We're ramping up for the Holodance V0.8.0 release, which is a fairly big one, so we've had quite a few "alpha/beta releases" for that one - here's probably the last one before that final V0.8.0 release.
New Environments
The new environments are currently in the "Experimental" area. There's three of them:
A Sci-Fi Tunnels environment ... it doesn't have Zombie or Aliens, so don't worry ... but this will eventually be a bigger thing with explorable areas. For now, it's just tunnels in 4 directions, and it has some bugs (like, missing/wrong textures, and preview stuff in the settings disappearing behind walls).
A new Sci-Fi Clubbing environment, which is really trippy. This is also early work in progress. It will look less confusing in the final version, and it will have areas to explore. The way exploration will work: By playing in an environment, you receive a score for that environment which unlocks new platforms to play from. Then, you'll be able to teleport to those platforms, to unlock the next area.
Finally, we now have Trippy Tunnels. This already reacts to combos and will eventually give you various themes to unlock.
Outlines
When you have played Holodance a lot, in different environments, and with different beatmaps, you probably ran into an issue that was super-annoying: Dark orbs in a dark environment, bright orbs in a bright environment ... and worst of all: Sliders with colors that aren't particularly visible in any given environment. I have known the the Slider visualization wasn't great and really needed a major redesign but recently, in a conversation on our Official Holodance Discord Channel, it became obvious that we don't need it "at some point in time" but right now.
Adding outlines to the orbs was really easy. The Sliders were major trouble, and I'm not satisfied with them, yet, but the foundation now is there, so it's just fixing the remaining issues.
New Song Browser - Preview
First of all: You cannot actually use the new song browser to play a beatmap, yet. That's why we still have it in the experimental area. But you can already get a feeling for how this new song browser will work.
It's a complete rewrite, where I'm using only a few good snippets of code from our old approach. In this current release, the filters work, text-based search works (still a little rough around the edges, but works), you can change the settings already ... but you cannot actually browse and select a beatmap.
But we're getting fairly close now. Expect something on the alpha-channel soon ;-)
Oh, and currently, the new song browser has no "back" button - so you need to use pause/settings to "Exit Environment" (just in case you don't know: You can always enter pause by pressing and holding the "Menu" button for about a second).
Full release notes for V0.8.0c13:
- Fixed UI bug that prevented UIs being correctly displayed on the flatscreen.
- New Song Browser: The song database is now loaded immediately in the background when Holodance is started up. When you open the New Song Browser before that process is completed, you'll still get the progress as usual - but that is very unlikely to happen. If there were any errors during loading, these will still show up in the song browser when it finally is opened.
- New Song Browser: Keyword based search V1.0 done. You can type using the SteamVR keyboard and will get Artists, Titles and Genres. Depending on how many results your search terms deliver, you either immediately get the results (if it's less than 8), or accumulated lists for Artists, Titles and Genres that you can browse into.
- Major improvements to the logic that gets the osu installation path and added entries in Configuration.json that let you override the path if the logic failed. Also, we have more verbose logging now to be able to figure out problems more quickly, in the case that any still arise.
- Fixed bug that caused left and right controller movements not being recorded.
- Updated Volumetric Fog & Mist to 8.0 (from Sep 05, 2017)
- Added three more environments, currently only in the "Experimental" area: Bonus-03-SciFiTunnels, Bonus-04-SciFiClub, Bonus-05-TrippyTunnels. These are all in early prototype versions but we have included them so you can already give them a try.
- Major updated for Bonus-03-SciFiTunnels. This is now getting fairly close to its final state.
- Added black/white circles around orbs to make them better visible against very dark and very light backgrounds.
- Applied a fix for the issue that caused the Slider paths to sometimes be all messed up (or at least tried to ;-) ).
- Fixed issue in experimental area, Level 5, Pritvitej didn't show up.
- Updated animations for Level 5; those are final now (except for the dancing animations which still need to be done almost completely new).
- Story Mode: Fixed issue that prevented state of all tracks already being unlocked in a level from being properly recognized.
- Gameplay Settings: Removed options "Appear at Orb Source" and "Appear Immediately in Target Grid" because the latter hadn't work for quite a while and doesn't really make sense, anyways.
- Fixed bug that GameplaySettings no longer showed up when the button was clicked.
- Changed default for "Slider Lines" to false because those never really looked good.
- Fixed bug where switching off the "Timing Lasers" in the middle of a session would cause unexpected behaviour (looking kind of like you hadn't switched them off, but not quite).
- Fixed strange artefacts in Trippy Tunnels.
- Fixed nasty bug that prevented orb themes from properly being shown.
- Fixed repeating Slider arrows in new Slider style.
- New Song Browser: Text Search, first level (showing results overviews) now works. We have included the current version as a super-early preview but it's not even at the point where you could start a song, yet. In fact, Text Search is currently the only thing that works - and even that only works for the first level (showing results overviews) - going deeper leads to nowhere. WIP ...
- New Song Browser: Added images for all areas - most of these are still placeholders, but it's now easy to replace those placeholders with the real images as soon as they are done by Antonia.
- New Song Browser: Filtering and searching now works. We can also very quickly switch between filtered and non-filtered, which is especially useful for the keyword search (if you have a keyword that only gives you no results when the filters are active, you'll usually want the browser to ignore the filters to give you at least some results).
- New Song Browser: Added "Info" and the most important settings, so now you can select whether or not you want to use your osu! local library, or the full library ... and also see if anything went wrong with auto-detection.
- New Song Browser: If anything went wrong, the song browser now starts up with the settings active, so you should be able to fix the issue quickly (using Full osu! library should always work).