The biggest change, and main reason why we will still keep this version on the beta-branch for a few days is that we have ported from Unity 5.6 to Unity 2017.4. The last two weeks, I mostly spent fixing issues due to that update, and trying some new features just to revert due to the trouble they caused.
But 2017.4 does open up quite a few possibilities, so I have no regrets. Also, if you're running on Ryzen architecture, this should fix a pretty nasty performance issue that was due to Unity's particle engine not working well with that architecture. So, you may want to try switching particles back on (if you had them disabled for performance reasons before).
Please try this version, it should not give you any troubles - but if it does, I'd love to hear about it (one issue I have just noticed: the texts during loading are currently not shown ... I have already fixed this a few times, will be easy to fix it again, so don't be concerned about that one)!
If you haven't opted in to a beta branch before, this guide will be useful: Opting In and Out of Steam Client and Product Betas. You can use either beta or alphadev, those are now in sync (we've had this version on alphadev for about a week, with a few updates already).
You may have noticed that we skipped the V0.9.0b5 release notes. Apologies for that. The reason: There really wasn't that much change, so we'll include those here.
Streamer Mode has one major new feature:
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 (includes 2 items from 0.9.0b5)
- 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.