Work on Story Mode: Experimental Area
This is the first release after my vacation, so it's comparatively small. We currently have a team of animators working on polishing the existing animations in Story Mode (Levels 1-3), and completing the animations for the remaining levels (4-12). In case you missed it, here is a little preview video of how this will roughly look (we won't you do a full 360° turn, of course, but it was fun for this prototype):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=42TTH_igsUU
You can actually even already play this by entering the "Experimental" section. This is really just for testing; especially the desert level in this area has some really intense bugs (dragon jumps "right on you" when the music should start ... and it doesn't start). The challenge for me, at the moment, is finding the right balance of working on the song browser and making sure the animators can continue working without interruptions. Part of that is doing some playtesting now and then ... but to make this really work I also had to redesign a system, which required some extra-coding.
Streamer Mode Updates
In the video above, you may notice another change ... at least if you ever had a closer look at our "Streamer Mode": That's an area on the flatscreen UI that lets you set things up for streaming or recording gameplay videos. There are three noteworthy changes here:
- You can now set the time for each camera in "Switch Cams in the Rhythm", in "bars". So, when you play a song at 120 BPM, 1 means "this cameras stays for 2 seconds" (which is four beats, each taking 0.5 seconds). 16 means 32 seconds. At 180 BPM (much faster song), 1 would mean 1.5 seconds and 16 would mean 24 seconds. More on that in a second.
- We have a few more cameras, and have made some of the cameras follow the gameplay.
- We have fully integrated MixCast into that system.
We also updated the MixCast SDK to 1.4 final.
Here's a rough video that shows what you can now do in Streamer Mode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4mGgjCqX0g
Make sure to read the description for a little background ... or join the discussion on Reddit.
Eventually, Streamer Mode will let you produce complete (and hopefully quite awesome) videos by playing a single session, with little need for post-production. As all of this is rendered in addition to what you see in VR, you will need a very powerful machine for this. But it's a huge time-saver.
Leaderboard Events done right
The implementation for the leaderboard events we have had in the game until today was actually "just for testing". That's why we didn't check for the number of entries in the leaderboard. Apologies for this sometimes being a little annoying, and thanks to Cookie Rookie for the reminder to finalize that.
Here's how this works now: Top 1 requires 5 players in the leaderboard, Top 3 requires 10, Top 10 requires 20, and the "rank improved" event requires that the leaderboard has at least 30 players (not a lot of leaderboards currently have this; and these events are only triggered for osu! beatmap leaderboards). We may remove the "improved" event and increase the number of minimum players for each event.
Let us know what you think in the forums!
And just as a quick reminder (because I completely forgot this myself ;-) ): When you get one of those fireworks and don't want to wait until it's complete - just press the trigger for about a second. This is our "gesture" to skip stuff and skipping works for fireworks ;-)
Full List of Release Notes
- Changed level loading procedure and sending the "LevelActivated" event a little later then before, when the level has been fully loaded and the compositor has faded back in. That way, we should no longer miss certain events (like the beginning of the flight of a dragon :wink: ).
- Updated to Unity 5.6.3p1
- Story Mode: Major "under the hood" work for the new dragon animations. These are coming soon to Levels 1-3, but levels 4 and 5 are also making really nice progress.
- MixCast: We have moved the MixCast UI to the "Streamer Mode" section of the UI because that's really where it belongs. Also, we integrated MixCast to the automatic camera switching, so you can now have Holodance automatically switch between pure in-game 3rd person cameras and MixCast Mixed Reality, all perfectly on the rhythm of the music. Switching to MixCast Mixed Reality still causes a little stuttering; this will be fixed in a later release. (edited)
- Cleaned up the "Streamer Mode" UI. This is not the full UI redesign, yet, but we finally added a setting for how long each camera is kept active before switching to the next. These are "bars", so at a song with 120 BPM, 1 means 2 seconds, and 8 would mean 16 seconds. At a song with 180 BPM, 1 would be 1.5 seconds, and 8 would be 12 seconds.
- Removed the "Networking Setup"-Button for now because the old networking approach is fairly broken and hasn't been tested for a long time. There is a new networking implementation coming fairly soon which will let you play in various multiplayer modes both on local networks and via normal online-multiplayer.
- Created a "timed ring buffer" that lets us apply movements from one object to another object with a specific time delay. This was necessary to make the target area behave correctly with the new dragon animations but is also really powerful to do other fun things (like compensate for Web cam latency, or network latency).
- Added several new cameras in Streamer Mode including some that follow the action. Streamer mode has just become much more powerful!
- Fixed a bug that sometimes caused a white rectangle with a black circle to appear around orbs that were not caught, in the companion Window (this never happened in VR but was annoying for recording gameplay footage directly from the Unity editor).
- Story Mode: The cloud that Vayusah sits on at the beginning in Level 2 is now slowly blown away with the wind. This solves an issue we've had for a very long time where orbs coming from where the cloud was would be really hard to see.
- Removed "Beatmap Editor Preview" from level selection area. This can currently not be selected because it broke when we took the main scene apart. This will return once we continue working on the beatmap editor.
- Added a section "Experimental" where previously, the beatmap editor was (to your left, in the main level selection area). This has the new dragon animations, in particular the dance animations. This is heavy work-in-progress, so expect strange things to happen (like the dragon jumping from one place to another, or ending up far from the player and facing away from the player after a song). But this gives you the opportunity to preview things and give feedback (like how do you feel about the gameplay with the new dragon dance animations).
- Updated MixCast SDK to final 1.4
- Store Mode: Fixed issue with "disableMovement" which we have introduced for the very intense sections in Level 3, Track 3 and 4, to prevent adding movement and rotations on top of really intense gameplay with an onslaught of orbs. This prevented the target area from properly following the dragon in our current Level 2 dancing animations test.
- UI: Fixed headlines for Comfort Settings (previously had "Style Settings", which was wrong) and Gameplay Settings (previously had "Expert Settings", which was old).
- Leaderboard events: These were still missing checks to make them "meaningful". Before, you'd get the "Top 1 event" even if you were the only player in the leaderboard. Now, Top 1 requires 5 players in the leaderboard, Top 3 requires 10, Top 10 requires 20, and the "rank improved" event requires that the leaderboard has at least 30 players (not a lot of leaderboards currently have this; and these events are only triggered for osu! beatmap leaderboards). We may remove the "improved" event and increase the number of minimum players for each event. Let us know what you think in the forums!