Project Heartbeat 0.7.0 is now available, this update is one of the biggest yet and is the culmination of an effort to bring some long-requested features to the game.
NEW CONTENT
NEW SONG: Blossoming Spell
Blossoming Spell is our first song from Impedance Eurobeat, our new partner, there are many more songs coming from this artist circle in the future. Blossoming Spell is an interesting catchy song. The chart was created by Twoncity.
CHANGES & NEW FEATURES
New leaderboards & leveling system
After many months of work the new leaderboards are finally available, this new system allows all workshop and PPD songs to be ranked. As an extra feature we have also added a level and experience system.
PPD Downloader
A new tool to automatically download PPD charts from their URL has been added, this is an experimental tool at this time (and performance isn't great) but I hope it's useful to someone.
Audio Volume Normalization
Audio normalization has been added through a new rust module, this makes all songs sound like they have the same volume.
Loading Screen
The game now features a new loading screen, this loading screen is used to have some time to do the audio normalization and other things.
Mouse UI
The ability to use the mouse to navigate most menus has been added, some menus still don't entirely work but for most usual tasks such as playing songs should be working perfectly.
Song Cache
Songs are now cached, this decreases startup times by storing song metadata in a cache file, the same goes for audio normalization.
youtube-dl error handling
youtube-dl now shows errors when they happen, we have also switched to a fork of youtube-dl that is still in development after the RIAA's unlawful takedown of the main youtube-dl repository earlier this month
New UI scaling and styling & note changes
The UI has been changed to be prettier, this includes design and scaling changes, the scaling should now be consistent so that users with higher and lower res screens will see the game with the same element sizes.
The main menu has also been changed, with new elements and the removal of the music player (a pop-up now replaces it).
The basic PlayStation notes have also been changed with a different design and sizes based on your feedback.
The sliders now have a new hit effect with stylized stars.
DSC importing
Project Heartbeat is now able to load DSC files from FT and M39s from within the editor, with more game formats support to follow in the future.
It was planned to have the possibility of simply pointing the game to a legally-obtained copy of those games to load it automatically (including mdata) but this wasn't ready, although it's still possible to use this feature through command line arguments if you want so ask around in the discord for more info on this.
Nintendo Switch homebrew port
An experimental port of the game for Nintendo Switch has been added, this is fairly broken and won't receive any official support but feel free to use it, check the text file in the game's folder for more info.
Other fixes & changes
- Fix custom song WAV loading not properly using the file's mixrate and stereo data.
- Change great and excellent thresholds to 90 and 95.
- Use scrolling labels for song titles in a lot of places.
- Add missing logo to song list preview.
- Fix UGC download message error.
- Fix slide chains in multi with other notes (I hate you a tiny bit).
- You can now precisely place notes in the editor by pressing shift + arrow keys.
- Also, there are now labels that show the current time in the timeline.
- The note ratings are now drawn beneath the note if the note is too high.
- PPD notes that are too close to each other (10 ms range) are now merged into multis, this is because in PPD multis don't really have to happen at the same time, yeah I don't get it either.
- You can now hide the artist name so that only the logo is shown.
- Editor selection limits have been removed
- Fix an issue related to voted items breaking leaderboard and result entering.
- Sliders now vibrate the controller.
Future
I'm much better mentally, I started taking anti depressants, I still plan to work on this game, sales are going decently well so I'm confident in working more on the game.
I have obtained permission from a local japanese-themed EDM musician to use his music, more info will follow soon.
I haven't touched the Xbox port yet, I'm trying to find ways to make it without having to write an all-new DX11 renderer, probably with ANGLE.
I have cancelled work on the new game for the time being.