We updated some of those bugs silently during the last few days, working with some of you to find and fix issues - thanks again to everyone who sent emails, posted to the forums or asked on Discord.
If you run into levels not loading (some players could not get into level 3, in particular), please try the new option to disable warming up shaders: This is on the flatscreen UI, click button "Show Extra Settings", then it's the first checkbox, top right of the screen, called "No Shader Prewarming". Default is unchecked, so usually shader prewarming is enabled.
Apparently, under certain circumstances the loading process gets stuck there (after otherwise successfully loading the level, and no obvious error). The worst side-effect you might encounter by enabling this option (and disabling prewarming that way) are a few framedrops right after loading the level, which is obviously not great but by far not as bad an issue as the game getting stuck during loading.
Another issue that was encountered that was actually outside of Holodance to be fixed is that apparently, some super-eager Virus-scanners move parts of games downloaded through Steam into a separate folder. The symptom: You start the game, Steam tells you its loading but stops without ever starting the game after about a minute.
There's a thread about this issue here on Steam:
Windows 10 | Steam games not launching problem
Then ... I did this 20 minute session playing with all the configuration options and settings, which can also be used as a tutorial (if you watch this directly on Vimeo or YouTube, you'll find a table of contents with links that let you jump directly to all the different sections). One thing I noticed is that we have an amazing amount of configuration options which let you do some pretty crazy things. I also saw some bugs. Those are now all fixed.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kOL7MZtTqUE
Detailed Changes
- Level Loading: Added option to disable shader prewarming as this apparently sometime causes level 3 to not be properly loaded. This is on the flatscreen UI, click button "Show Extra Settings", then it's the first checkbox, top right of the screen, called "No Shader Prewarming". Default is unchecked, so usually shader prewarming is enabled.
- Level Loading: Now has more timeouts, and longer timeouts, so that loading levels should be a little more robust and hopefully no longer hang under certain circumstances.
- Level Loading: Activated verbose logging to find hang/crash issue easier if it still occurs.
- Music Library: No longer caching beatmap files because this could cause changes in settings (e.g. disable sliders / spinners) to only have an effect after changing the beatmap / song.
- Avatar System: We had an issue with skin coming through clothes. That's fixed now.
- Zen Mode: Removed most, if not all the message popups when in Zen-Mode. One notable exception: Unlocking a new track or level in Story Mode still gives you a message popup because that is very important information for anyone.
- Party Mode: The Story Mode parts of party mode were still wired to the old versions of levels 1, 2 and 3, and we had some references to the old song browser in there, too. All fixed.
- Party Mode: Added a way to immediately skip to a specific step in the demo, including an automatic counter for the current step, so that when one session is cancelled, it is easy to continue the next where the current one started.
- Party Mode: We have some steps in Party Mode, where players just enter a level for a few seconds and then move out of the level. We use this, for example, to show the submarine in level 7. When skipping over such a level, the timer then kept on going and skipped the next level which could be really confusing to everyone. This no longer happens.
- Settings: Disabling the Target Grid worked - but re-enabling it didn't, neither in the preview, nor for actual gameplay. You had to leave and re-enter the level for this to work again. That issue is now fixed and both, disabling and enabling the grid now both work properly.
- LIV SDK: No longer spamming log with errors when LIV Client is not installed.