Watch Ruu Ruirize Holodance Live on Twitch Today
EDIT: In case you missed it, you're covered: After Show Reddit Posting with links to the video
The most important announcement for today is that we finally added the "Ruirized" achievement. The first time I ever saw Ruu aka Steffan Donal was when I found a video of Holodance where someone played a full osu! beatmap without using his controllers - only using his head. While this is fun and fairly easy with most native beatmaps that come with Holodance, osu! beatmaps with Sliders and Spinners are a different story.
So, when I saw him do it again, live on his stream on Twitch, I knew he had to get his own achievement in Holodance. You can already see it on our Steam achievements page - this is Ruu's most recent Avatar.
The tricky part was balancing this one right because it had to be significantly more difficult than I use My Head which we have already had in the game since Alpha 51.
So here's the criteria in full detail:
Play an osu! beatmap with OD (overall difficulty) of at least 3.5, that is at least one minute long. Catch at least 200 orbs, sliders or spinners (flying notes) with your head.
We do have a bit of tolerance: You can catch up to 4 flying notes with your left or right hand. This is to prevent small accidents from ruining it when you don't lay the controllers down before trying the achievement.
Of those 200 flying notes that you caught, more than 100 have to be orbs, more than 50 sliders and more than one has to be a spinner (so you have to pass at least two spinners). Your head has to move a distance of 3 meters while playing. We may still increase this later, but at the moment, the measurement is not reliable enough. Finally, you must not miss more than 20% of the orbs or 20% of the Sliders.
That last one makes it fairly hard. Too many Sliders missed: You fail. Too many orbs missed: You fail. All those stats are stored before the full stats of each session in the file GameData/PlaySessions.txt which you should find in your Holodance Steam folder (unless you have changed that path in Configuration.json).
Watch Ruu live today (Wednesday, July 5) on Twitch (7:45 PM UTC) when gets his own achievement in Holodance: Ruirize on Twitch
For the exact time, you might want to try this long link with a Countdown: The Countdown on TimeAndDate.com
Performance Improvements
Aside of this fun stuff, the primary purpose of this release was making sure that performance is flawless on all supported GPUs starting with 970. This should now be the case but we are still investigating occasional framedrops that occur on our 970 testing machine (which also has a fairly low-powered CPU). The main work was testing on different hardware, making adjustments, adding new settings, re-testing. We'll have a more in-depth performance report with some images soon.
The environment "Virtual Clubbing" now also has its own performance settings, which include an "intensity" slider for the intensity of the particle effects. That slider actually does not have an effect on the performance of the game - but it may have an effect on your performance because less intense may be also less distracting ;-)
All the Details
- Changed the quality base settings to name-based instead of index-based. This makes it much easier to e.g. add a PS4/PS4Pro setting and also add higher end settings.
- Tweaked some of the Level 1 980Ti performance settings because performance in level 1 with the 980Ti at its default setting actually wasn't that great. Now it is.
- Did quite a bit of research to compare performance of different GPUs and adjusted our preset groups accordingly: The 1070 is no longer with 980 / R9 390X but instead with 980 Ti, Fury and 1070. 1080 has a group of its own, and so does 1080 Ti.
- Updated to Unity 5.6.2p1
- Added Anti-Aliasing to adjustable quality settings.
- Added per environment renderScale multipliers. We have considered adding adaptive quality / adaptive super-sampling but at the moment, this is simply too broken to be of any use. Will check this again at a later point in time, just like DX12 and Vulkan (which also don't work with current Unity versions and current versions of OpenVR / SteamVR Unity plugin).
- Made loading scenes / environments more robust (this fixes an issue in Party Mode where the Virtual Clubbing level was not loaded correctly after finishing the story mode part of the demo).
- Made the lists in Dropdown-lists larger and the text bigger because it was both, very hard to read, and very hard to select.
- Now using a Dropdown for "Wave Resolution" instead of the Slider because changing this value does create a brief framedrop / hiccup that cannot be prevented. Using a Slider usually resulted in several hiccups in a row, which could be fairly annoying and disorienting. With the Dropdown, you can immediately select the resolution you want, and once you "click", you get the hiccup, so it's more predictable and therefore, more comfortable.
- Added an extra light in Level 01 / Paradise Beach so Pritvitej appears less dark ;-)
- Bloom is now only default on starting with the 1080 preset (no longer with the 980 Ti preset).
- Moved AMD Fury to "980" preset group. It has significantly worse performance in Level 1 than the 980 Ti.
- Removed highest level of vegetation in Level 1 for all presets except the 1080 Ti preset. You can still re-activate the dense vegetation but it does have a rather severe performance impact.
- Fixed an issue with new memory allocations during regular gameplay that could cause hiccups on lower-end machines.
- Performance Settings now always show the correct render resolution, even if you change supersampling in the SteamVR while the performance settings UI is active (it did update correctly when making any change to render scale before - but now it updates immediately when you make a change in the SteamVR settings).
- Turns out the main issue with performance really only was level one. In all other levels, we can easily keep supersampling at 1.0 and also have color grading enabled. In fact, now we can even have color grading enabled in level 1 / paradise beach. Changed the default accordingly.
- Fixed FileNotFoundException that gets thrown when externalcamera.cfg is not found (that is kind of expected).
- Fixed issues with UI and world rotations being rotated further and further when certain environments where entered.
- Fixed a whole bunch of bugs with the "old-style sliders" in Story Mode, Level 6, Track "DubAndOrgan" and Level 11, "Piano and Strings" and "Violins and Guitar". Finally, you can play all the tracks that are available in Story Mode again (and this is the last time I'll fix these before creating the in-VR beatmap editor at last).
- Changed position for head score bubbles because those were not visible very well.
- Added check for new achievement "Ruirized" - but not actually writing the achievement to Steam, yet. This still needs some testing.
- Fixed issue that caused the total valid distances to often be larger than the actually tracked distance.
- Made the lightshow in Virtual Clubbing much less dominant (we needed to switch from particle based noise to a noise texture due to a bug in Unity 5.6, so this is only partially intentional).
- Added level-specific performance settings for "Virtual Clubbing". Aside of switching off / on various lighting settings which do have quite a performance impact, this also lets you control the intensity of the particle audio effects, which may be distracting if set too high for certain songs (the logic does try to adapt to the intensity of the song but intense songs are still more intense visually than less intense songs).
- Holodance did not behave well in Free Mode, when the default folder was disabled in Configuration.json, and the extra folder was enabled. In this case, we don't need an osu! installation at all - just put osu! beatmaps into GameData/Songs/osu, and Holodance will automatically unpack them. There's a lot more coming with the new song browser but this was just a small fix for now, preventing Holodance from potentially running into a timeout (after a little while) and telling you to install osu! while you really don't have to (when you have edited Configuration.json appropriately).
- osu!Mania: Due to mania maps often having more than two orbs at the same time, and players only having two hands, those mania maps could not be properly played in Holodance (you'd never be able to full combo such a map). We have a tweak that prevents this from happening (used for tracks that had chords in Story Mode) and this tweak is now also applied to mania maps. If there are more than 2 circles within a 64th note (that's a 0.005 seconds at 187.5 BPM, which is kind of insane), the third circle will be ignored until that time has passed.
- Changed the default intensity for the audio particle effects in "Virtual Clubbing" to 0.5, so these are now only half as intense as before, per default. With many songs, when you go up to 1.0 (which you still can, of course), they get really bright and intense, which can be nice but it probably wasn't such a great default setting. Now it's more subtle by default.
- Added skipping to fireworks (at last). Now you can Skip the fireworks at any time and continue playing if you don't want to spend as much time enjoying the celebration of your skills.