it appears it will be superseded by AV1 eventually.
The reason to move to VP9 is the same as why most of the web moved to vp9 webms, H264 is a proprietary format, there was one point when Theora video and Vorbis audio inside Ogg containers were considered to be included in the web standard but were ultimately dropped after lobbying from proprietary format supporting companies.
This monumental stupidity on the W3C's part eventually led to the inclusion of Encrypted Media Extensions on the web standard, something that Netflix and co have used for evil.
This won't change how you use videos in the game, but it will require you to download them again, it is possible that it will make playback less CPU intensive and will make the videos take up less space, performance-wise VP9 is said to be tied with h265, but this is debatable.
Project Heartbeat metadata in PPD charts
In order to allow authors of PPD charts to release songs for both games you can now bundle Project Heartbeat metadata in your PPD charts, the game will pick this up automatically, in order to add them, simply add new entries to your data.ini file starting with project_heartbeat_ followed by the property name, so for the title it would be project_heartbeat_title
The following properties are allowed at this time: "title", "author", "preview_image", "background_image", "youtube_url"
EDITOR IMPROVEMENTS
There have been many changes to the editor, most are invisible, such as performance improvements, others are more visible, like the changes we will discuss now.
Chart offset tool
You can now move all notes and events in the timeline through the new offset tool in the tools tab.
Note copying/cutting and pasting
Last update we added the ability to copy note parameters from one note to other using the inspector, this has now been extended and it's possible to copy notes in the timeline using the shortcuts you are familiar with.
Custom content directory and song reloading
It is now possible to select where your custom content is gonna be saved and loaded from, this includes videos and manually installed songs.
You can also reload all songs by selecting the "Reload all songs" option.
Editor contextual menu
The editor now features a contextual right-click menu, this can be used to access some of the new features.
Note interpolation
This feature allows you to place notes in a straight line, with their separation being based on their hit time.
Simple place your earliest and latest note and select them together with the ones in between, when you apply the interpolate option to them they will be placed in a straight line, separated and ordered by their time.
Minor changes
- Add extreme to song metadata editor.
- Allow decimal steps for stars in metadata editor.
- Add Control+F shortcut to show FPS and video playback data.
- Add hold to scroll to song list.
- Add ability to disable video per-song.
BUG FIXES
- Fix youtube-dl sometimes not finding ffprobe on windows.
- Fix linux video download regression.
- Make some changes to how game starts are done to hopefully prevent startup bugs.
- Make sorting use lowercase.
- Fix instancing bugs causing score overwrites.
- Fix chart editor settings not loading properly under some cirucmstances.
- Fix BPM changes not working properly.
- Fix inputs breaking when restarting a song with them held.
- Fix and issue that cause holds to be dropped instantly under some circumstances.
- Do a hidden fire of the slide particles when the game is starting so that shader compile doesn't happen during gameplay.
- Add error message when attempting to join lobby with a song you don't have.
- Fix linux video download regression.
- Fix editor title pushing controls out of the screen