[UPDATE: We have now made this the default branch.]
We wanted to have the orb skins in there much earlier - apologies for the delay. But there was a fairly bad issue with the way we stored replay data so that had to be done first. This release also has a fix for the very annoying "tutorial in level 1 resets the whole game state"-bug. And it does have several orb skins which you can select in the osu!-section of the game.
One thing you may have already noticed is that when you currently start the game, you can select "Holodance - Default" or "Minimal osu!/neutral", and unless you already were on the alpha-branch, "Minimal" (previously called "Experimental") wouldn't work. This is now also available on the beta-branch, and if all goes well will become available on the default branch tomorrow.
This is a way to start a minimal version of the game that only has osu!-support and the neutral level (which is the default level for osu!). For players that don't care about all the other things in the game, this is a nice way to get a (hopefully) much faster startup time.
This version is currently available on the branches alpha, beta and skintest. I'll remove the "skintest" branch because it was really only there for people to opt-in to the version that added the new orb skin for osu before we had pushed that to the default-branch.
Please let us know through the forums how this build works for you.
Here's the full release notes:
- Main-Settings: Quality presets ("GPU") could not be changed via the pause menu.
- Main-Settings / Pause Menu: Added a Toggle "Store Replay Data" in section performance. This is enabled by default and will store replay-data for each session. Currently, there is no UI to do an actual replay but eventually, we'll add that. This generates a lot of data (we had one user with a 400 MB file after playing for a week or two). Eventually, we'll optimize how this is stored. Like ... tomorrow (see below).
- osu!-beatmaps: Cleaned up FileSystemCache_Osu.json - this now really only has the "file system cache" instead of also keeping favorites and play session history. Favorites and play sessions are now separate files. We'll do the same with playlists (once we have those), except playlists will be one file for each playlists which will also make sharing playlists very easy.
- osu!-beatmaps: Made file-browser more robust; there had been some unchecked NullReferenceExceptions which are now properly handled.
- Completely redesigned how played sessions are stored. You should now be able to safely keep "Store Replay Data" on all the time because each session is stored in a separate, gzipped file and those files will only be loaded later when you can actually do a replay of a session. We now also keep the story-mode sessions. All of this is currently locally stored, so unless your personal machine is compromised, you don't need to worry about privacy concerns. Eventually, we'll put this data on our servers - but then, you can opt-out. If you want to change where this information is stored, you can change the relevant paths in the file Configuration.json, which you find in the Holodance-folder in your Steam installation: \steamapps\common\Holodance\Holodance_Data. Steam Base Folder is usually C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam unless you have installed Steam at another location (and then you'll know best where to find it).
- osu!-beatmaps: File scanner no longer writes warnings to the log for beatmaps that have no beatmap-id stored in the map. We should be handling this case correctly now and there are quite a few beatmaps like that, so putting every one of them in the logfile is just spamming the logfile and makes relevant error messages more difficult to find.
- Loading Screen: Fixed a minor issue where the osu! song selection already appeared on the loading screen before loading was completed. Looked ugly. Fixed.
- Moved the default configuration file folder one level up out of Holodance_Data into the Holodance root-folder so that we can work better with different builds (we currently have a HolodanceMinimal.exe build in addition to the main Holodance.exe build)
- Moved all the other files / folder structures one level down into GameData. The GameData folder now has all persistence information, in other words your played sessions, osu file cache, gameplay recordings and so on. This also has a subfolder PartyMode now for party mode highscores. All those folders are configured in Configuration.json so you can easily move everything to other locations by simply editing this file (it's a well-formatted JSON-file, so it's fairly easy to edit with a simple text-editor).
- Updated to current version of the SteamVR Unity plugin (1.2.0), which now also uses the most current version of OpenVR (1.0.5)
- SteamVR Unity plugin 1.2.0 has a new (and actually much better) way of registering for events; this required a bit of porting but has the benefit of creating less "garbage" (.NET / Mono, memory allocations that lead to garbage collection which results in brief hiccups)
- When you cancel a session, your score is no longer uploaded to the leaderboards and you no longer "finish" the track in story-mode. Cancelling means losing anything you did in that level. But this also prevents you from putting your name on the leaderboards with a ridiculously low score
- Fixed a very annoying bug that caused you to cancel a session when you first paused the game from within the game (holding trigger for a second) and then entered the SteamVR dashboard. When exiting the SteamVR dashboard (when previously activating pause), you dropped out of the song. But not anymore.
- Story-Mode: Re-enabled the Early Access texts for each level so you can see what status each level currently is in.
- Story-Mode: Instead of resetting everything when you click "Tutorial", this now simply takes you into the tutorial without resetting any gameplay state. You can still start the game fresh (which will reset all progress in story-mode) via the settings and via the flatscreen UI. The "Start Fresh" buttons in the other levels only reset progress for that specific level, which is useful if you want to fully replay one specific level.
- In the flatscreen "Full UI", the "Debug" section is now called "Physics Tweaks" and has descriptions for each setting. We've removed "Always Interpolate" because it wasn't useful (this is now always off) and added "Backwards Raycasts" and "Double Precision". If you have trouble with missed orbs (that you actually should not miss), you can activate Backwards Raycasts, and if that is not good enough, activate only "Double Precision" (so if you use that, you should deactivate Interpolate and Backwards Raycasts). If "Double Precision" is not good enough, activate "Interpolate", if that's still not enough, activate "Backwards Raycasts". If that's still not enough, talk to us. Oh ... and if you mess with these settings, you'll usually first want to activate the 970 GPU preset and make sure you're not using particle effects or other fancy stuff that is heavy on performance.
- osu!-beatmaps: Fixed bug that had beatmaps of deselected game modes (osu / Catch the Beat / Taiko / Mania) show up in the beatmap lists if a song had at least one beatmap that matched the selection.
- Disabled levels 4 and 8 again. trueSky, the cloud system I was using for those two levels has been one of the really great disappointments and I am actively looking for other cloud systems now which will hopefully not explode in my eyes (or render grey backgrounds in single-pass stereo rendering). I'm very sorry for having two completely broken levels in our game due to this mess. When it does work, it looks quite awesome but that doesn't help much if it just doesn't work.
- Clubbing-Environment: Just a little bit of polishing; or I should rather say fixing several materials and very minor geometry tweaks. This still is an early prototype of that level but in the previous version, it was kind of messed up with the floor being way to bright and the spotlights at the ceiling having a strange orange color, and the pillars bumping in the wrong directions.
- No longer playing failed songs for Sliders when the player actually hasn't failed the Slider.
- Added audio-feedback for Sliders. Uses the slider tick rate from osu!-beatmaps. (edited)
- Made head collider a tiny bit smaller (Radius was previous 0.8 and is now 0.7). This makes tracks 3 and 4 in Level 3 of story-mode a bit more difficult but also more interesting to play. The collider now has almost exactly the same width as the Vive HMD.
- Added Comfort Settings, Style Settings and Expert Settings to the osu! file browser so that you can directly access those settings without having to go through the main settings or the pause menu. In 0.7.4, this is only available in the minimal osu!/neutral version of the game; in the next release, it will be available in all versions.
- Added a few more Orb Skins, including one with cubes instead of spheres and also one that does not have orb trail particles. With that one, you can have both: Impact particle effects but no trail particle effects.