Time Dilation
According to the theory of relativity, time dilation is a difference in the elapsed time measured by two observers, either due to a velocity difference relative to each other, or by being differently situated relative to a gravitational field.
Source: Wikipedia
Holodance is now a serious game. Very very serious. About physics. You are divine - you have full control of time. Watch this:
https://gaming.youtube.com/watch?v=lA3rkI3PF0U
How can you experience Time Dilation first hand in Holodance? When you groove naturally with the music while catching orbs, time passes normally - but when you slow your hands down, time slows down with them. If you hold your hands still, time almost completely stops. As you can imagine, this opens up quite a large range of new approaches to how you play our rhythm game. It's all about style.
And time dilation also works the other way: When you wildly swing your arms, it's like fast-forward. So you can make slow songs more fun this way, too.
The Time Dilation mechanic works especially well with our laserblades because while we do track rotational velocity as well for the score bonus, it does not influence time. So you can do some really tricky advanced moves while playing with rhythm and time.
Local Music: Better Location Mapping, Better Difficulty Presets
Important: If you have had local music set up for a little while, you need to do "Full Rescan" one time to make the 5 different difficulty levels / beatmaps show up for each song. Keep in mind that local music is still experimental / early access^2, so things like recently played, favorites or leaderboards don't work, yet. But I believe the algorithm is very close to "finished" (these things are never finished - but finished enough for now ;-) ).
Better Difficulty Metric
We had some pretty nasty bugs in our difficulty calculation (for a little while, the minimum difficulty was 1.6, while it should have been 0.0). Those are now hopefully all fixed. Difficulty is a really important metric because it determines your skill level, and your skill level will eventually unlock all those funky new features like the laserblades, time dilation, and soon guns.
At the moment, you can still access all of those easily via Settings / Style / Themes. We won't make unlocking those super-difficult because we really want you to play with all of Holodance. But some of those mechanics are more challenging and you need to have the skill level with our regular gameplay mechanics to actually have fun with them. Playing those too early will be just frustrating.
Full Release Details
- Local Music: Added new and improved version of location mapping.
- Play Sessions: Now linking to the new osu! beatmap listings instead of the old one.
- Local Music: Fixed bug that unchecking "Auto" would not remove the procedural maps because they were still recognized as "osu".
- Local Music: Added safeguard against the recursive search delivering fewer (e.g. zero) results while the "flat full search" delivered all results.
- Difficulty Calculation: BPM, Duration, Orb Count and Slider Count difficulty values are now multiplied with the average distance between orbs to weigh them based on that value. That way, long or fast beatmaps where most orbs are very close to each other no longer result in high difficulties.
- Difficulty Calculation: Fixed a very nasty bug that removed distance and average distance from the difficulty.
- Velocity Tracking: We previously used real time instead of scaled time for the time tracking, and scaled time instead of real time for velocity tracking, which can cause trouble when we mess with time, which we already do in Psychedelic Mode (Bullet Time), and will do even more with an upcoming mechanic.
- Velocity Bonus: Tweaked bonus so that slow movements will be completely ignored, and faster movements will be more rewarded now.
- Mechanic Modes: Added Time Dilation - your controller movement determines how fast time passes. For now, you can always activate Time Dilation in the Themes selection - eventually, this will be one of the unlockable game mechanics and you will be able to combine it with other mechanic mods (e.g. Laserblades or Guns).