The full V0.8.0 release is still a few days off but we felt the current "alpha" has so many improvements that we should put it on the default branch. If you have any trouble with this version, you can still use the "previous" branch until those issues are ironed out.
If you have never opted-in to a different branch on Steam, here's some instructions: Opting In and Out of Steam Client and Product Betas
Most likely, V0.8.0a4 will feel much better than V0.7.8 (the current "stable" release), especially because the startup time has been significantly reduced and a little part of the UI polishing is already in there.
That said ... there is one important known issue to be aware of: We had a bug in calculating the scores of Sliders which resulted in giving a higher score for each Slider than what would be correct. This is fixed in 0.8.0 resulting in leaderboards having scores you could not beat with the current version. We have a discussion about this in the community forum. Most likely, we will do a leaderboard reset for osu! leaderboards. Please let us know what you think (we have a few possibilities and the final decision has not been made, yet).
Another important (potential) issue: We now have color grading for all environments and this could have a negative impact on performance. Please let us know if you feel this version performs worse than 0.7.8. Either way, we'll let you switch this off in the next release ("alpha 5", or "beta 1") and remember - you can still play 0.7.8 by opting-in to the "previous" branch, in case performance is a real problem for you.
I'm also currently doing a build with Unity 5.5.2 which I'll put on the alpha branch as soon as it's complete. If you can give this a try and give feedback that would be awesome. I'll create a pinned thread for this feedback called Holodance 0.8.0a4_U552 (Unity 5.5.2) Feedback Thread .
I had done several tests with various 5.5.x-versions of Unity but I believe we're now ready to move to 5.4.3. One important thing to look for (aside from any obvious new bugs) is different performance between the current beta / default (0.8.0a4 built with Unity 5.4.3) and the alpha (0.8.0a4_U552 built with Unity 5.5.2p2).
So here's what has changed since alpha 2 (we didn't put the alpha 3 release notes online; see below for changes since 0.7.8 or read the full V0.8.0a2 release notes):
- Improved (hopefully) the style of the transparent osu! orbs. These should now be more visible and also match their colors much better. The old style is still available as "Old Transparent".
- Added new orb shapes: Low Poly Sphere, Wobbly and Spiky. We'll eventually use Wobbly and Spiky for special orbs (e.g. the one that triggers a new multiplier) in the default themes.
- Frames for level selection now stop moving when they are in front of players. Some people felt the soft movement uncomfortable, which is understandable because it very much resembled what it feels like on a ship on the Ocean.
- Finished UI redesign of level selection area (except background images for settings and beatmap editor and UI of settings, which is part of the greater UI redesign).
- You can now select the environment for "free mode" the same way as you can select levels in story-mode. Except we have a few more available in free mode. But: You now need to unlock some of them. That's what your total score / accumulated score is now good for.
- All environments were color graded for our screenshots and should feel much better now in terms of atmosphere / mood (we might still adjust some of the color grading for VR but most environments already feel pretty decent).
- Fixed all fog settings for all levels (these broke fairly recently, I believe in one of the 0.8.0 alphas when we upgraded to the most current postprocessing effects).
- Fixed issue in new ScoreHUD: We have a number for the combo count, and that wrapped to the next line when we went over 100 (which happens easily) and had wide numbers (like 888).
- Change how orb themes are built. Instead of having to keep prefabs for every style, the theme now defines material and shape. That way, we need by far not as many prefabs (with lots of redundant settings / information). This also prepares a cleanup refactoring where we'll move from having plenty of AudioSources attached to each orb (causing a lot of memory allocations) to using our AudioSource pool.
- Made "follow markers" (the orbs that travel along Sliders) smaller so that match normal orbs better.
- Tried the game in Unity 5.5 and 5.6. 5.6 still has showstopper bugs so Linux builds will have to wait until those are fixed. The issue I ran into won't be fixed in beta 11 (current beta is beta 10), so that means it's probably at least two weeks, maybe more until I'll get to try this again. Unity 5.5 has a crash in the standalone builds in the clubbing environment ... let's see if I can fix that (see above - disabling Graphics Jobs is a temporary workaround that stops this crash from happening)
- Added controller / head distance traveled since last caught orb, and global distance traveled. Also added tracking for lots of statistical data for each caught orb which will be stored in the replay data. This is the first step towards our upcoming precision mode. (this is work in progress, notice the "will be stored" - it's not stored, yet)
Changes since 0.7.8 (so that's 0.8.0a1 and 0.8.0a2):
- Fixed issue with Spinners that sometimes lost "contact" with the active controller.
- Our Clubbing bonus level has had a major update. We're slowly moving out of the prototype phase with this one. Give it try!
- We now have a rough version of a "lightshow designer" that we can use in the Unity editor to control the lighting in the clubbing level (or any other levels where we add this). Eventually, we'll give this in your hands so you can design your own light shows.
- The clubbing level now has effects based on the current combo / multiplier ... and it will be the "default" for free mode. But just for a short time until we finally have a proper environment selection for free mode (should be in for the full 0.8.0 release)
- The clubbing environment now uses a loop from Sovve - Rising, which is the song we will be using for Level 4 of story mode. So this is kind of a little teaser for what's coming in story mode.
- Now keeping each camera in "Switch Cameras (Auto)" for 4 bars instead of 1. Eventually, we'll let you set up a different number of bars for each camera you have active in this mode. Plus you'll also be able to switch cams on every beat by pressing the grip buttons.
- Fixed camera locations to work properly with clubbing level (two cams were very badly positioned). Eventually, we'll also have cameras in the environments that are set up perfectly for the environment.
- Fixed an issue that could cause camera switching to go one bar off. When a given song has reliable BPM and section-start data, this is now fairly reliable and should always switch at moments that make musical / rhythmic sense.
- Updated SteamVR Unity Plugin to most current version (V1.2.1)
- Updated Unity's Postprocessing effects to the most current version from GitHub. One important fix in there is that they have reduced the amount of shader variants from 9216 to 6912. This should speed up start up time a tiny bit. There's another change coming that should reduce startup time much more than this but keeping this up-to-date is just general house-keeping.
- Updated to the most current beta of PlayWay Water 2. This should fix issues when porting to Unity 5.5 / 5.6, so this is part of making Holodance work on Linux (we need to move to Unity 5.6 to be able to create a working Linux build; there are a lot more things we need to do, so don't hold your breath, yet, but we do have Linux support fairly high on the roadmap.
- Fixed the location of the status messages (multiplier gained / lost, track / level unlocked). These still had the location from the very earliest prototypes which was about 12 meters in front of the player, using the rotation of the headset at the point in time when the messages was generated. Neat idea but simply didn't work too well and should have been fixed ages ago. Now those messages appear slightly below the curved target area, in a decent distance for reading with having to look too far away from the orbs and at the same time also not obstructing the view to the orbs. Only problem with this location may be that it's hard to read those messages when there are a lot of orbs and they are not transparent, or intense particle effects.
- Fixed color of font in loading screen (this still doesn't quite match the color of the font in the logo; will work on it more ;-) ).
- Fixed color of the ocean in Level 1.
- Activated SIMD for Water which should significantly increase performance in Level 1.
- Fixed issue where water did not appear at all in the 970 and 980 quality settings (Level 1).
- Updated Particles Playground to 3.1; this should also significantly reduce hiccups due to garbage collection and increase overall performance.
- Created a new ScoreHUD based on our original prototype ScoreHUD but using the new UI-style. This will be used for the neutral level, as well as SciFi and Clubbing bonus levels.
- Started performance optimization: Removed allocations from ScoreHUD texts.
- Added digit separators for scores in ScoreHUD, so instead of showing 3142314, we now show 3,142,314. We don't have this anywhere else, yet, only in the ScoreHUD, but will eventually use it everywhere.
- Made alpha fade for ScoreHUD not only more correct but also significantly more efficient and much simpler.
- Turned down volume of the sound that is played when the controllers go into "catcher-state". That sound had been a little annoying.
- Sometimes ScoreHUDs got "stuck" when cancelling a session. This should be fixed now.
- Added a workaround for a super-annoying Unity-bug: When clicking a button, or doing quite a few other things, Unity "selects" the widgets, resulting in the hover state being stuck (because in Unity, mouser over and select is the same thing). I believe this is now fixed for all cases where it occurred, by rewriting some of the code Unity delivers to more ... well ... more correct.
- Our UI Sliders and Range-Sliders now have a button that you can use to pull the Slider towards you for much easier editing. You can also move the Slider back to the main UI. We are not using this new version of the Slider everywhere, yet, but will eventually replace all Sliders with this new one.
- We can now move full screens from VR to the flatscreen UI and back.
- Improved how beatmaps are looked up in the cache. This should work totally robust now. We first use the beatmapHash, which should always work - except we didn't store the beatmapHash in the cache in earlier versions of Holodance, so some favorites and entries in "Last Played" will not have that information. In that case, we fall back to the beatmap file name, which should be unique and a fairly reliable fallback. It probably always ends there. If for some weird reason, the lookup via name fails, we still try beatmapSetId and beatmapId. In most cases, this is the least reliable approach because quite a few beatmaps don't have this information stored in their metadata. But we keep in just in case.