Today's release 0.6.2 has a strong focus on "player flow": Longer time players will immediately notice that the level selection area has been cleaned up quite a bit. Instead of having everything that's available there all the time, you now enter with one new "section" called "Story-Mode", which is right next to "Sandbox-Mode" which is the new name for the area that provides third party content and eventually player-created beatmaps or simply your own MP3s.
You also have the settings in this area, and access to the prototype beatmap editor (which currently is just a viewer and was not even tested for the current release).
What new players will see the first time they play the game instead of going directly into the tutorial in level 1 is now the level selection area. This solves several issues including improved initial loading times and being able to change settings (including the comfort settings) before entering the game. Like, if you hate butterflies (some people do), go into settings / comfort settings to switch those evil insects off in level 1.
When you enter "Story-Mode", you get the 12 environments from what originally was "Episode 1: Dancing with Dragons". There's a fairly big content update coming soon but this release only has bugfixes and polishing. One noteworthy thing that is new is that level 3 now has a button to directly continue with level 6 (because levels 4 does currently not work, and level 5 only has an environment but not its own music), and level 6 has a button to directly continue to level 10. While we still have early access gaps in the content of the story, this should help people not get lost.
Another noteworthy change concerning player flow: The "next track" to be unlocked now has a blue arrow above it, making this mechanic much more obvious (a lot of players actually missed this kind of progression). In the environment selection, the blue track progress now also have an additional state, so now you see which tracks you have not unlocked, yet (empty circle), which tracks are unlocked but not passed (filled circle) and which tracks you have actually passed (orange checkmark). The logic for "passed" assumes you go through the game sequentially and fails if you use the "unlock levels" cheats.
You'll also notice an improved color scheme in some parts of the UI. This is also the first part of something bigger that should land very soon.
We've done a little work on Oculus Touch support and it should actually already work fairly well ... but ... to be honest, I simply haven't had time to set up Rift + Touch here, yet. So, use at your own risk. We'll put more time into this soon.
[EDIT: Oh, and I just shared a fun story about this release on Reddit]
Here are the full release notes:
- Changed initial startup player flow: Instead of immediately jumping into the tutorial in Level 1, you now start in the level selection area. This way, you can already review and change settings before entering level 1, and the initial load time for first time players is also significantly shorter. Kudos to Avatar for making the suggestion to change that.
- Level Selection Area now first lets you select "Story-Mode" and "Sandbox-Mode" instead of directly throwing you into the selection of a level in the story-mode. This is to make the story mode and sandbox mode more equally accessible. We'll always have both but some players like the one better, some the other, and we want to make sure it's a great experience for both. In the next release, we'll let you select the environment for the sandbox mode the same way you can already do it in the story-mode.
- Story-Mode: Improved how progress through the story-mode is shown: The "next" track that should be played in the current level to progress is now indicated through a large arrow instead of only the text "Next" (which players easily overlook). And in the level selection area, you now get a checkmark for tracks that you have completed because there was confusion when you had a track unlocked (which means you can play it) but haven't had it passed, yet (which unlocks the next track or level).
- UI Polishing: Replaced the gold material used for the frames in the level selection area with the material also used for the platform; this is a first step towards a more consistent UI and color scheme for the main area of the game.
- Fixed a bug that broke the initial quality settings recognition and defaulted to 980 Ti. Now the automatic recognition is used for the initial startup (the first time you run the game on a new machine) again, and it defaults to the 970 (lowest) setting, if the gfx card is not recognized. Kudos to Avatar for reporting this issue.
- Fixed a long standing and very annoying bug that caused the quality settings dropdown lists to only work the first time they were called in a session, and another, related one, that caused the drop down lists in different areas of the game (companion Window UI, in-VR settings and so forth) to not be properly synchronized. Now you can switch quality settings from anywhere and it will just work and display correctly everywhere. At last :-)
- Did quite a bit of storage space optimization which also should improve load times a little. We have some more significant optimizations coming up in that area but those are not ready, yet.
- Skybox in level loading screen is now both sharper and more memory efficient.
- Updated water system to PlayWay Water 2.0 beta 5.
- Added left / head / right counts to stats shown after a level was played. You might be surprised how many orbs you catch with your head in osu! mode.
- Added a circle indicating where you should ideally be standing. This moves, when the ideal position moves and is relative to the grid where you should catch the orbs. Currently, this uses the location used for the orbs that are just created; we'll probably change this to the actual arrival location.
- Story-Mode: Fixed a bug in Level 1 that prevented the platform and controllers to flash up and change colors according to progress in the level.
- Story-Mode: Polished the level progress color gradients - these are meant to first create a stark contrast with the environment and over time become more and more harmonious with the environment. This is now the case for the first three levels - let us know what you think about those colors.
- Story-Mode: Added a "continue" button to levels 3 and 6. This way, you can go directly from level 3 to 6 (after completing level 3), and from 6 to 10 (after completing level 6). From 10 to 11, you can just continue as usual. This button will be removed once we have levels 4 and 5 ready but was needed because quite a few people got lost at the end of level 3.
- Story-Mode: Finally fixed the first track in Level 6; this had a fairly long pause right in the beginning and also some pauses during the track. Added some nice gameplay for this instead, based on the off-beat boop track. Also activated the "door knock" track which was previously missing and can now be used for gameplay.
- Story-Mode: Levels 6, 10 and 11 had several tracks where no orbs were visible at all. Ouch!
- Story-Mode: Fixed scale of several objects that were way too big in level 6 (we had already done this in level 7). Now all objects in all water levels should have fairly correct scales.
- Story-Mode, Level 6: Fixed "floating splines" (aka "floating curves") of track 2 ("DubAndOrgan"). This is just a small fix because it was really broken. The next release will bring a major update for both osu! Sliders as well as the floating spline mechanic in Holodance. This is really overdue.
- Story-Mode, Level 6: Fixed a scoring issue: The long arcs for the fat synths only gave you 100; should have been 300 and now it is.
- Story-Mode, Bonus song for level 1: Orbs were coming from random locations instead from Pritvitej's eyes. Fixed.
- Sandbox-Mode: We currently cannot run levels 4 and 8, so those are temporarily removed from random mode until we have them fixed. I might drop trueSky from the project because it's been way too much trouble. Even though the clouds do look fairly awesome ... when they work.
- Leaderboards: There was a bug in the leaderboards parser that caused most statistics to not be parsed correctly. This bug is fixed.
- Integrated Oculus Touch controller models (as we also have Playstation Move controllers which are not supported by OpenVR, we use our own mechanism for selecting the controller models)
- Switched level loader back to "async". The loading time is actually the same but async should provide better stability while loading and avoid "not responding" messages when checking the game Window.
- Switched off the "robotic sound" we still had from very early prototypes of the game. This was that "weird sound" you may or may have noticed when the game starts up. It was played when the play area adjusted itself to your physical play area. That's history now.