Most important change with this release: We have activated HDR and tuned down some of the bloom and glowing effects. It still may be too much in some environments and also with the dragon stripe emission glowing. Let us know what you think (obviously, bloom has to be active in the performance settings, and this is an effect that has quite an impact on performance, so if you're on lower spec hardware, you'll probably want to avoid it).
This also has a little fix in Story Mode: The strip emission glowing didn't work for Vayusah in Level 2 - now it does ;-)
Another important change: Sliders are more forgiving now in terms of where you actually follow them. So being a little ahead or behind the sphere (on Z, which means back/forth) is okay now. I think this doesn't necessarily make the game easier but make it feel more fair and less frustrating. We'll have more work done to the sliders over time.
The gun mechanic has also been polished a little, and the previews in the Music Library should no longer cause performance issues (and also work much more reliably).
Also, we now have the meta-data of all ranked osu! maps from 2007 to 2018-03, so that's more than 12,000 songs now, and quite a bit more than 60,000 beatmaps for you to play with.
You can now also pull the Music Library to the flatscreen UI which may be useful to set up favorites (and soon playlists). This feature is still very raw and unpolished but I use it during development and felt it may be useful to you, too. Most importantly, you may have to restart the game after you pulled the UI to the flatscreen because pushing it back to VR seems to not work that well, yet (you may be able to fix that by pause / unpause but I haven't tried).
Also, we removed the "Holodance Impact Timer". This was really old, and causing trouble. Let us know in case you miss it. I think the other Impact Timers are all much better and spending time keeping that old thing working seemed like I'd better spend this on other things with higher value.
Finally, we have done some work on Beat the Rhythm, and the orb theme we have created for Beat the Rhythm is already available in Holodance. This will still get more polishing but I think it's already fun to play with. For some more information on how Beat the Rhythm compares to Holodance, check out this posting. TL;DR: If you are happy with Holodance, you don't need Beat the Rhythm (but you can support us by getting it, of course). The environments and songs we have created specifically for Beat the Rhythm will be available as addon for Holodance.
Full Release Notes
- Mutant Club: We had added a "lightshow" to this environment a long time ago but for "some reason", it never worked. Turns out the issue was that our light show controller usually "forgot" the settings on startup - so it's kind of strange it ever even worked for the Retro Clubbing Environment. This is now fixed and more reliable (was actually in previous release already).
- Sci-Fi Attack: This originally had a fog effect that we had disabled because we couldn't support different fog settings in different environments and needed the one in Retro Clubbing. For Beat the Rhythm, we needed yet another variation and meanwhile, different fog settings are properly supported by our fog effect.
- Activated HDR which mostly improves the quality of the bloom effect we're using.
- Sliders: Made Sliders more forgiving on the Z-axis. One thing that could be really frustrating with Sliders was that they were very strict "on the Z-axis", in other words, you really had to push the controller into the orb while following it. This is now quite a bit more forgiving, so if you have the controller a little behind the moving orb in the slider, or a little before, it will still count. For 2D-sliders as we have them in Free Mode / osu! support, being as strict as we were didn't really add anything interesting to the gameplay, so it was only frustrating, without adding anything - so we changed it.
- Moved prewarmed objects back to -10000 so they won't be visible in environments that let you look through the floor (Trippy Tunnels, Asteroids, to name two where this is the case).
- Gun Mechanic: When interpolation was active (which it is by default), the orbs only reacted to correct aiming during their "active" phase, which is a short time before the actual beat. While for regular orbs, this helps improve performance and does not have any noticeable effect, it could be irritating with the gun mechanic, so for that mechanic, this is disabled. TL;DR: Now, orbs and drones used for the gun mechanic will always react to correct aiming by showing the target indicator and a short haptic impulse.
- UI: Fixed scrollbars (again). They only could be pointed at at the handle - instead of in the whole area, which made quickly jumping to a position impossible. Now this works again.
- Analytics: Major redesign of how we use analytics - this will give us much better insight into what features / options are used and what people may not even discover. Also improved device tracking.
- Target Area 4x3 (Standard): Made this quite a bit wider because the narrow area felt quite limiting with the radial source. In fact, this was limiting with normal orb sources as well.
- Beat the Rhythm (but available in Holodance, too): Casual Orb Theme for Beat the Rhythm done except for Slider paths (the outlines and flat paths don't look well). Gun Orb theme done (except for sliders and spinners - but don't have those for the gun mechanic, yet).
- Performance: Removed an issue introduced by MixCast that caused 0.6kb allocation each frame. This significantly reduces the number of hiccups during gameplay.
- Game Initialization: Cleanup and better defined states.
- Music Library: Moved to persistent selection paths - first step: Mode and search moved over to new data structure.
- Music Library: Added meta-data for osu! ranked maps 2017-12 and 2017, 01-03. Fixed issues with preview loading.
- Music Library: Improved progress during "Full Rescan!" - previously, we had "Calculating Reference Stats" which looked like it got stuck because the greater part of it didn't have it's own progress. Now, we have three steps "Calculating Stats", each with its own progress.
- Local Music: Changed how beatmapSetId and beatmapHash are calculated. This may break lookups for recently played and favorites (but should not).
- Music Library: Made caching and previews (images and audio previews) much more robust.
- Flatscreen UI: The flatscreen UI now has a button "Pull UI to Flatscreen". If you click this while any UI is active, that UI is transferred from VR to the flatscreen. This can be very useful with the Music Library, if you want to set up favorites, for example. You can also push the UI back to VR (but that may be currently broken).
- Story Mode, Level 2: Vayusah's Stripes did not glow up with the rhythm. Now they do again :slightly_smiling_face:
- Audio / Level Loading / Avatar System: Fixed issue that caused the level environment sounds to start playing during a session when the Avatars were loaded right after a song was started, resulting in environment sounds and actual gameplay song to be playing together. (edited)
- Impact Timers: Removed Holodance Style because it was buggy and ugly. I hope no one will miss this one. We also override your setting for the update back to the default (FullCircleUp) but you can change this back to any of the others if you prefer.