Welcome to Project Heartbeat 0.16, after three months in development hopefully it will have been worth the wait.
This update is probably going to be the final big feature update to the game, as the focus now remains on getting more content in, bugfixing and polish, hopefully the new changes are to your liking.
The update is also not as big as other updates, because most of the work has been on big things with far reaching consequences (like the new version of the audio engine). The last few months have been hard, I spent around a month working hard on the game on big stuff such as the MM+ loader. Then I spent another month mostly bed ridden and finally spent a whole month trying to pick up a car.
It's been a terrible summer and I hope to leave it behind.
Anyways, let's get to the new stuff.
NEW CONTENT
New Song: Confession
A new song from Takanashi Koubou, this very nice song was charted by resident idol enjoyer Yahoo, the artwork was made by David Revoy for his webcomic Pepper & Carrot, which we are using because the comic is creative commons licensed, check it out.
The song is composed by TTL, sang by Kanata and written by LUNA.
NEW FEATURES / CHANGES
Shinobu Z
A few updates ago I shipped the first version of Shinobu. Shinobu is our Open Source bespoke audio engine designed with rhythm games and other low latency applications in mind, powered by the great miniaudio library.
Shinobu was very well received by the community and made the game's foundations so solid some might argue that, as a rhythm game engine, Project Heartbeat is less prone to issues than some commercial titles such as Project DIVA MegaMix+
After the success of Shinobu I set out to engineer a reworked version of the audio engine, the main goals of this design project were reducing memory usage and increasing memory safety, thus augmenting reliability and preventing crashes caused by the engine.
This was once again a worthy endeavor, as Shinobu Z is now included in update 0.16, this update achieves higher levels of memory safety and performance while using less memory. For this he API has been completely reworked to allow binding songs to the Godot scene tree, among other things.
Overall, you should expect a 10% improvement in memory usage and reduced loading times for songs in the song list and in the game itself.
Project DIVA MegaMix+ loader
In may of this year our colleagues at SEGA released Project DIVA MegaMix+ on Steam which has achieved positive reception.
Because of how similar the gameplay styles and due to how some costumers enjoy playing both games based on their different respective strengths Project Heartbeat now includes the ability to load content from Project DIVA MegaMix+ through the new MegaMix+ content loader in update 0.16. This new functionality can load the full song list of a legally purchased copy of the game so you can enjoy playing with your content in a different engine. This is similar to playing OpenTTD or using an emulator such as CEMU.
This system reads the files as they are, without modification, and even supports loading content designed to work with DivaModLoader. We hope you enjoy both games to their full extent.
The loader uses the Steam API to find your installation of MegaMix+ and verify ownership of the game, this is just a simple ownership check done by steam itself and doesn't involve Denuvo or any other similar technology.
Furthermore, through playing Project DIVA MegaMix+ content on portable systems such as the Steam Deck one can obtain longer battery life, as Project Heartbeat uses very little battery due to it not having 3D animations and using an engine that was designed for low power devices such as the PSP and the Nintendo DS, the battery usage is so low the default FPS on the deck is set to 120 FPS, yet it maintains 4-5 hours of battery life from a full charge.
Audio normalization system rework
The code for audio normalization has been modernized and improved, this should yield much faster audio normalizations.
Streamer mode
A lot of Project Heartbeat players tend to play the game on stream, for this we have added a new feature that we hope will be able to enrich their streaming experience for them and their followers.
The new streamer mode is a simple but effective option that allows exporting to files both cover art and background art right from the game as you are playing it. This allows you, the streamer, to display both artwork and currently being played song information right on your streaming interface.
If we ever move to Godot 4.0, an option to open another window to show extra stats of the current gameplay session to your viewers might be added, but for the time being please enjoy the new functionality.
We have also released a simple guide that explains how to use it, you can check it here.
Audio downloader rework
One of the major complaints we got from gamers was the rudimentary nature of it. We agree.
Introducing: The new audio downloader, this is a major improvement over the old system, since it now handles the downloading of song media inside the game itself, thus being able to give you feedback about the status of the download, simultaneous downloads, better error information and more.
The system continues to use youtube-dl internally to obtain the information required for downloading the data, but the rest is handled by the game itself.
As this is a highly experimental feature, we ask for some patience while we sort out the inevitable bugs with it.
Game over chibi Aiko
We thought that we would give the health system a bit more personality by including a crying Aiko when the random game over quotes are shown.
Option to clean unused and deleting song media
You can now delete the song media from each song's pregame screen, and delete all unused media from options -> content inside the options menu.
Other minor changes and bugfixes
- Fallback to default user directory when the user specified content path does not exist.
- Add support for using PageUp/PageDown in the song list.
- Fix skin editor applying clear bar colors wrongly
- Fix YoutubeDL cache saving issues
- Add new YTDL downloader code.