Hey Riders!
From the bright neon of The Rooftop in Spin City, Synth Riders goes out of this world, touching down on the surface of The Planet! Spaceships soar and walkers stride around the base during the totality of an Eclipse. Gorgeous new visuals, an enhanced multiplayer room for more interaction possibilities to coincide with the introduction of Custom Experiences, a reimagining of “Spin City” and a brand new spin stage called “Eclipse” await you in this update - along with much, much more!
SPIN STAGE & HOME STAGE UPDATES
- Enjoy a brand new Spin Stage, “Eclipse” which takes you to another planet far, far away - where robots roam and spaceships rule the skies.
- Our existing “Spin City” stage has been completely redesigned, adding a new level of richness and depth never before seen in Synth Riders.
- Both these stages are also available for selection in standard play mode, or as your Home Stage (Settings > Visuals > Home Stage) as "The Rooftop" & "The Planet".
AN IMPROVED MULTIPLAYER EXPERIENCE
- Players can now teleport around in the Multiplayer room, which is now a shared space! Just point to an empty hex where you wish to go and pull the trigger to jump!
- More intuitive interactions with other players are now possible, as avatars reflect your movements and positions correctly relative to the room and each other!
- Player name tags will always face towards you, and a speaking icon appears above the name tag to make it easier to know who’s speaking when not looking at the board. Voice chat in the lobby also includes spatialized audio to help you know who’s talking.
- Player platforms are also closer together, so step towards a player if you want to interact more closely, or just stay in the centre of your hex if you prefer to keep your social distance!
- If you find crowds a little overwhelming, you can always find a clear space in “The Room”. Go to Settings > Visuals > Home Stage and select “The Room” and “Load Stage” to enjoy the voice chat only experience from the comfort of your futuristic apartment!
- Room hosts can now mute a player for the whole room at once using Global Mute. A less severe option than a ban, great where someone has a malfunctioning microphone, or where you need to take control of a situation. Hosts can just return to the Multiplayer Room and select the cog next to the player's name to see the new option.
HIGH QUALITY GRAPHICS OPTIONS
- The regular Synth Avatars get a polish on PCVR with a shiny new skin!
- The Glow Is Back! Additional “Beautify” Settings for PCVR players! Use Settings > Visuals > Effects: Neon Bloom - turn on / off and control the level of the neon bloom effect
- Settings > Visuals > Effect Display: Neon Bloom Effect - control whether the effect is displayed in headset and/or on screen
- Settings > Visuals > Advanced Settings > Neon Bloom Quality - control the quality of the post processing effects applied
OTHER GRAPHIC AND VISUAL IMPROVEMENTS
- New "Contrast Corridor" option under Settings > Gameplay determines whether to display a dark contrast corridor in the line of play to improve visibility on some stages.
- When using spin stages outside of Spin Mode, the spin mode emitter will always remain present as a contrast panel in front of the note origin to aid visibility.
- Minor cosmetic changes to The Pit & The Void home stages and Glitch stage.
- Improved visuals in the Multiplayer results screen for Quest.
CUSTOM STAGE CHANGES & CUSTOM EXPERIENCES
- The long-awaited Custom Experiences are now available for creators! More documentation on how to set up and use this feature is listed separately here, please join us on the official discord (discord.synthridersvr.com) to share and learn!
- Custom Stages are now cached, extra information is available in-game about them, and they will be reloaded when you reload your custom songs! To accommodate these new features, a new custom stage template has been released for this version onwards, available here. Our stage makers are encouraged to migrate to this new template for all new stages.
- Removed an extra offset which was added to custom stages (thanks Gruntled).
TWITCH INTEGRATION IMPROVEMENTS
- QUEUE & HISTORY labels were missing for "The Pit" home stage (both Multiplayer & Solo play).
- Global cooldowns (any user any feature and this user any feature) don't apply to !srr and !oops anymore.
- Added sorting history in reverse order, changed history to sort by time deleted instead of time requested.
- Disabled bot reply to cheers when invaderz are disabled.
BUG FIXES AND IMPROVEMENTS
- New option in Settings > Calibration to allow players to customize the position of the controller orbs.
- Volume control on the song selection menu and multiplayer lobby are now in 5% increments
- Note values display correctly in the song select screen.
- Exit button & platform clock visuals improved.
- OST songs with Experiences are now easier to identify with a “EXP” slash on the album cover.
- Settings > Visuals > Advanced Settings menu cleaned up, Calibration and bHaptics menu cleaned up on Quest.
- On the main screen you can use Tab to disable the In-Game News panel, then again to disable the game UI, and then another will bring it all back.
- Sort & Filter results persist through song plays.
- Fixed an issue where the spin emitter would show over the pause menu.
- Fixed an issue where if a playlist loaded had an error, all playlists were deleted (thanks Whipstickgostop).
- Pausing a song while in multiplayer and failing while still in pause will no longer leave you forever playing.
- Song hash is now the only option used to determine whether all players have the same custom song for Multiplayer. Previously, this would failover to a song ID. This will prevent players from playing with different maps in the same game.
- Players with 0 score in multiplayer no longer vanish from the HUD at end, and if all players score 0, no longer generates a blank summary screen.
- Fixed an issue around LIV fade out/in on scene transitions for avatar and mixed reality.
A huge shout out to our beta testers who signed up and joined us to test! You are all amazing - thank you for being a part of this, enjoy sharing it with the world!
As always we welcome your feedback and bug reports on our Official Discord server or in the Synth Riders Official Community on Facebook.
If you want to support the development of Synth Riders, we really appreciate reviews left on the store!
