So this release was primarily driven by an event we've had in Berlin about a week ago, at the Conrad Drone Champions League. We once again met a lot of great people, created a lot of video footage and showed the new song for upcoming Level 10 to the public for the very first time. The actual Level 10 from Story Mode currently isn't that great, so we've had players play it in Sci-Fi Tunnels which is also a really fitting environment for this dubstep-like track. Here's a video that also shows Mixed Reality mixed with our new Avatar System:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ttKEzy6hBhc
Speaking of the new Avatar system: This version has one known issue when you use the Avatar system in the Retro Clubbing level. Skin might disappear. I'm hoping to have a fix for that in the next version. We have also added one more Avatar, called Azeroid, who does not show much skin ;-)
So, most of the changes we have in this release are related to Streamer Mode, Mixed Reality and Party Mode. One interesting thing to note about this: When you use Party Mode, we now have tight integration with OBS.
But, there are also two really important changes to the Music Library: First, we have a lot more songs in there now (almost 12K and almost 60K beatmaps), and we now also have the statistical data about the beatmaps stored in the meta-data. This is the foundation for a much improved difficulty ranking that will land in one of the next releases.
We also cleaned up the level selection area for Free Mode quite a bit, I hope this won't confuse anyone but I think once you got used to the new layout, you'll agree that this is much better than before.
If you want to review Holodance, talk to us ... we have just added a feature to this release that makes this a lot easier than it was before.
- Music Library: Fixed issue with Refreshing / Rescanning library - this now works reliably.
- Music Library: Added metadata of ranked osu! beatmaps from June to November 2017. Now we're at 5,519 artists, 11,814 songs, 59,042 beatmaps. Previous, we had 5,252 artists, 11,216 songs and 55,236 maps. So we're nearing 12K songs, 60K beatmaps.
- Music Library: Added several new statistical values to our beatmap metadata and ran through the whole library to collect this data. Ran into several beatmap parsing errors (due to beatmaps having issues) that we now are robust against, so you can actually play a few more osu! beatmaps in Holodance that failed before.
- Avatar System: Added Avatar "Azeroid", who should be kind of gender neutral and is our first space soldier. Could be a human, could be an android. You can never know with these things.
- Free Mode: Re-arranged the environments to make more sense, also fixed some of the score thresholds to have a more sensible progression.
- Level Selection Area: Fixed bug that prevented settings from showing up properly, which is bad because this explains some things.
- Level Selection Area: Added more instructions to the "settings" screen.
- Fixed Skybox in initial loading screen (there was flickering when you looked back).
- Fixed Initial Loading screen that always showed "Virtual Clubbing", while this was actually the main Holodance scene.
- Streamer Mode: Re-Arranged UI Layout to be consume less space, and changed 2D GUI button to almost completely disappear when switched off.
- Streamer Mode: Removed "Take Screenshots" for now. This was not really meant to be used by people.
- Mixed Reality: Made parsing externalcamera.cfg a little more robust.
- Mixed Reality: Now handling camera "stuff" related to quadrant view in Mixed Reality using the CameraManager instead of trying to find all cameras.
- Streamer Mode: You can now fully disable Mixed Reality, regardless of technology used (standard quadrant view based on SteamVR Unity plugin, LIV Client, MixCast) by checking a checkbox. This can be useful if you mix parts where you use Mixed Reality, and parts where you only use in-game footage (no Mixed Reality).
- Streamer Mode: Added a camera that is based on the MR-camera, so when you have a tracker, you can now simulate an in-game camera with that tracker, just like you would with Mixed Reality - except you don't need a greenscreen setup (this works best when using the Avatar System for representing the player).
- Streamer Mode: Mixed Reality can now also be part of the sequence used by "Switch Cams in the Rhythm".
- Streamer Mode: Fixed issue that when using "Switch Cams in the Rhythm", you'd get a "weird camera" after "Dragon Perspective", regardless of which camera were taking part in this.
- Streamer Mode: Holodance can now talk to OBS and activate different scenes, depending on whether we're entering new player data in party mode (will show a waiting scene), or we are in Mixed Reality (e.g. taking LIV client output), or in regular "Streamer Mode". Also, recordings are now automatically started when in Party Mode.
- Mixed Reality: Added parameter "disableQuadrantView" to externalcamera.config. If you set this to True, the quadrant view will be completely disabled. This is useful if you use LIV Client or MixCast and don't want the quadrant view to pop up before you have activated either of the other solutions.
- Mixed Reality: Much improved integration of MixCast that now properly supports configuration via externalcamera.cfg (but currently no longer the setup via MixCast Studio which unfortunately doesn't seem to use externalcamera.cfg or support writing it). We can now switch quickly between MixCast and our new MR Tracked Cam to switch quickly between the real person or an Avatar.
- Shader Prewarming is now disabled by default and you have to explicitly enable it (This is on the flatscreen UI, click button "Show Extra Settings", then it's the first checkbox, top right of the screen, called "No Shader Prewarming". Default is now checked, so usually shader prewarming is disabled. Eventually, this will disappear - unless we find a good reason to keep it.
- Removed VRTK from project. We never really used it much and will eventually use the SteamVR Interaction system which seems to be a much better approach to what we need.
- Added a feature that I'd rather not talk about publicly. This is for people doing reviews. If you want to do a review, ask me, and I'll let you know about it. It's not totally hidden, so, if you look for it, you'll find it, and you'll know why I'm not putting it into the release notes.