It's that time of the year where even pacifist, vegetarian game developers that have dragons throwing friendly magical orbs at you so you could tune into the rhythm of nature and save the world suddenly start punching ghosts to gory pulp as pumpkin-headed Halloween monsters. Also, some of us throw incredibly long sentences at our players, without any punctuation, which could also be considered an act of violence, fitting the season. Such a sentence is in some ways like an insanely long slider or spinner: You just can't wait until it's finished without breaking your combo.
You still here?
You better be, cause here's some important news: For those of you that don't own Holodance, yet, this will be the last chance to get it at 50% off for the time being. We can't tell you when or witchwhich the next sales will be - but we'll do the next sale that we participate in after this one at 40% off, and the one after that at 33% off. The reason is that we're slowly moving towards the end of Early Access, so the price will eventually go up. That's not meant to scare you, it's just meant to make you not put off till tomorrow what you can buy today.
There are more updates coming but here's a really quick recap of the recent news:
Spooky Town
[previewyoutube="zH6Dp55XWcE;full"] Most importantly, this version has a seasonal Arena for the spooky season called Spooky Town. If you don't like blood, or ghosts, or giant pumpkins, this one is not for you. You'll still want to play this version of the game - just don't go to Spooky Town because it would give you nightmares. But if you want to punch, or slice, or shoot ghosts before they punch you, we got you covered.
I'm honestly not quite sure what to do with this after Halloween, so make sure to let us know in the comment section. Should Halloween stuff only be available during Halloween? Or should we simply add this to the Free Mode Arena selection, maybe to be unlocked with a not-too-hard to reach accumulated score? I'm open to all suggestions.
New Avatar System
[previewyoutube="H1t6FldLdQU;full"] If you followed the news (you better!), you already know that we have added a lot of new Avatars and streamlined the whole thing. Especially for Halloween, we added a few spooky ones: A Halloween monster called Methus, a shaman rat called Peter, an ice golem called Torog, and finally, the Dark Angel some of you may have seen ages ago in our first Avatar system teasers. Those will definitely stay in the game as they are.
Also, if you have the Valve Index controllers, almost all the avatars support full finger tracking. To a certain degree, this also works with Oculus Touch but it's best with the Index controllers.
Modding
[previewyoutube="dLQy7N1rClw;full"] This had been on the list for a really long time, and what we have now is really just the beginning: The arenas Trippy Tunnels and Zero Distraction now support text-file based modding, so you can replace textures, skyboxes, change the lighting and some of the geometry in Zero Distraction (to make it very distracting), tunnel effects based on the combo in Trippy Tunnels, and postprocessing effects in both Trippy Tunnels and Zero Distraction.
This is obviously still quite barebones but it already is quite powerful. Eventually, we'll let you build your own Arenas, including gameplay- and audio-reactive logic, your own Avatars (we'll also support the VRM format, but native avatars will obviously be better integrated into the game, e.g. with audio-reactive effects), weapons (for punching, slicing and shooting) and "orbs" (which could also be something like ghosts ... or airplanes ... or whatever crazy thing people come up with when they're bored with circles, spheres, and the Beat the Rhythm OctaDrops, and drones that need to be shot).
Holodance V0.9.1: Halloween, Modding, and all the Beta-Updates
Working a lot on our upcoming game Beat the Rhythm (and porting most of the improvements immediately to Holodance for you to play with them), I apparently got a little confused between Beat and Beta. Our last update to the default-branch that most people are playing on was ... O.M.G.! - more than a year ago, on 25 June, 2018.
We still did update the alphadev and beta-branches more or less frequently but that means that all of you who don't feel like playing betas and alphas of an Early Access game have been missing out not only on major new features but also on important bugfixes. SORRY!
For Halloween, we obviously want all of you to have the Spooky Town that we first released to the beta- and alphadev-branches on October 13. And we want none of you to play on a version that's more than a year old (you still could, if you wanted, on the previous-branch that we keep just in case something breaks really badly for anyone ... but really, you shouldn't!)
Spooky Town
[previewyoutube="zH6Dp55XWcE;full"] Most importantly, this version has a seasonal Arena for the spooky season called Spooky Town. If you don't like blood, or ghosts, or giant pumpkins, this one is not for you. You'll still want to play this version of the game - just don't go to Spooky Town because it would give you nightmares. But if you want to punch, or slice, or shoot ghosts before they punch you, we got you covered.
I'm honestly not quite sure what to do with this after Halloween, so make sure to let us know in the comment section. Should Halloween stuff only be available during Halloween? Or should we simply add this to the Free Mode Arena selection, maybe to be unlocked with a not-too-hard to reach accumulated score? I'm open to all suggestions.
New Avatar System
[previewyoutube="H1t6FldLdQU;full"] If you followed the news (you better!), you already know that we have added a lot of new Avatars and streamlined the whole thing. Especially for Halloween, we added a few spooky ones: A Halloween monster called Methus, a shaman rat called Peter, an ice golem called Torog, and finally, the Dark Angel some of you may have seen ages ago in our first Avatar system teasers. Those will definitely stay in the game as they are.
Also, if you have the Valve Index controllers, almost all the avatars support full finger tracking. To a certain degree, this also works with Oculus Touch but it's best with the Index controllers.
Modding
[previewyoutube="dLQy7N1rClw;full"] This had been on the list for a really long time, and what we have now is really just the beginning: The arenas Trippy Tunnels and Zero Distraction now support text-file based modding, so you can replace textures, skyboxes, change the lighting and some of the geometry in Zero Distraction (to make it very distracting), tunnel effects based on the combo in Trippy Tunnels, and postprocessing effects in both Trippy Tunnels and Zero Distraction.
This is obviously still quite barebones but it already is quite powerful. Eventually, we'll let you build your own Arenas, including gameplay- and audio-reactive logic, your own Avatars (we'll also support the VRM format, but native avatars will obviously be better integrated into the game, e.g. with audio-reactive effects), weapons (for punching, slicing and shooting) and "orbs" (which could also be something like ghosts ... or airplanes ... or whatever crazy thing people come up with when they're bored with circles, spheres, and the Beat the Rhythm OctaDrops, and drones that need to be shot).
So much other new stuff
If you haven't done so, yet, be sure to read the V0.9.0b19 patch notes from March 18, 2019 to learn more about the new game mechanic presets (punching, slicing, shooting, with a few variations in each mechanic), the much improved gun mechanic, a new Slider Visualization that comes with the OctaDrop Theme that we developed for Beat the Rhythm (but that will always also be available in Holodance), better handling of tempo changes in songs, the new backend server, improvements to scoring based on velocity and directionality, tracked appendages and localization ...
... and a much smaller game package size. That last one is a little unfortunate for the update because the package structure has changed, so it will be a 2GB download. But after the update, the size of the full package is now only 6.3 GB instead of the 9.5 GB it was before. Your SSD will sure like that, and so should you.
Where are we going next?
The beatmap editor is taking much longer than anticipated - but it should land soon. This is really big because it will let you create maps that are much better optimized for our different mechanics than using osu!-maps or procedural mapping. In my opinion, osu!-maps work really well for catching and punching, and you can have fun with slicing and shooting when you pick easy enough maps - but those mechanics really need maps designed for the mechanic, so I want to make sure that we offer tools that help create that content. We may also add support for more beatmap formats.
Also, we have a few open ends, like with the new leaderboards and how your scoring is presented after each session, and generally the new backend, while providing a good foundation for what we want to do still needs to have quite a few things added and polished.
The work on the avatar system also inspired a few new ideas that will actually finally make "Holodance" a fitting name for what the game offers. I'm not so sure about Story Mode. It's how the game started but for a long time it has been a bit of a burden that very few people actually enjoy playing while at the same time requiring a lot more time, energy and money to add content to than the features that almost everyone enjoys. So please let us know your perspective on this! We definitely will not remove it, and I'm hoping to eventually finish it in one form or another but it feels increasingly strange to have that part keep the game tagged as Early Access.
That said, Story Mode also got some love in this update: [previewyoutube="GigipFC_4L0;full"]
Preparing for Halloween: New Build on Beta-Branch
We're about to push one of the biggest updates in the history of Holodance to the main branch before Halloween, to celebrate this spooky season with all of you! And you can already try it on the beta-branch and help us find any issues that may still be in there (in addition to the ghosts and gore we put in there intentionally).
For Halloween, we'll have a completely new Arena, called Spooky Town. And spooky, it is! In that special Halloween Arena, you can punch ghosts, or slice them, or shoot them.
And to make it all more fun to show off, we also completely redesigned our Avatar system and added a whole bunch of new avatars, including a few ones that fit the spooky season: A Halloween monster called Methus, a shaman rat called Peter, an ice golem called Torog, and finally, the Dark Angel some of you may have seen ages ago in our first Avatar system teasers. The new Avatar system fully supports Index Controllers and no longer requires calibration when you only use controllers (for full body tracking with Vive trackers, calibration is still needed).
Speaking of teasers ... a video says more than a thousand words and is also more entertaining to watch. So here goes:
[previewyoutube="zH6Dp55XWcE;full"]
Please help us test this version so Halloween won't be spooky because of any bugs we may have missed.
If you haven't opted in to a beta branch before, this guide will be useful: Opting In and Out of Steam Client and Product Betas (navigate to section Product Betas). You can use either beta or alphadev, those are now in sync (we've had this version on alphadev for about a week, with a few updates already).
During the last few months, I worked primarily on the in-VR beatmap editor. Unfortunately, this isn't ready for this release, yet. However, we also did quite a few technology updates and bugfixes that we silently pushed to separate branches dedicated to different Unity versions and eventually also (finally) updated to the new SteamVR Unity integration which has SteamVR Input 2.0. This lays the foundation for full Valve Index support. For now, it gives you the ability to re-bind input according to your preferences.
Update Highlights
LIV Mixed Reality support is finally working again
Story Mode Level 1 / Paradise Beach has significantly improved performance and also looks better (the Ocean and sky in particular)
Slicing OctaDrops works much better now
The stats shown in Game Progression can now either use the legacy system (Steamworks), or our new server. For more details on what is changing here, see: Building Our Own Backend Server
Story Mode: Fixed the one event that was broken that prevented the "Knows The Secrets" achievement from being unlocked. This is secret is hidden in the tutorial.
Chronological Changes List
Holodance V0.9.0b19 (alphadev/beta): A *lot* of Update ;-)
So this is kind of a huge one, because the last patch update was in June 25, roughly 9 months ago. We did post some updates to the alphadev channels and also beta channels but announced them only via our Official Discord. But this current version will probably go to the default channel in a week or two, so it would be awesome if you could opt-in to the alphadev or beta channel, try it, test it and let us know what you think about it (ideally in the forum to keep things organized).
This is a really long list, so here are some of the highlights:
Settings / Themes / Game Mechanics / Presets
This has been completely re-designed to make the different game mechanics easier to find and activate. Also, we previously had quite a few implicit changes in the settings (e.g. when you activated Laserblades or Guns) that did make sense when we originally introduced them but became pretty annoying over time, as development evolved (like, choosing guns would always activate the balloons - but actually shooting drones is more fun than shooting balloons ;-) ).
We have consolidated almost all the settings into one screen (Settings / Style / Presets & Themes), and have added a few presets that set up everything in a consistent way that hopefully makes sense. After activating one of the presets, you can still fine-tune everything according to your likes and dislikes. Here's the current list of presets:
Casual Mode
Catch Orbs
Punch Drops
Slice Drops
Shoot Drones
Shoot Balloons
Gun Mechanic
We've had this in the game for a long time but polished it a lot during the last few months:
The explosions are now based on how perfectly you time shooting the drone. If the timing is perfect or near perfect, the explosion is very quick. If, however, the timing is a little off (a little too early, or a little too late), you get a longer explosion as a penalty. Before, the explosions were random and the longer explosions would unfairly obstruct the view. Now this is "by design" if your timing is off.
Also, all explosion effects were polished and optimized to work really well with the drone and gameplay.
The gun mechanic will still get proper support for sliders and spinners.
New Slider Visualization
This comes with the new OctaDrop theme (see below). We've had that theme in previous builds - but the slider visualization is new. It's true 3D: Sliders in the OctaDrop theme are now streams of the OctaDrop outline. ;-)
OctaDrop Theme
This now has its own hitsounds, also for sliders and spinners, and full support for punching and slicing as well as directionality. The OctaDrop theme will be the default theme for Beat the Rhythm but we'll also keep this as an option in Holodance as well. We're still polishing the OctaDrops and will make some of the mechanics more strict. But it's already close ... at least in our opinion ;-)
Improved Handling of Tempo Changes
Notes are now properly looking ahead so they use the tempo while they play for the buffered ahead spawning. Previously, the orbs were speeding up just when the tempo of the song already had increased. We need this for the original soundtrack of Beat the Rhythm which has quite a few tempo-changes, and even switches back and forth between 3/4 and 4/4 in one song.
Backend Server
This is currently only visible in the leaderboards that show up after a session. The leaderboard when you select a beatmap and the leaderboards in Story Mode are still the Steam Leaderboards, so currently, in some places, we have two different leaderboards, an old one, and a new one. That server not only has new leaderboards but will also let us do things like song ratings, beatmap ratings (in terms of "how fun is it"), and difficulty ratings and will also be used to host beatmaps you create with our upcoming beatmap editor. It will also let you do things like in-game "challenge me". The possibilities are literally endless, so this will evolve a lot over time.
Important: We might reset our backend server a few times until the release of Beat the Rhythm. But you won't lose your skill on such a reset ;-)
Scoring: Velocity and Directionality
In the first early versions of Holodance, the velocity bonus used the velocity on impact. Then, I thought using the maximum velocity between catching two orbs was a good idea. It wasn't. So that's reverted, and velocity on impact is what matters again. This is coherent with moving from primarily catching orbs to primarily punching orbs. You can still catch orbs - but punching is more fun and will give you the higher scores.
The OctaDrop theme also has directionality, so some of those drops will come at you with a direction (very short sliders in osu! beatmaps are converted into those directional drops). We had a rotation bonus but that never really felt right because how does wildly rotating your controller really matter in the game? Well, now that bonus is based on how well you are in tune with the rotation of the drop. Makes a lot more sense, doesn't it?
Tracked Appendages:
One really special thing about Holodance from the beginning was that you could also catch orbs with your head. One problem with this was that it gave you a bonus, so it does give you an advantage with your score - but not everyone enjoys this mechanic. So now, we're properly tracking which appendages you use: Two Hands (TH), Head and Hands (HAH), Head Hands and Feet (HHAF), Head Only (HO), Hands and Feet (HAF), Single Hand (SH), Two Feet (TF) or Single Foot (SF). And each gets its own leaderboard. While in principle, you could play each map in any way, maps designed for a specific gameplay style will also be preferable, so Beatographer will let you say what style a map was designed for. With guns, laserblades and bow and arrow, there are only single hand and dual wielding, or in the case of bow and arrow, obviously, only single hand.
Localization
We have started localization. We have quite a bit of Chinese already done, Japanese, Korean and Russian are there but very incomplete, and the translations we have were done using Google translate (so expect some weirdness). As many of the texts are still changing, we'll do a professional full translations when things have stabilized a bit.
Game Package Size
The game package has become much smaller, going from 9.5 GB down to 6.3 GB.
Lots of Bug Fixes and Unity Updates
A lot of bugs were fixed. A lot of new bugs were introduced by incrementally updating Unity, and then fixed (either by more Unity updates, or by implementing workarounds). But using Unity 2018.3 significantly improves the development process, especially due to the new nested prefabs workflow. I wish I had done this much earlier.
Also, ported PostProcessing from v1 to v2. As the color grading set up works differently in v2 compared to v1, there will be some changes in the color grading. Also, v2 has a new bloom effect that provides higher quality, at the cost of lower performance. But it has a "Fast Mode", which you can activate via the performance settings. We have both versions in a current builds, so you can easily switch between the two. But eventually, we'll remove v1 from the project.
Full Chronological Changes List:
Holodance 50% off ($9.99) in Lunar New Year Sale and Updates!
Hey everyone,
just in case you missed it: Holodance takes part in the Steam Lunar New Year Sale, so if you don't have it, yet - now's a really good time to get it at a 50% discount (so that's $9.99 instead of $19.99). Please let everyone else know! ;-)
And those coming in from the sale: The default branch has received no updates in the last 6 months because we've been building our own server backend ... but we have a pretty long list of changes, including the long awaited native Oculus support on the beta-branch.
So, if you want to try something new, or if you use a Rift - make sure to opt-in to the beta. If you have never opted-in to a beta, check the Product Beta section in this guide.
A lot of work went into the Octadrop and Guns game mechanics, so be sure to check those out! Also, we're getting new leaderboards :-)
If you are really courageous, try the alphadev-branch: That's the bleeding edge of development and has been updated almost daily during the last two weeks.
This was (and still is) a big one! I actually knew we needed our own backend server for a very long time: One reason Holodance is still only available on Steam is because I heavily relied on the Steamworks backend for leaderboards, achievements and keeping state for players (i.e. progress in the game, mostly for Story Mode). In order to let you play with people on other platforms, like Oculus Home, Windows Store or PlayStation Network, we either need to use a third party service (there are some, like PlayFab or GameSparks, or roll our own.
With our second game, Beat the Rhythm VR, we not only want cross-platform but cross-game: All the community features, like leaderboards, song and beatmap quality rankings, session streams and so forth should be consistent and shared among both games, so that we can have one (hopefully) large community for both games, instead of two smaller, isolated player communities.
And there’s another thing: I’m still working on our own in-VR beatmap editor and the fun with that really only starts when you can conveniently share your hard mapping work with your fellow players. Which opens a whole other can of worms and tricky challenges that need to be faced.
Having our own backend server solves a lot of these issues; even if solving some of these issues makes developing that backend server significantly more complex than just a leaderboard-system.
A little Personal History
Before I started working on VR games full-time in 2015, after several years of doing it “on the side” (since 2007), as freelance software-engineer I had a really decent income. Which was really cool! But that was due to taking whatever software-engineering project came along. That was still kind of fun. But when I’m totally honest, this wasn’t really what I was here for, and I had known that for sure at least since 2007 … but really, as a hunch much much longer. Most of my time, I spent working with databases, Web frontends, early Java days mobile apps, some of which I developed from scratch on my own, some large and complex systems that had grown over many years, that I worked on in small teams.
One reason it took a long while to get started with this was because I knew I’d be facing some old demons when getting back into this, and I honestly wasn’t looking forward to that. While I know I can do these things, and actually do them quite well, I’d honestly rather have paid someone … except I know how much that would cost, and we have to be super-careful with our budget (2018 was twice as good as 2017, and 2017 three times as good as 2016 — but we* still have very little liquid cash and roughly €100K open loans … also, it’s not so hard to double and triple your revenue when you start from a base of roughly €10,000 … per year … revenue).
*we currently actually only means me, working from my basement to be able to sustain the company
When I finally did get started, I first spent a lot of time figuring out which technology stack to use, and learning to use that technology stack. That was fun — I love learning new things, and in terms of server backends and Web development, I was living at least 10 years in the past, probably more like 15 years. Eventually, I got it rolling and we have now had the new leaderboard and progress tracking on the alphadev branch of Holodance for a little while, we also already use it for a little side project based in Beat the Rhythm that I did for money called Beat Challenge or 节奏激战 (this one’s currently only available in China, for the Lenovo Mirage AR headset), and the internal builds of Beat the Rhythm. This is on the beta now for Holodance, so by the time we release Beat the Rhythm, it will have been in production for a little while (you may have noticed that we just pushed the release of Beat the Rhythm from “Fall 2018” to “Spring 2019”).
It’s done … well … almost!
(and we all know what that means ;-) )
The hardest parts are done. Obviously, there is still a lot more work on this end, but I am super-happy that the foundation is there and I can now build out the various systems step-by-step, one at a time.
There was a price to pay: One of the things I really enjoy about developing games is that it’s an incredible creative and lively process. Sometimes, I have an idea of my own, or a request coming in from a player in the middle of the night (Hello Discord), start coding in the morning, and can play test this new idea in the afternoon, to share it with you in the evening. Then, of course, there’s usually several days, sometimes weeks, sometimes months of polishing until it behaves in the most fun way — but it’s usually a fun process that involves designing game play mechanics, coding, visuals and effects, sometimes audio.
I have been missing that during the last few months, and after my last meditation retreat, I took a little break from the server work to play with something new. That will go into Devlog 3, so stay tuned!
One (fairly big) concern …
One final thing, also to get a little discussion going: Until recently, I wanted to use the game play data that we have been keeping on player’s PCs to rebuild the complete history on our server. In other words, upload your game sessions, rebuild the leaderboards from that, basically “migrate” everything. Technically, this is possible, and I could still do it … but there are a few concerns:
First of all, it does add a lot of complexity. There are a lot of things to be taken care of, and it would add a significant amount of time just to set up a reliable synchronization mechanism that can handle years worth of gameplay data without interrupting gameplay. We also changed the data format a few times, so that’s also something to be careful about.
Then, that data is not necessarily complete or reliable: You can disable recording the movement data, or you might have deleted the GameData folder — when it’s gone, it’s gone. So, the restored history would not be as complete as one would wish for.
A related issue: Without the movement data, there is a bit of potential for cheating by messing with the session data. With the new system, we’ll only record your session for the leaderboards if you opt-in to including the movement data. That way, cheating becomes near impossible. But handing that for lots of past (and partially incomplete) data is quite tricky.
Finally, there’s the privacy issue: I honestly don’t feel comfortable uploading up to three years of gameplay sessions to a new system without asking (and under current EU privacy laws, that would be illegal, too). But when I ask, I kind of invite people to cheat (say “no” now, mess with the data, then say “yes”). This is much easier with current / future data that is generated while playing.
So, at the moment, I lean towards making this a fresh start, probably even with a few resets during beta, to be able to polish how we store things without having to carry the burden of migrating. When I made some changes to how scoring works, player feedback on “wiping the leaderboards” was fairly positive — Holodance is still in Early Access, Beat the Rhythm not even released, yet, so that kind of thing is not totally unexpected. But still, it’s something I’m not taking lightly (which is also the reason why I haven’t updated the default-branch and only did alphadev- and now beta-updates for about six months).
Holodance V0.9.0b12: Major work on Beat the Rhythm Orb Theme
When we started developing Holodance, which was originally called "Holodance Episode 1: Dancing with Dragons", after a few early prototypes, we fairly quickly moved into what is now called Story Mode and then, a lot of time went into building environments, modeling and animating dragons, voice-acting, making it all work together.
Of course, we also did polish the actual gameplay mechanics, added the target grid, added various ways of showing you how your score came about and even added orb themes and orbs with different shapes and materials.
But there were always a lot of other pressing things that needed to be done: Free Mode, properly handling osu! beatmaps, a music library so you could conveniently find music that you enjoy playing. Procedural mapping. More environments. Laserblades, guns ... lots of stuff a lot of people (including myself) enjoy.
Long story short, for Beat the Rhythm (and most of this work also immediately goes into Holodance), I'm kind of going back to the drawing board - with almost three years of VR rhythm game development (and playing ;-) ) experience. What I'm striving for is figuring out the most fun ways to interact with the music - and building the design and visual effects (and later also audio-effects) around that.
I have already talked a little about the new "orb theme" that we're building for Beat the Rhythm, which is also already available in Holodance in the V0.9.0b10 release notes.
Here's quick look a little tool I'm building to improve iteration times, test various color schemes and different ways of "dealing" with those orbs (if you click it, you get to the full YouTube video):
Let us know what you think in the comments!
Full Release Notes
Beat the Rhythm: Small Fixes in BtR Octagonal Drops (now called OctaDrops) - sliders and spinners are no longer completely broken with this theme but they are still using the old style and logic; that will change soon (and be also available for the old orb-themes).
Fixed file paths: Originally, we kept everything next to the game folder - but this does not work on all platforms, so this was now changed to a more appropriate location. Existing game installations should not be effected (spoiler alert - they were and the change that made this happen went live with the previous release, ooops :-/ ).
Cleanup: Removed "resources" which are automatically included in the builds, even if not used or not even working on a given platform, quite aggressively. I had done some of this before - but unfortunately, those changes got reverted in one of the updates.
Fixed file paths 2: Due to an earlier change, Configuration.json could land in Holodance_Data instead of the main game folder (the parent folder of Configuration.json). This no longer can happen - we now use the game folder again, and also do some cleanup in case players had run this version. If you made changes in Holodance_Data/Configuration.json and also had the file in the original location, Holodance will use the original file again and clean up the one in the wrong folder. If you only had the file in the wrong folder, Holodance will move it to the correct location and use it from there.
Beat the Rhythm "Octagonal Drops" / Octadrops: Major work on making appearing, disappearing and slicing those octagonal drops look awesome.
Holodance V0.9.0b11: Initial Game Progression and Accumulated Score
This is another fairly small release but it fixes one important issue and adds something fun:
It's kind of common to use 32-bit integers to store scores. In fact, it is so common that this is also how they are stored in the Steam leaderboards. The problem: We keep track of an accumulated score, each session can give you up to a few million, and (this is not a problem but awesome): We have some very active players. So, currently, three players "hit the ceiling" when it comes to the accumulated score: MechanicaL, koolaide95 and liqiyang.
This version changes how that score is stored internally, and also added a little hacky patch to at least display the correct score in-game, even when it's above 2,147,483,647 (maximum value a signed 32-bit integer can have).
While I was at it, I also added a first version of our "Game Progression" page:
The numbers in parenthesis are your rank in the leaderboards ... and yes ... we've had Style and Skill leaderboards for a little while but they are not shown in the game, yet.
You can view your progress at any time either via Pause or Game Settings:
... and ... I figured you'd usually want to see this right after playing a session, so I also included this pane in the after session stats, and re-arranged the layout a little:
So, while this is still kind of a small update, I hope you'll enjoy this new feature. Eventually, Game Progression will also let you access various leaderboards (which will also get a major visual polishing round), become more graphical and give you more convenient access to the different game mechanics.
Meanwhile, I'm also working on native Oculus and Windows VR (aka WMR) support, and multiplatform and making very nice progress there as well.
Full Release Notes
Accumulated Score: As we were using integers to keep track of the accumulated score (32-bit signed, to be precise), the maximum possible accumulated score was 2,147,483,647. We currently have three players (MechanicaL, koolaide95 and liqiyang) who hit that limit. Internally, this update moves tracking that score to a floating point value, which lets us go into numbers of any size - at the expense of some precision. The problem: Steam's leaderboards also use int. But with a little hack, we can display your actual score even there.
Game Progression: At any time via the settings, and also after each song, you can now check some progression stats: Your accumulated total score, how many notes you have caught (orbs, sliders, spinners), how many sessions you played (playing the same song multiple times counts multiple times), how many full combos or perfect sessions you have had, how often you started the game, and your current skill and style level, as well as the last skill / style level. Accumulated score, and skill and style level also have your current rank in the leaderboards.
So, this has been kind of an embarrassing one, tbh: I love Mixed Reality, a lot, and we have done plenty of Mixed Reality videos in the past. But during development, I don't always get to to MR-stuff ... and it turned out that both our 3rd party Mixed Reality integrations (LIV and MixCast) were both broken. Sorry everyone!
The other thing is something that during my vacation, I realized that Beat the Rhythm (and optionally also Holodance) might become much more interesting if we allowed beatmappers to define orbs for specific hands (as it was introduced by Audioshield), and specific directions (as it was introduced by BoxVR). Obviously this doesn't mean that we'll drop our orbs that you can take with any hand, in any direction ... but the "new thing" is not even an orb anymore. It's modeled as an octagonally shaped drop:
While we may still polish the design, the idea should be quite obvious: Due to the drop-like shape (which has direction), which is emphasized by the outline, the direction is immediately obvious without needing arrows or anything like that. Also, if you have followed the development of Holodance for a longer time, you noticed that we added outlines around the circles because we had visibility issues in bright environments. This shape doesn't have those issues.
One thing you don't see here, yet, is that we can also place symbols for 2x, 3x, 4x, long combo, almost full combo and combo. Those will be very simple (two dots, three dots, four dots, like dice, and a more or less filled square) and will be placed depending on the direction so that they are always inside the dark area (and with the same color as the outline).
With osu! maps, in many maps, there are a lot of very short, straight sliders that never really worked well in Holodance (they were basically just orbs in terms of gameplay). Those will become directional drops. The others will be straight (like the center one). Also, we have 5 colors, so head, hands and feet can be "assigned".
A very early prototype of this new "orb theme" is in this build - and while this is quite early (don't play this with sliders or spinners, yet, it's broken for those), I think you'll like the "physicality" of the behavior.
Full Release Notes
Orbs will be Drops: Well, not always, but a work in progress "orb" theme is now available in the Theme selection - it's called "Beat the Rhythm 2" and either play it with the Casual mechanic, or manually disable Sliders and Spinners if you want to try this.
Added a Privacy button to Pause and Settings that for now lets you opt-out of Analytics and get the data that has been collected. Eventually, this will become its own area with more settings - especially our upcoming community features will be quite interesting in that regard.
LIV SDK Integration: Updated to SDK version 0.1.1. Also fixed an issue with the foreground transparency layer.
MixCast Integration: Fixed issue that the MixCast button didn't show up in Streamer Mode even when it should have showed up. The way this works: You need to have either a 3rd controller or a Vive Tracker, or a driver that emulates that third controller / tracker active. Then, when you activate Streamer Mode, and activate the "Mixed Reality" camera, the MixCast button will appear.
