Here we are again.
0.12 is ready, this update is pretty big, it also comes with some big news, off we go:
New song: Going my way (DJ Timotei EDIT)
A new song licensed from the Eurobeat circle Takanashi Kobo, this song has been charted by Yahoo and illustrated by Reixart.
Website and user rankings
Project Heartbeat now has an official website, this includes web based leaderboards and user rankings a la osu, the ranking system's points have been tentatively named pp (for funny reasons).
Do note we want to revisit and probably redo this algorithm eventually, as it didn't perform quite as expected so a bespoke solution is gonna be needed.
You can find the website at ph.eirteam.moe
Steam Deck support
While we weren't among the lucky few to get a devkit, but we managed to get the game ready for Steam Deck anyways through some black magic (and some new Steam SDK releases). It will now use the new text input features of SteamOS 3.0 where available.
Another features include better scaling of the menus in general, particularly for the main menu.
Big picture mode gamepad text input support
When running the game inside Steam Big Picture you can now use the keyboard whenever you have to type something.
Controller overhaul
As part of the aforementioned deck support we have updated how the controller support works.
The selected controller is now the first one we detect an input from, when a controller is being used the mouse gets hidden.
Song search
What took you so long? - Kazuhira Miller, probably
h264 mainlined
After some investigation I discovered that neither my country nor my closest neighbor (France, unfortunately) recognize software patents, thus I've taken the decision to mainline h264 support for PPD migration.
Ordinary songs will continue to use vp9 for the time being, in case we have to remove it, but I don't think we will.
Previously you had to install a plugin, hopefully this simpler solution will make transitioning easier.
Editor shortcut remapping
You can now remap most shortcuts in the editor
Load time improvements
Load times have been greatly improved across the board by removing some 4D chess code I accidentally added, song load is instant most of the time, and audio normalization is cached, so even if the first load isn't instant subsequent loads should be.
GLES2 improvements
Some minor fixes have been made to make GLES2 support better for those that need it.
Rewritten main menu music playback
The code used to playback songs in the main menu has been made more reliable and more performant, now audio normalization is used where available, else it uses a compressor to try and keep volume under control.
Updated localization
Most localization files for catalan and spanish have been updated
Direct Joystick Access fixes
Last update we introduced direct joystick access, which allows controls to behave in a nicer way by combining the two axis of a joystick for detection, this didn't really work well so it was relegated to an optional feature, new changes and bugfixes should make it now better although some issues have been found that prevent it from becoming the default yet.
ShiftJIS support for PPD zips
When downloading PPD charts you may have noticed it sometimes failed to find the data.ini even though it was there.
This was caused because the file names were encoded in an encoding system known as ShiftJIS (JIS stands for Japanese Industry Standard) this encoding is fairly exotic in the west but very common in japan, at least years ago (everyone seems to finally have agreed on UTF-8).
The game will now try converting the raw file name data into ShiftJIS if it fails to decode it as UTF-8, which should be nice.
Editor changes
A bunch of editor changes, courtesy of lino.
Add X/Y snap for grid notes
You can now slide around notes in a straight line by pressing shift while dragging them
Practice mode stats in playtest
The practice mode stats have been added to playtest in the editor
Autoslide option
Added an autoslide option to make slide spacing be correct
More per-song editor settings
More editor settings will now be saved when you save your song:
- Snap to the timeline
- Show video
- Show BG
- Show grid
- Snap to grid
- Grid resolution
- Autoarrange HV separation
- Autoarrange diagonal separation
- Use stage center for transformations
- Angle circles from the inside
- Circle size
- Circle separation
- Advanced circle mode
Use mipmaps on loaded images
Some mipmapping, filtering and other fancy stuff is now used when loading transparent things such as circle logos and any other gaphic, this is likely broken on some renderers for various complicated reasons, so please let me know if your images come up black so I can add exceptions.
Anti-cheat
After some digging I found some undocumented APIs that allowed me to retrieve metadata from the workshop uploaded by the game on the server-side, this has lead to the development of an anti-cheat solution that's not invasive. It isn't perfect, but not even invasive anti cheat is perfect so you can be sure I am not stealing your Maki Nishikino images.
Hold scoring changes
In order to make holds more consistent and less complicated, the score is now counted from (Note Time - Fine Timing Window).
Menu sorting changes
Difficulties within a song will now be ordered by stars, makes more sense.
Credits menu
A new credits menu has been added to options, this will show people who contributed to the game as well as some legalese. There is also a pretty neat surprise if you scroll all the way down on the "Game" section.
Bug fixes & minor changes
* e96a9d4a - Fix editor error when freeing (hace 8 semanas)
* c339fe7f - Include audio loudness in HBSong when saving (and make use of it) (hace 8 semanas)
* cd89e6b6 - Hopefully fix last subscribed sorting being broken when a song is updated (hace 8 semanas)
* d9ceb1a8 - Add audio nromalization data to all built in songs (hace 8 semanas)
* a8c5192e - Fix highest score not saving (hace 7 semanas)
* 916666ae - Remove yield that caused stall when returning to menu (hace 7 semanas)
* 6b05b942 - Fix slide chain multis in editor (hace 6 semanas)
* 3802e579 - Hide multi laser for weird multis when hit (sustains and slide chains) (hace 6 semanas)
* ce43c9f1 - Fix slide note scoring inconsistencies (hace 6 semanas)
* 0c4040ce - Fix NX-switch controller mode being used outside of the Switch (hace 5 semanas)
* 9d8cd77b - Saner defaults for lyrics (hace 5 semanas)
* 469c527d - Remove unused virgin eirexe achievement (hace 4 semanas)
* dfd9c68c - Fix expressionrunner performance bullshit (hace 4 semanas)
* 7c0c1ef8 - Ensure unique resource_paths in ResourcePackLoader (hace 4 semanas)
* 8034c611 - Move OptionControlsSection to use UniversalScrollList (hace 4 semanas)
* 9f5084fb - Remove remaining uses of legacy HBScrollList (hace 4 semanas)
* 715cd6f7 - Add some experimental jitter improvements (hace 4 semanas)
* 769a38e4 - Fix expressionrunner error logging (hace 4 semanas)
* 8aa05957 - Make expressionrunner cast to HBTimingPoint instead of HBNoteData (hace 4 semanas)
* 6c1f0f3c - Fix clear bar color in GLES2 (hace 4 semanas)
* 28798742 - Add extremely hitler nazi song verification (verify disallowed file types and subfolders not existing) (hace 3 semanas)
* cdc9a18c - Enable encoding text resources to binary to save space (hace 3 semanas)
* 23f8c77d - Cancel workshop preview image requests when it is safe to do so (hace 2 semanas)
* e186cca1 - More steam error handling (hace 13 días)
* a6b36811 - Fix GUI misalignment (hace 9 días)
* c029eec2 - Fix seeking issues when not using system clock (hace 9 días)
* 6e391e17 - Remove is_on_steam_deck() requirement for GamepadTextInput as per valve's recommendation. (hace 9 días)
* c5c466dc - Fix ending of songs without end_time in BackgroundMusicPlayer (hace 9 días)
* 136659d0 - Fix ACHIEVEMENT_PERFECT_BUILTIN (hace 3 días)
* dec02754 - Update all official songs with hashes and new meta (hace 3 días)
* 98f5a2df - Universal scroll list consistency fixes (hace 2 días)
* 744408c4 - Fix scrolling from top to bottom (hace 2 días)
* 04c35c48 - TTN 2019 chart changes (hace 2 días)
* f37fa92e - Some label overflow changes (hace 6 horas)
* 02b8da27 - Sanitize composers, writers, vocals arrays on set (hace 6 horas)
* 6dccf1f3 - Release holds when the song ends before the hold is finished (hace 5 horas)
* 652d15d6 - Fix vibration settings not saving (hace 23 minutos)
Future
3DPV system progress
In collaboration with the V-Sekai people I ported a tool called VMDMotion to Godot, although it's currently very slightly broken in the future it will finally allow VMD (mmd motion files) to be loaded into VRM avatars, which was always the dream.
Why not use MMD PMX files you may ask? Because MMD PMX files are not made for games, they are made for offline rendering most of the time, thus they may be too high poly to be used in a game while keeping good performance.
VRM models on the other hand are usually made for use in VR, thus they are high performance, this coupled with the extremely nice support from the godot_vrm plugin.
You can find info on my port of VMDMotion on our GitHub
Onto a new update!