Full Release Notes for V0.8.4

• Audio Settings: Added a "Restore" button to restore the mixer settings to the default mix.
  
• Audio Settings: We previously used a scale from -70db to +5db in the audio mixer, which probably didn't say much to most people. Now each slider goes from 0 to 10 ... no ... to 11. So you can give it that extra push over the cliff!
  
• Streamer Mode: Fixed clip planes for 3rd person cameras.
  
• Story Mode, Level 3: Removed additional hihats and snare that muddied the actual gameplay.
  
• Music Library: Removed all instances of "SongBrowser" throughout the project - this is now all called "Music Library" or "MusicLibrary", consistently.
  
• Fixed issue that could cause controllers to not show up upon startup (workaround was to switch controllers off and on again, this occurred only in a test-build; I had only seen this before when doing the restart of the game when resetting all base values).
  
• Free Mode: Renamed "Virtual Clubbing" to "Retro Clubbing", because really, that's what that environment looks like. Oh, and by the way: No one told me that the lighting effects in the level are broken! This is a bit of a nasty bug because it does work well in the Unity Editor but not on builds. I'm investigating this and trying to find a fix ... but ... if something doesn't work, please let us know!
  
• General UI: UI elements are now disabled during animations to prevent accidental interactions during those animations.
  
• Music Library: Fixed a really strange issue with the second text-line sometimes changing its color. Turned out the red-value (1.0) was missing in one of the animations.
  
• Music Library: We are now disabling the UI during animations to prevent accidental clicks during those animations. The problem with this is that in the Music Library, this made the switch to the disabled state rather jarring. So we now have a much more subtle disabled state.
  
• Music Library: Navigating back (and a few other things) caused both the "Browse Music" and "Take Shortcuts" items to appear. Not anymore.
  
• Music Library: Fixed issue that the Music Library came up empty the first time you started the game (ever).
  

Full Release Notes

• Avatar System: We actually had this almost ready for a little while with just a few things missing. Those were now added and if you have Vive Trackers, you can already play with the first version. We currently have two Avatars available: A Soldier and Aika, an Animé-girl. We'll shortly add a few more to play with, and polish the whole thing up quite a bit. Like, the Avatar system will also work with only headset and two controllers (obviously, it won't work as well - but it will work much better than right now, where the feet are just dragged behind - ooops :wink: ). In VR, seeing this "other body" of yourself actually is a little weird, so you can switch it off. The primary purpose of this system is to easily be able to create awesome videos, do Streaming, and it's also a preparation for the upcoming multiplayer and "show" mode.
  
• Music Library: Fixed default values for duration filter. By default, this filter should not filter any songs, so the minimum needs to be 30 seconds (which will ignore the lower limit altogether), and the maximum 320 seconds (which will ignore the upper limit altogether).
  
• Updated the trailer - the previous version had way to many, and way too chaotic cuts. The new version is still intense, but compared to the previous version, it's much calmer.
  

Recent Major Release: V0.8

Our new Gameplay Teaser

Full Gameplay Video of our new Avatar system using Vive Trackers

Near Term Roadmap

Current Story Mode Updates

Holodance V0.8 - Summary

• Music Library: Browse and play a library of more than 55,000 high quality osu! beatmaps for more than 12,000 different songs, directly from within the game.
  
• New Environments: Sci-Fi Tunnels, Trippy Tunnels and Mutant Club, a creation by Virtual Reality artist Miguelangelo Rosario. Holodance now has a total of 12 environments from Story Mode (also available in Free Mode), 5 official bonus environments as well as several special purpose environments. This makes a total of almost 20 environments, ranging from a tropical beach or underwater environment with dolphins and whales, to trippy abstract tunnels or asteroid fields. Screenshots are available in our press kit.
  
• Progress in Story Mode: New song for Level 1 by Billy Maestro from Brazil, remixed by Sheipz, improved animations for Level 2, Preview of Level 5.
  
• Vive Tracker Support: Players can catch those orbs not only with their hands and head - but if they have two Vive Trackers, also with their feet - Kung Fu Style!
  
• Steam Trading Cards: Holodance now has 9 trading cards, themed with environments from both Story Mode and Free Mode. When players have completed a set and crafted a badge, they can get one of 5 profile backgrounds and one of 8 alphabet-based emoticons. These letter-based emoticons spell out HOLODANCE. Which also lets players write words like HELLO, DANCE, or DOODLE. The badges themselves are themed in the five elements, so that's based on Story Mode.
  
• Major improvements in the look and feel: A completely new UI, much improved look of Orbs and Sliders - with outlines for better visibility against various environments, new Orb Score Bubbles, that can be customized, and a completely new Sci-Fi based HUD used in several environments; also completely redesigned achievements icons. The Catch Area grid that helps players know where to best catch the orbs now has five styles, from just an outline to various graphical designs.
  
• Mixed Reality: Plenty of fixes in our default SteamVR-based implementation, including Vive Tracker support, cooperation with LIV, built-in MixCast Support
  
• Major improvements in Streamer Mode: Players that use Holodance to produce content for YouTube or Twitch can now set the timing in musical bars for when each camera switches to the next. Also, the 3rd person cameras in Streamer Mode have been significantly polished for much better footage. Eventually, Streamer Mode will let players produce complete videos by playing a single session, with little need for post-production.
  
• Ruirized Achievement: For catching orbs in difficult osu! beatmaps only with your head
  
• Major performance improvements, environment specific performance settings
  
• Heavy project cleanup, countless bugfixes and polishing, resulting, among other things, in much improved loading times
  
• Improvements on how Scoring is handled, detailed statistics on how scores are calculated are now available to players after each session
  
• Not all players enjoy Sliders and Spinners, so those gameplay elements can now be converted to regular Orbs with an option in the settings.
  

Holodance V0.8.1 - Full List of Changes

• Level 3: Integrated new animations with voice-acting and proper dancing animations
  
• Fixed skipping issues in levels 2 and 3 - skipping should now work properly in all states in those two levels.
  
• Level 2: Fixed one audio track missing from the song.
  
• Level 5: Added new, significantly more polished dancing animations.
  
• Level 5: High five sequence now works. We will still streamline this one a little.
  
• Level 1: Added new animations with lip-sync and significantly improved dancing animations.
  
• Applied a fix for Level 2 (Vayusah didn't show up), and also improved robustness of Music Library, right after the release (and did a hot fix for that).
  

Holodance V0.8.2 (Current Release) - Full List of Changes

• Story Mode, Level 1: Improved first voice acting animation to make it more lively.
  
• Internal refactoring: Put all new story mode into their appropriate locations because those are no longer experimental (but were in the "experimental" area internally).
  
• Story Mode: Fixed issue where resetting player state (this is available through the old settings menu) would cause a restart of the game, which would result in the controllers disappearing. That restart is not necessary anymore, so we no longer do it.
  
• Improved how loading of audio is handled. This should prevent long delays with voice acting and built in songs.
  
• Fixed several in issues in how levels / environments are being loaded, which could cause glitches like the dragon animations starting before you could actually even see them.
  
• Story Mode, Level 1: Fixed all known glitches in the animations.
  
• Pritvitej can now be stroked / tickled as often as you like, instead of only once.
  
• Story Mode, Level 1: Fixed voice-acting animation for "Gimme Five and we will dance again". Also, this should now only be played when the player did not previously complete the tutorial (in this session; in other words, the "very well done" voice-act and animation will always be played when the player has just completed the tutorial; it will also not be played when the player skipped the tutorial).
  
• Story Mode: We previously had the dragons at a larger distance and therefore needed to have the orb first approach quicker and then slow down a little bit. With the new animations, the dragons are at a more appropriate distance, so this hack is no longer needed. In fact, this caused the orbs to be too slow where you'd catch them in previous versions, resulting in much more difficult gameplay (because you needed to be much more precise). Fixed.
  
• Fixed Story Mode ScoreHUD: The current score was fairly glitchy, sometimes curved, sometimes not, sometimes going back and forth. This now works properly.
  
• Fixed several audio issues in Level 3.
  
• Fixed orb colors in Level 2 and Level 3.
  
• Fixed issue in Level 3 where Apastarrr overshoots at the end of the song, resulting in a jump when he starts swimming towards player.
  
• Story Mode, Level 2: Fixed ScoreHUD appearing behind Vayusah, instead of above Vayusah.
  
• Story Mode, Level 1: Fixed issue that dragon audio from intro was playing even when entering the level without the tutorial.
  
• Improved quality of loading-screen skybox
  
• OrbScoreHUD for head orbs: Moved up a little bit so this is no longer right in front of your face, which can be fairly annoying.
  

All Changes in this Version

• Level 3: Integrated new animations with voice-acting and proper dancing animations
  
• Fixed skipping issues in levels 2 and 3 - skipping should now work properly in all states in those two levels.
  
• Level 2: Fixed one audio track missing from the song.
  
• Level 5: Added new, significantly more polished dancing animations.
  
• Level 5: High five sequence now works. We will still streamline this one a little.
  
• Level 1: Added new animations with lip-sync and significantly improved dancing animations.
  

Our new Gameplay Teaser

Full Gameplay Video of our new Avatar system using Vive Trackers

And the most important new features / changes

• Music Library: Browse and play a library of more than 55,000 high quality osu! beatmaps for more than 12,000 different songs, directly from within the game.
  
• New Environments: Sci-Fi Tunnels, Trippy Tunnels and Mutant Club, a creation by Virtual Reality artist Miguelangelo Rosario. Holodance now has a total of 12 environments from Story Mode (also available in Free Mode), 5 official bonus environments as well as several special purpose environments. This makes a total of almost 20 environments, ranging from a tropical beach or underwater environment with dolphins and whales, to trippy abstract tunnels or asteroid fields. Screenshots are available in our press kit.
  
• Progress in Story Mode: New song for Level 1 by Billy Maestro from Brazil, remixed by Sheipz, improved animations for Level 2, Preview of Level 5.
  
• Vive Tracker Support: Players can catch those orbs not only with their hands and head - but if they have two Vive Trackers, also with their feet - Kung Fu Style!
  
• Steam Trading Cards: Holodance now has 9 trading cards, themed with environments from both Story Mode and Free Mode. When players have completed a set and crafted a badge, they can get one of 5 profile backgrounds and one of 8 alphabet-based emoticons. These letter-based emoticons spell out HOLODANCE. Which also lets players write words like HELLO, DANCE, or DOODLE. The badges themselves are themed in the five elements, so that's based on Story Mode.
  
• Major improvements in the look and feel: A completely new UI, much improved look of Orbs and Sliders - with outlines for better visibility against various environments, new Orb Score Bubbles, that can be customized, and a completely new Sci-Fi based HUD used in several environments; also completely redesigned achievements icons. The Catch Area grid that helps players know where to best catch the orbs now has five styles, from just an outline to various graphical designs.
  
• Mixed Reality: Plenty of fixes in our default SteamVR-based implementation, including Vive Tracker support, cooperation with LIV, built-in MixCast Support
  
• Major improvements in Streamer Mode: Players that use Holodance to produce content for YouTube or Twitch can now set the timing in musical bars for when each camera switches to the next. Also, the 3rd person cameras in Streamer Mode have been significantly polished for much better footage. Eventually, Streamer Mode will let players produce complete videos by playing a single session, with little need for post-production.
  
• Ruirized Achievement: For catching orbs in difficult osu! beatmaps only with your head
  
• Major performance improvements, environment specific performance settings
  
• Heavy project cleanup, countless bugfixes and polishing, resulting, among other things, in much improved loading times
  
• Improvements on how Scoring is handled, detailed statistics on how scores are calculated are now available to players after each session
  
• Not all players enjoy Sliders and Spinners, so those gameplay elements can now be converted to regular Orbs with an option in the settings.
  

V0.8pre2

• Story Mode: The UI on the level selection frames (with the painted level images) was partially very hard to read due to bad choice of colors. We now have much darker and less transparent backgrounds for the texts on the top left. This is not a final UI by any means - but at least it now is functional also for the fairly bright levels.
  
• Story Mode: Integrated Level 5 - this now has the final environment, and final dragon animations ... but is using placeholder music (the track from level 3).
  
• Story Mode: Integrated new version of Level 2 - this now has much improved dancing animations and lipsync while Vayusah talks. Also, all animations in this level have been polished and improved compared to the previous version.
  

V0.8

• Music Library: Fixed bug that caused Music Library to disappear when pausing (without previously entering the settings of the Music Library).
  
• Sci-Fi Tunnels: We had exposure set too high in post-processing color grading, which made the environment look really nice - but the orbs were over-exposed and hardly visible. We fixed this by improving the lighting. With better lighting, less exposure is necessary - now the orbs look great again in this environment.
  
• Music Library: The "play" button now is "normal" while a beatmap is being cached. You can still press it, and the song will start once caching is complete - but when you wait until this button is green, the will start immediately, with no further waiting time.
  
• Music Library: Library now shows you stats on beatmaps that you have already played before.
  
• Music Library: Changing settings for which libraries are being used should now work without having to restart the game. You do have to Rescan, however, but that's just one button press.
  
• Music Library: Moved navigation buttons a little up and out of the main area that moves right. Also moved the location to the top left corner of the right area because that's the location that this refers to.
  
• Music Library: Random now selects a song instead of immediately selecting a beatmap.
  
• Music Browser: Changing settings where to look for beatmaps now works properly.
  
• Music Browser: Added setting to disable auto-grouping large lists. If this is checked (which is the default), lists with more than 100 entries are automatically grouped, e.g. by alphabet.
  
• Music Browser: Song lists now also have the artists included.
  
• Music Browser: Fixed bug where grouped lists were not sorted properly.
  
• Sliders: Made the moving arrows that indicate the direction much more obvious by making them darker with bright colors, and brighter with dark colors.
  
• Music Browser: Starts where you left off after playing a song.
  

Full Release Notes

• New Song Browser: Added button to exit environment; this is the button with the level selection area screenshot.
  
• New Song Browser: Added "Game Settings" button to the song browser settings screen, so you can now navigate to the settings without having to enter pause.
  
• Fixed issue in startup where "Loading Virtual Clubbing" was wrongly displayed and then overwritten in a very ugly way.
  
• Major Fix in our UI-system: Previously, when entering pause while some other UI-screen was active, unpausing had that previous screen removed, sometimes leaving you in UI-less states where there should have been a UI (e.g. when pausing after a session). Now, in the new song browser, you can enter the game settings (which are equivalent with pause), enter pause, browse to the same menu, exit pause (by pressing the menu button for a second again), and Holodance will be right where you paused. In the case that you had for example Style Settings in the game settings, and also in pause, it will look like nothing has changed (it's the same screen after all). But behind the scenes, Holodance will have removed all the screens in-between and when you navigate back, you go exactly where you expect to go (to the game settings and then song browser).
  
• New Song Browser: Showing complete lists of Artists, Titles and Genres now works.
  
• New Song Browser: Scrolling now works like in the old song browser, just a little better.
  
• "New Song Browser" is now called "Music Library" - because that's really what it is. (edited)
  
• Music Library: We now have a system in place that lets us have two lists at any time, so you have a little more context of where you're coming from. When you click an item on the right list, you drill down deeper (so a new list appears on the right, the list on the right moves left, and the list on the left disappears under the player platform). When you click an item on the left list, you replace the list on the right.
  
• Music Library: Browsing no longer causes framedrops; it's now all asynchronous.
  
• Music Library: Changing filters while browsing now automatically updates the lists.
  
• Music Library: "Preselection", which was never a term I want to stay with but used for lack of something better, has now been replaced with "Take Shortcuts" - because that's what you do when you take this route.
  
• Music Library: Major refactoring; cleaned up responsibilities of all the different (ui-)components involved for easier maintainability, higher robustness and quicker adding of features.
  
• Music Library: Added much improved handling for text search, with animations, selection highlighting and audio.
  
• Music Library: Fixed issues with SteamVR keyboard (this caused the game to pause when opened, and it could appear in the wrong location when the UI was not in front of the player base position)
  
• The new clubbing environment previously called "Sci-Fi Club", of which we had a prototype in the Experimental area, now has its original name "Mutant Club" and is in the game in a fairly final version. We'll still polish this, and there may be more coming in this one later down the road, but for now, it's complete.
  
• Finished initial version of Sci-Fi Tunnels.
  
• Moved Sci-Fi Tunnels, Trippy Tunnels and Mutant Club to the main Free Mode area and assigned minimum scores to unlock them. So these are now officially part of the game :wink:
  
• Adapted Party Mode UI to new style (more or less)
  
• Officially moving to version 0.8 now (the previous 0.8.0nN versions were all alphas / betas for that release).
  
• Party Mode: Added Twitter-handle to player data
  
• Music Library: Re-arranged filter checkboxes to make more sense. We now first have Native, because once we do have the in-VR beatmap editor, those will be the most fun to play. Then, we have built-in, because those are in a way "Native" (only that we include them directly in the game). Next up is "Auto" because ... layout (sorry), and finally StepMania. This whole first row is currently not available and we may actually hide it for a little while after release. Next line is the different osu! beatmap types; with those, there was only one change: Taiko is now before Mania, because Taiko in a way is the "better version" of Auto (it only gives us timing information - but we automatically define the locations of the orbs, kind of like in Auto, except Auto is fully procedurally generated). Mania is last, because StepMania and Mania are similar in many ways.
  
• Music Library: Browsing lists with more than 100 items works but isn't really that much fun. So, whenever the new Music Library now encounters such a long list, it automatically groups it, e.g. by alphabet. You can still get the long lists, if you want to, by simply clicking the first entry, "All Artists" or "All Songs" ... but that's up to you.
  
• Music Library: Played Depeche Mode "Wrong" using the new song browser - without having previously downloaded the beatmap! YES!
  
• Music Library: Added navigation buttons to move back and forth in the current selection.
  
• Music Library: Moving on from search that yielded specific results (instead of the groups) didn't work - now it does.
  
• Music Library: Browsing via genres now works - but genres aren't tagged all that well, so this is only of limited use.
  
• Music Library: Added last played, favorites and random.
  
• Music Library: Temporarily removed a few sections like Added Date, Difficulty, Tempo and so forth. These will return soon.
  
• Music Library: Leaderboards are now working; adding/removing favorites is now working.
  
• Music Library: Audio Preview now works; not perfectly, but good enough for now.
  
• Fixed disabled images for new environments (Sci-Fi Tunnels, Mutant Club, Trippy Tunnels)
  

New Environments

Outlines

New Song Browser - Preview

Full release notes for V0.8.0c13:

• Fixed UI bug that prevented UIs being correctly displayed on the flatscreen.
  
• New Song Browser: The song database is now loaded immediately in the background when Holodance is started up. When you open the New Song Browser before that process is completed, you'll still get the progress as usual - but that is very unlikely to happen. If there were any errors during loading, these will still show up in the song browser when it finally is opened.
  
• New Song Browser: Keyword based search V1.0 done. You can type using the SteamVR keyboard and will get Artists, Titles and Genres. Depending on how many results your search terms deliver, you either immediately get the results (if it's less than 8), or accumulated lists for Artists, Titles and Genres that you can browse into.
  
• Major improvements to the logic that gets the osu installation path and added entries in Configuration.json that let you override the path if the logic failed. Also, we have more verbose logging now to be able to figure out problems more quickly, in the case that any still arise.
  
• Fixed bug that caused left and right controller movements not being recorded.
  
• Updated Volumetric Fog & Mist to 8.0 (from Sep 05, 2017)
  
• Added three more environments, currently only in the "Experimental" area: Bonus-03-SciFiTunnels, Bonus-04-SciFiClub, Bonus-05-TrippyTunnels. These are all in early prototype versions but we have included them so you can already give them a try.
  
• Major updated for Bonus-03-SciFiTunnels. This is now getting fairly close to its final state.
  
• Added black/white circles around orbs to make them better visible against very dark and very light backgrounds.
  
• Applied a fix for the issue that caused the Slider paths to sometimes be all messed up (or at least tried to ;-) ).
  
• Fixed issue in experimental area, Level 5, Pritvitej didn't show up.
  
• Updated animations for Level 5; those are final now (except for the dancing animations which still need to be done almost completely new).
  
• Story Mode: Fixed issue that prevented state of all tracks already being unlocked in a level from being properly recognized.
  
• Gameplay Settings: Removed options "Appear at Orb Source" and "Appear Immediately in Target Grid" because the latter hadn't work for quite a while and doesn't really make sense, anyways.
  
• Fixed bug that GameplaySettings no longer showed up when the button was clicked.
  
• Changed default for "Slider Lines" to false because those never really looked good.
  
• Fixed bug where switching off the "Timing Lasers" in the middle of a session would cause unexpected behaviour (looking kind of like you hadn't switched them off, but not quite).
  
• Fixed strange artefacts in Trippy Tunnels.
  
• Fixed nasty bug that prevented orb themes from properly being shown.
  
• Fixed repeating Slider arrows in new Slider style.
  
• New Song Browser: Text Search, first level (showing results overviews) now works. We have included the current version as a super-early preview but it's not even at the point where you could start a song, yet. In fact, Text Search is currently the only thing that works - and even that only works for the first level (showing results overviews) - going deeper leads to nowhere. WIP ...
  
• New Song Browser: Added images for all areas - most of these are still placeholders, but it's now easy to replace those placeholders with the real images as soon as they are done by Antonia.
  
• New Song Browser: Filtering and searching now works. We can also very quickly switch between filtered and non-filtered, which is especially useful for the keyword search (if you have a keyword that only gives you no results when the filters are active, you'll usually want the browser to ignore the filters to give you at least some results).
  
• New Song Browser: Added "Info" and the most important settings, so now you can select whether or not you want to use your osu! local library, or the full library ... and also see if anything went wrong with auto-detection.
  
• New Song Browser: If anything went wrong, the song browser now starts up with the settings active, so you should be able to fix the issue quickly (using Full osu! library should always work).
  

Holodance now has Trading Cards

Story Mode, Level 5 Preview

Flashing Lights Comfort Setting

JSON-Files Documentation

Full List of Release Notes

• Fixed bug we introduced in previous version that caused the note source in all the environments from story mode (except Level 10) to almost immediately go way above the player, making those environments unplayable.
  
• Improved choreography in Experimental Area / Level 2: Instead of doing a full 360° from the "forward-facing" position, which is really awkward, Vayusah now first goes 180° to the left, then 360° to the right. That way, the maximum angle turned from the forward-facing direction is 180° but we still get a 360° turn section. Also, the choreography now ends forward facing for this song, so the animation after the song doesn't end up with Vayusah flying away from the player before he says good-bye.
  
• Removed movement in Experimental Level 2 because it was confusing. Currently, this is only about testing the playability of the rotations of the dragon around the player. Movement will be there in advanced levels in the actual game and we may also add this back here at a later point in time, but for now this does not make sense.
  
• Dancing animations in the experimental levels no longer rely on root motion. Instead, after each animation, we check what kind of rotation / movement it was and then apply that as a discrete rotation / translation. As cool as root motion is, it actually turned out to cause a lot of trouble for the animation workflow, so as much as we can, we replace it with another approach.
  
• Finished the implementation of "Likes Flashes" comfort setting and also added an epilepsy warning before entering the Virtual Clubbing environment, if the "Likes Flashes" comfort setting is active. If this is disabled (i.e. player says "I don't like Flashes"), the main lightshow in the Virtual Clubbing level won't show up (this starts when you have activated the 4x multiplier by catching 48 orbs in a row without missing one). Basically, if you have been clubbing in real-world clubs with light-shows and feel comfortable there, entering Virtual Clubbing should not be a problem for you. We don't have actual stroboscopes in there - just moving spot-lights that flash on and off. But still, better be safe than sorry!
  
• Story Mode: Major progress in the preview of Level 5. The gameplay mechanics (outside of the actual song which is not ready, yet) now are pretty much solid; most of the animations are done except for polishing and there are a few jumps here and there due to incomplete animations. But we're getting there now, and fast.
  
• "I feel comfortable with ... Flashes" is now called "I feel comfortable with ... Flashing Lights" which is probably more clear. Also, when this is deactivated, the Particle Intensity (from the Virtual Clubbing performance settings) is clamped between 0.0 and 0.2, so while you can still get the effect in that mode, it is much more subtle than it is when you have "Flashing Lights" activated.
  
• Added READMEs with documentation for some of the JSON-files we use to persistently store various kinds of information locally. All those documentation files are under the folder README in the game folder (where Steam stores the game).
  
• Fixed an issue with how the "actualBonus..." values were stored in the recordings that make processing these values in 3rd party apps much more complex and error prone.
  
• Updated animations in Level 5.