At last! If you have been following the news closely, you saw that I spent a lot of time on V0.9.0b6, with nine builds with incremental bugfixes, polishing, quick fixes, most of them delivered only to the alphadev branch, and some of them going to the beta branch. The last upgrade to the default branch was almost a month ago - so quite a bit has been happening.
Most importantly, I upgraded to Unity 2017.4. If you're wondering why this update has a massive 1.6 GB - that's why! Unity 2017.4 does open up some new possibilities (if you use Oculus and/or Windows MR, this upgrade was a major steps towards native support, even though there is still quite a bit more work to do - to be clear, obviously, Oculus support was possible in much earlier versions of Unity, but the recent versions have seen major improvements to what is supported in native Unity APIs).
Gun Mechanic Polishing and Radial Orb Sources
One thing that was really annoying with the gun mechanic was that due to the orbs coming in from a screen, aiming was unnecessarily challenging. Originally, our orb spawning was designed to be from the extension of a straight line between your chest and the "ideal impact point" and for quite a while, doing the more parallel lines was actually just hacked in. Obviously that old approach is much more suitable for the gun mechanic, so we restored it.
There is a little problem with that: Not all environments even have room for orbs or drones coming from "almost all directions". So there is now a fallback to revert to the orbs coming from a screen or specific object, if necessary.
The way this all works internally is by having different "Grid Styles" and with the non-gun modes (which require a more distant "Grid Style" that cannot be used with the other modes), you can now select 4x3 (that's the default), 4x2 (that's the one we use for Story Mode) and a "tall 4x3" which is useful if you have your feet tracked because it has orbs coming all the way down.
Plus, you can also activate radial mode for all game mechanics (if the environment has enough space - most have, Sci-Fi Attack, Sci-Fi Tunnels, Robots Attack and Full 360 Craze being the exceptions, all conveniently to your right in the selection area).
Here's a video of the radial orb sources:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fAUs6y-KNbI
This is currently all set up in Settings / Style / Themes, which also has an option to disable the laser sight for the guns. This was requested by digitaldocc about six weeks ago, and I originally thought this wasn't even gonna work. Well, I guess this shows I'm not much of a "gun guy": It actually works really well, and I probably won't ever switch the laser sights back on again. Thanks for the request - I have learnt something!
Game Mechanics Preset Settings
Punching orbs is very different from blocking laserbeams with laserblades, and both of these are extremely different from shooting guns. We have a lot of configuration options to adapt to the different mechanics and a few of those, we already automatically set up when you select a different mechanic (you probably noticed, for example, that we switch to other orb theme ... or that sliders and spinners get automatically disabled when activating laserblades or the gun mechanic).
Those automatic settings are now polished. In particular, all the guides are disabled when the laserblade mechanic is activated, and we've increased the time for the orbs when the gun mechanic is active (I even had this set to 8 beats / fourths but that eventually seemed a little too slow ... but try it) ... because, you can still change all settings after you have selected a game mechanic to play with. This whole area will get a lot more love - but one step at a time.
Small Things, Big Difference (I hope)
The audio preview in the Music Library was very annoying, because it cut in and out abruptly. This is much softer now, but still quick. It's still cut off at the end after the 10 second preview time - that's something I'll eventually also fix but it's a little more involved.
One change that you may or may not like is in Story Mode, and related to the work we did on the "Target Grids" (where the orbs have their ideal impact points): This was tilted downwards. Now it's straight. I like it better - but do you, too? Please give feedback (if you play Story Mode at all).
The following one already was in the beta-release notes, but for the sake of completeness:
Bullet Time 360 Pans in Holodance
https://vimeo.com/265579078
Cameras that are fairly close to the player now have an "auto 360 pan" feature that gets triggered when time slows down. This is obviously inspired by Bullet Time in Matrix. We had a much worse version of this before, this is the second iteration ... it won't be the last (eventually, we'll use Cinemachine with paths for a more natural and fluid camera movement).
Full Release Notes - Since Last Beta
- Story Mode Environments in Free Mode: From a very old prototype, we still had a behavior that at the end of a session, the "dragon" would be moved to 20° up (from the player perspective). In Free Mode, when using any of the Story Mode environments, this had the nasty effect of moving the target grid up at the end of each song. Not anymore.
- Target Area Styles: We've had several variations in the game for a little while but only implicitly switched between the standard 4x3 and the "far style" for the gun mechanic. Now, we let you select one of three different options in the Theme settings (for punching orbs / laserblades; gun only supports "far", and the others don't support "far", so you can't select far - it is automatically selected when you activate the gun mechanic).
- Radial Orb Sources are Back: We've had it in the very earliest prototypes but then moved to letting them orbs come from dragon's hands and later eyes, then, in Free Mode, from a rectangular screen. This proved very bad for the gun mechanic - so now, in any environment that has enough space, you can let the orbs come "radially" from the direction where it's also landing. Kind of hard to put in words, just give it a try.
- Story Mode: Straightened out Target Area. We've had a rather uncomfortable angle for the Target Area in Story Mode (IMHO), straightened this out. This way, instead of the orbs coming roughly towards your solar plexus, the should now come more towards your chest or a little above. Please give feedback on this one! We could easily change it to something in-between.
- Trippy Tunnels: Fixed tunnels being weird when you rotate your head (this was due to the TunnelFX update, which reverted my fix for this).
- Story Mode: Probably still due to the Unity 2017.4 upgrade, animations in Level 2 were broken. Fixed.
- Music Library: The audio preview cut in and out in a super-annoying way. Now it quickly fades in / out, which is much much much better. At last! It still cuts off at the end of the preview after about 10 seconds. So this will get another polishing round but it's already a major improvement, especially if you preview lots of songs.
- Gun Mechanic: Default BufferAheadQuarters now set to 8 - because having this slow makes a lot more sense ... then back to 4 because 8 seemed a little too long make the arrival time based on orb movement a little difficult for slower songs.
- Game Mechanics: For the laserblades mechanic, we usually don't want all the guidance but for the gun mechanic, we should have the impact points and the timer style "osu!" is really best. So, now we set everything up for best defaults for each mechanic. Of course, you can still change everything according to your likes once you have selected a mechanic (but this is still scattered across various screens - eventually, we'll do some major consolidation for this).
Release Notes from Second V0.9.0b6 Release on Beta
- Gun Mechanic: The laser sight can now be switched off in the Theme settings. Default is still on. Funny enough: I like it better without ;-)
- Simple Gun Orb Theme: While the drone orbs had a really nice "target locked" sprite, the simple "balloon" theme only had a circle that was actually kind of hard to even notice. Now the simple gun orb theme has the same target locked sprite as the drone theme.
- Environment The Desert: The color grading wasn't behaving properly in this level when flashes, saturation changes or hue shift from Psychedelic Mode were active. Fixed.
- Loading Screen: Fixed issue that loading texts hadn't shown up.
- World Position Offset: Change steps for world position offset from 10cm to 5cm because we've had players that needed more fine-grained control. Also increased the maximum offset from 30cm to 40cm. We're conservative with the offset because using a larger offset can give you trouble in Level 3, Story Mode, when the game moves the target area around.
Release Notes from First V0.9.0b6 Release on Beta
- Streamer Mode: Removed 360 Rotation camera and replaced with a rotation that works on any close camera. This is activated by checking "Time Dilation Rotation" in the Streamer Mode flatscreen UI. (edited) Streamer Mode: Made "Switch Cameras on Rhythm" persistent.
- Gun Mechanic / Drone Orb Theme: The explosions had a fairly annoying distortion that could cause discomfort in VR and didn't really look all that great. Removed.
- Laserblades (this was in 0.9.0b5): Added soft trails (instead of the ugly sharp ones) and added particle effects which are activated based on the current combo, as well as much improved "impact particles" which are based on the laserblades instead of the orbs
- Logging (this was in 0.9.0b5): Removed logging of when session were stored - this was just bloating the logfiles.
- Local Songs: Made configuration for local songs path and osu extra songs more robust against misconfigurations.
- Themes: Renamed "Easy Mode" to "Style Mode" because this mode lets you focus more on style.
- Themes: Added description to Time Dilation. Improved descriptions of different game mechanics.
- Style Settings / Guidance: Fixed issue that Impact Timers dropdown was not made interactable / non-interactable based on Impact Timers checkbox.
- Configuration Files: Added a file copy in addition to writing the string read from the file. We had a situation where the "copies" were empty with zeros, which should not happen if we directly copy the file. However, also keeping the string may give us useful debug information in cases of failure, so now we keep both.
- Ported to Unity 2017.4 ... and fixed too many issues to list (but some, I do list).
- Updated Hx Volumetric Lighting to 1.3.2
- Removed NAudio from project because we currently don't use it, anyways, and it has dependencies that make builds file in Unity 2017.4.
- Updated Volumetric Fog & Mist to 9.1
- Updated Tunnel FX 2 to 1.4.1
- Updated Relief Terrain Pack to 3.3l
- Upgraded to Unity 2017.4.1f1 (from 2017.4.0f1)
- Removed all UnityScript code from project.
- Updated TextMesh Pro to 1.0.56.2017.3.0b3
- Updated UniMerge to 1.10.3
- UI: Fixed very annoying issue that caused the laser pointers to behave really flaky with buttons and dropdown lists (this was introduced with Unity 2017.4, so this only went to alphadev).
- UI: Fixed even more annoying issue that caused the slider animations to be completely off (this was introduced with Unity 2017.4, so this only went to alphadev). This refers to the UI sliders and range sliders - there's a button to "pull the slider towards you" which makes it much easier to change the values because you don't move the handle at a large distance. Now the animation towards you is perfect, and the animation back is almost perfect.
- Moved project from Mono Runtime 3.5 to 4.6 (well, see below - we didn't stay with 4.6).
- Major cleanup / refactoring.
- Updated Unity Standard Assets: Utility, Prototyping, Particle Systems, Environments, Effects, Characters.
- Removed all compilation warnings!
- UI: Fixed issue introduced in earlier version of 0.9.0b6 that caused scrollbars to not react to clicking in the empty area.
- Fixed issue that controller textures came up all black; this was due to using .NET 4.6, solved by reverting to 3.5 for now.