The most noteworthy fixes are probably that you should no longer miss orbs that you actually caught (I noticed this happening a lot in level 1 when playing in the Unity editor which causes fairly bad performance) and some animation glitches also in Level 1 that are fixed. Furthermore, spinners in the osu! integration should now behave much better.
There's also a major improvement in the party mode: You can now select from various presets and daily highscores are kept per preset, as well as the global highscores.
We also have two new bonus environments but those are actually only very early prototypes. The exciting news about this: We're moving towards Workshop support, so people that know how to build an environment in Unity will soon be able to create content for Holodance. Also, the Sci-Fi bonus level has been significantly improved.
Here are the full release notes:
- Party Mode: Added a new party mode preset that takes you through almost all environments in about 15 minutes (note: this includes levels 4 and 8 which are currently buggy because we had to activate single-pass stereo rendering which is not supported by our cloud system, yet)
- Party Mode: Added selection for party mode presets so now you can select which of the presets the next player will play in his session
- Party Mode: You now have options to keep daily highscores in party mode, and also to show those daily highscores (instead of the global highscores)
- osu!: Improved "touch detection" for Spinners. This should prevent accidentally grabbing a spinner with the wrong hand. Technical detail: Originally, we used a SphereCollider which resulted in the center going quite some ways towards the player. Now we use a BoxCollider which has the advantage that it's a flat area. Of course, a BoxCollider has a rectangular shape, so it doesn't actually represent the spinner too well. However, given that Spinners are fairly large and player's hands are not quite that long, this should not cause any weird effects like the SphereCollider did.
- Fixed behavior of flying orbs: We had choppy movement and sometimes missed collisions (i.e. you caught an orb but the game didn't recognize you did) both due to a faulty interpolation settings. This is now fixed. For best performance, we ignore collisions in the early flying phase, so you may not be able to "catch" orbs way too early (but that wouldn't be much fun, anyways :wink: )
- Multiplayer: Added feature for each player to have their own platform location (multiplayer still is not functional, yet, but this was one very important step of enabling multiplayer)
- Core Gameplay Mechanics: Polished how FlyingNoteSources work; this is a preparation to give out a simple Unity project so people can easily create custom environments for Holodance. FlyingNoteSources are where the orbs are coming from. We are now also including the template level which demonstrates some of the available features. You can select this (in addition to other bonus levels) via the osu! player (when entering the level; there's a drop down list to select the environment)
- Sci Fi Bonus Level: Created a much better platform for the player
- Sci Fi Bonus Level: Changed the locations and sequence of the turrets / cannons for much smoother transitions, making this environment much easier to play than it was before (it did feel kind of unfair before).
- Club Bonus Level: Super early prototype of this level. The more interesting thing about this is that we now have some fairly interesting means to create rhythmic light and texture effects to make the environment "musically aware" regardless of the beatmap that is currently playing. For now, we have a way to create a rhythmic "light sequence" so that a light can be switched on/off every 16th of a beat, in any pattern, as well as a material switch that can be used to cycle through a list of materials, again, every 16th of a beat, in any pattern. For example: If on the first, 5th, 9th and 13th, the material is cycled, you'll get a new material every quarter note (which usually equals every "beat"). But we could also easily switch only every bar (by only having the first sixteenth checked), or any kind of rhythm.
- osu!: Changed location of stats after session because they were interfering with the osu! song selection UI.
- Level Selection: Added "Tutorial" / "Start Fresh (Reset)" buttons for an easier to find way to reset a given level.
- Level Selection: Fixed a bug that resulted in level images not being greyed out when they were not available, yet.
- Level 1, Animation Pritvitej: Fixed the glitches in the landing animation (we had one pretty severe jump when that animation started, and another, less severe one after he had landed).
- Temporarily disabled Levels 4 and 8 because they use trueSky which currently does not work with Single-Pass Stereo Rendering (but we need Single-Pass Stereo Rendering for the volumetric lights effect in the early "clubbing" level prototype to work)