So, this has been kind of an embarrassing one, tbh: I love Mixed Reality, a lot, and we have done plenty of Mixed Reality videos in the past. But during development, I don't always get to to MR-stuff ... and it turned out that both our 3rd party Mixed Reality integrations (LIV and MixCast) were both broken. Sorry everyone!
The other thing is something that during my vacation, I realized that Beat the Rhythm (and optionally also Holodance) might become much more interesting if we allowed beatmappers to define orbs for specific hands (as it was introduced by Audioshield), and specific directions (as it was introduced by BoxVR). Obviously this doesn't mean that we'll drop our orbs that you can take with any hand, in any direction ... but the "new thing" is not even an orb anymore. It's modeled as an octagonally shaped drop:
While we may still polish the design, the idea should be quite obvious: Due to the drop-like shape (which has direction), which is emphasized by the outline, the direction is immediately obvious without needing arrows or anything like that. Also, if you have followed the development of Holodance for a longer time, you noticed that we added outlines around the circles because we had visibility issues in bright environments. This shape doesn't have those issues.
One thing you don't see here, yet, is that we can also place symbols for 2x, 3x, 4x, long combo, almost full combo and combo. Those will be very simple (two dots, three dots, four dots, like dice, and a more or less filled square) and will be placed depending on the direction so that they are always inside the dark area (and with the same color as the outline).
With osu! maps, in many maps, there are a lot of very short, straight sliders that never really worked well in Holodance (they were basically just orbs in terms of gameplay). Those will become directional drops. The others will be straight (like the center one). Also, we have 5 colors, so head, hands and feet can be "assigned".
A very early prototype of this new "orb theme" is in this build - and while this is quite early (don't play this with sliders or spinners, yet, it's broken for those), I think you'll like the "physicality" of the behavior.
Full Release Notes
- Orbs will be Drops: Well, not always, but a work in progress "orb" theme is now available in the Theme selection - it's called "Beat the Rhythm 2" and either play it with the Casual mechanic, or manually disable Sliders and Spinners if you want to try this.
- Added a Privacy button to Pause and Settings that for now lets you opt-out of Analytics and get the data that has been collected. Eventually, this will become its own area with more settings - especially our upcoming community features will be quite interesting in that regard.
- LIV SDK Integration: Updated to SDK version 0.1.1. Also fixed an issue with the foreground transparency layer.
- MixCast Integration: Fixed issue that the MixCast button didn't show up in Streamer Mode even when it should have showed up. The way this works: You need to have either a 3rd controller or a Vive Tracker, or a driver that emulates that third controller / tracker active. Then, when you activate Streamer Mode, and activate the "Mixed Reality" camera, the MixCast button will appear.