Hello friends, it's time for our monthly project heartbeat development update, I have spent this month working mostly on PH, so phoenix got many massive upgrades and is inching ever closer to being released.
I don't know why but I have spent the last few weeks working HARD on Phoenix, squashing many editor bugs and improving things here and there.
The funeral
As you may be aware, diva is all but dead, which is very sad, this has incidentally led to a massive amount of new sales for me, so it's a bittersweet moment. I hope I can carry the project diva torch as best as I can. Of course my budget will never be anywhere near diva, but PH also doesn't cost nearly as much ;)
(P.S: If you are the owner of some music-heavy IP, like a music-focused anime or similar I'm open to negotiations of making a game using the PH engine, similar to miracle girls festival. I have console and mobile versions of the engine too).
Phoenix Beta 3
I released Phoenix Beta 3 last week, I could pad this post by copying and pasting you all the changes (and there are a loooooot of them) but I think it would be better if you read it straight from the source here.
The important changes, besides the massive amounts of fixes are:
UI is now true 3D, saving power and looking better, plus I added a frosted glass effect to transparent elements
Modifiers are fixed, including hidden
New console -> arcade conversion modifier, experimental
Input map migration from old PH to Phoenix
Disabled dx12 support (for now)
Workshop now shows a gameplay type display
Some changes to menus, specially pregame
Phoenix Beta 4
Today I'm also releasing beta 4, well, I've been releasing it as I worked during the week, but there's yet another shit ton of changes to the game and fixes to make it work better. Not much new stuff, but as I said before, phoenix is in a bit of a feature freeze until it's all sorted out and relatively bug free.
God I fear for the day Phoenix is released and I have to write the changelog for all cumulative changes... Anyways here they are:
The controller dilemma
I was thinking about non-standard controller support in PH, and I came to a dilemma, I am considering only officially supporting non-gamepad-style controllers (like the xbox controller) and letting people use steam input to remap it. What do you guys think? (specially considering phoenix supports steam input, unlike stable PH).
Multiplayer
I've worked hard on some phoenix multiplayer stuff, it's almost ready, most functionality is restored but I want to give it a good do-over. Either way, it should be made available soon.
Unfortunately phoenix MP uses a different, newer, Steamworks P2P API for communication, so you won't be able to do crossplay between stable and beta.
Results screen rework
I redesigned the result screen, thanks to input from NeoRash from the PH server, the new one looks way nicer adn shows more info!
3D UI improvements
(It totally looks like wallhacks lol)
Good news, I've revamped how the 3D UI system introduced last update works, it's simpler and does clipping properly, yay. I also managed to do away without dynamic canvas operations, unfortunately I've also managed to break DX12 and OpenGL whoops..
I may just drop OpenGL support entirely, but i could reimplement it if needed quite simply.
DJA rework
In another episode of EIREXE tries to fix direct joystick access, I think I've finally done it this time.
I replaced how inputs behave, with the empty slide sound playing always, even when hitting.
I also used a multi band compressor to try and make the slide empty sound less annoying, let me know what you think!
Finally, I reworked how DJA behaves in general, including some funky deadzone intersection code that should make fast flicks more consistent.
Previously, when you hit a direction and then flicked back the opposite way there was a chance your input would "skip" the deadzone and thus never re-trigger the slide/heart action, now the game checks if a line drawn from the previous joystick position to the current joystick position would intersect the deadzone, if it does and if it would end up outside the deadzone again it takes care of triggering actions and releases the way it should.
Interval tree accelerated gameplay
After many long years of pain dealing with inconsistent note clipping I decided to go the nuclear way. The new interval tree method the game uses allows for very fast lookups of what note groups are actually visible on screen with none of the issues that plagued old PH, specially regarding custom time out values.
Other fixes/small changes
Fix MM+ song loading
Fix sine wave gimmick effects
Fix editor right click lockout
Fix editor timeline scale being wrong in some circunstances
Adjust slider piece particle and note hit effect
Fix difficulty creation
Fix editor settings selector
Fix creating variants
Improve mouse trap
Fix potential loading screen error when downloading UI skins
Fix workshop media auto downloads
Fix editor help links
Fix data race in get_song_select_sprite_set
Fix editor help links
Fix some timing point deserialization (intro skip, lyrics etc)
Fix song metadata editor question marks
Fix resource pack editor open pack window, scaling and inspector.
Adjust main menu scaling and theming
Fix practice mode layout
Fix lyric clipping
Fix error loading content dirs section
Fix ofsetting timing points in the editor only offsetting notes even if that setting is unchecked
Hide tempo change dialog by default
Optimize editor inspector updates by deferring them whenever possible
Optimize copying and pasting notes
Fix PPD song loader not loading YT json
Fix PPD video selector dialog
Make script editor dialog a normal window instead of a Popup
Fix script editor behavior and syntax highlight
Fix editor background scaling
Make editor playtest UI scaling match the game's
Optimize results screen
Fix some album art scaling issues
Fix workshop browser pagination wraparound and backing from detail view
Fix start menu party hat
Fix editor note layer order
Fix playtesting charts
Fix editor playtest not playing video at the correct time
Fix multi note deletion breaking
Fix audio loudness for MM+ variants
Fix DJA heart sustain note transfers
Fix "the save as button doesn't seem to do anything" and "after going into the song selector in the editor and then going back to a chart you can no longer press space to play until restarting the editor"
Rework some pre game screen architecture
Fix missing async task queue thread joins
Optimize song list container by using visibility notification rects
Fix note usage deserialization and related menu elements
Add CSV timing dumping
Swansong
Honestly haven't worked much on swansong, but I've made an execution system and switched to ghost of tsushima style GPU blood, it's fast as fuck and I think will look better once I add more randomness.
I'll post a video of the blood in movement on Patreon right after this post goes live.
After the combat and assassination system is semi-working, I would like to go work on parkour again, I have some ideas on how I'm going to do it.
I've also been drawing some concept art, it's not good but it shows an idea i had for a hanging city inside of a rock formation (a ravine?).
I also asked Guinii to make me some concept art for the protagonist, i'll showcase it here as soon as there's something done! I think you'll love the ideas I came up with.
Future
It's all looking very good, it's all going well, suspiciously well, this means we are well on our way to exiting early access relatively soon! Target is before august.
On another personal note, my car finally passed inspection (which cost me a pretty penny) and I unfortunately had to reject a job at a company for personal reasons, but oh well, at least I will always have frieren... except someone forgot to put the base in the box for the figure, ffs.
Project Heartbeat Phoenix: Beta 3 now available
Hello, I decided to start making changelogs for the big beta updates.
In case you aren't familiar with it, Phoenix is the name given to the new version of Project Heartbeat running on Godot 4, this version has been widely revamped with many new bells and whistles, including the new subtick system. You can learn more about it here:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EgtpCrbdSg
This update consists of 80+ changes to the game's code, mostly fixes but some minor new features.
Fixes
Fix workshop browser
Remove controller selector since it isn't required anymore
Remove simplified chinese translation that wasn't ready for prime-time yet.
Fix loading screen crashes
Fix some BPM changes not being applied
Fix an issue that would cause the game to crash when opening the editor
Fix notes not cleaning up properly when being deleted in the editor
Fix and improve behavior cursor auto-hide
Fix editing angles in the editor by clicking on the stage
Fix some editor time conversion errors
Fix folders
Fix midi, DSC and PPD importers.
Fix minor (inconsequential) memory leaks
Fix result rating styling
Optimize stylebox vertex count
Fix clipping in pregame screen.
Fix 3D menu scaling
Fix editor trying to use hidpi and failing at it strepitously
Fix lyrics rendering
Fix UI scaling changing when exiting the editor
Fix some popups not spawning centered
Fix note input lockout during fade-in
Fix slide chain drawers not doing the appear animation properly
Reduce editor font size to better match old PH
Fix missing editor toolbar icon and recolor waveform icon
Fix note movement gizmo losing tracking when moving the mouse too fast
Fix song variants crashing the game
Fix editor area select
Fix song list search passing keyboard input through in some circumstances
Fix song restart fade-in input lockout
Re-add yellow selection triangle to notes in the editor timeline
Fix arrange wheel
Fix pregame screen modifier buttons not being usable with a keyboard/gamepad
Fix pause menu stealing focus when clicking in an empty place
Optimize credits section
Fix results screen minimap
Fix results screen graph
Bring back and further optimize pause menu blur
Fix slide hold score not showing
Fix editor shortcut styling
Fix song metadata editor using save file dialogs instead of open file dialogs
Fix note appear effect animation speed
Add hack to reimplement old engine note high amplitude high frequency effects
Improve modifier localization
Fix modifier selector scaling
Fix hidden modifier
Features
Add note usage icons to workshop browser item thumbnail
Add new result screen test button to debug menu
The main menu is now real 3D, which should massively reduce power consumption and make most GUI elements look better.
Menu elements now have a 0 cost frosted glass effect behind them.
Pre-game screen now has a small leaderboard with information about previous plays, this will be improved upon in a future patch.
Temporary project heartbeat phoenix logo
Add migration system for old engine input maps
Make sustains actually usable when using the hidden modifier
The trailer I told you guys about in the last post is finally done and released, please check it out!
Cheers.
News roundup #6 - Project Heartbeat Phoenix
(This story was originally posted to the EIRTeam Patreon here) Hello, sorry for the delay but I've been down for most of the month due to health issues, fortunately I've still managed to continue work full steam ahead.
Unfortunately due to a badly timed company restructuring I didn't manage to get into the big studio I told you guys about last time, that was a hard blow specially because it would have been very helpful economically, oh well.
Project Heartbeat Phoenix
I've been struggling with coming up with a catchy name for the new engine update, I think I finally have one I like, Project Heartbeat Phoenix, let me know what you think about it.
Subtick promo video
I've been thinking about making promo videos for Phoenix, this includes the new subtick system, I already have a video ready that I will have Kyuuon voice, hopefully it's well received.
Fonts
I did some work on unifying fonts across the whole game to better support non-Latin character languages, if I did my job well every single label now supports Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Cyrillic characters (I hope).
Localization
I did some work on improving the localization system, it's now basically ready for me to send to translation companies to translate it. I tried to find a service where I can let people contribute localizations, but I would have to self-host and thinking about it with the cost of proper translation it would probably end up being more expensive. I also considered AI translation but people would probably not like it and Valve may be made about it. My current plans for localization languages in PH will be:
English
Spanish
Catalan
Japanese
Chinese (Simplified)
Chinese (Traditional)
Russian
Ukrainian
It might take a bit for me to look into paying for these translations because I have to get the car fixed, but hopefully that will be done soon.
SDL on Windows
The game now uses SDL for handling game pads on windows just like on Linux, this is likely to increase compatibility with different controllers and I might do something fancy with the PS4/5 LEDs in the future.
Other minor fixes
Fixed a long-standing where the waveform would veer off-sync depending on the amount of horizontal scroll
Fixed async loading data races on boot
Fix main menu mouse accuracy
Fix scrolling using the mouse in various places
Swansong
As I said last month I've started working on the combat system for Swansong, it's not ready to show yet, but I've recently added sound events to the animation system, ragdolls and I'm currently working on blood by taking inspiration from Counter-Strike 2. I might even make a video detailing how the system works.
I have also been experimenting with some euphoria-style semi-procedural ragdoll physics, I'll probably use them for death poses and maybe for some combat reactions.
Future
Honestly it's been a rough month, I almost though about cancelling Swansong but I got a burst of motivation to work on it after seeing the combat system sorta seem to work.
I also went to the doctor the other day for a follow up on my kidney stones, seems like its genetic and all I can do is drink water and pray they dissolve before getting dislodged.
See you all next month!
The early access finale update now in beta, tickless input system, SDL & more!
Hello again friends, welcome again to the monthly progress post. I've been busy working on things for both PH and Swansong and I'm very excited to how well things are turning out.
I also had the opportunity to get interviewed for a job, i managed to pass two interviews and a technical test quite well, but I still haven't received a finally answer, it's at a pretty nice local studio so the money would come in handy, I could even hire people to work on PH if the workload is too big for me, so the continuity of the game wouldn't be a concern.
Project Heartbeat
New content on the way
A few new songs are either charted or about to be charted, they will be added to the game as they are ready, at least 3 new songs are being worked on, here's a sneek peek at how the artwork for one will look.
It's made by Guinii, our resident anime women enthusiast.
The early access finale update
I have decided to rename the Godot 4 port to the "early access finale" update, this update will be the final update before the game comes out of early access, however this doesn't mean I won't continue working on the game. I just feel like its in a very good position where it can be justified to be called a full game.
Challenges proposal
After the very successful launch of the new website design I am pleased to announce that I've started work on challenges, challenges will allow players to fight against each other on randomly selected songs, details are still to be determined so I suggest you read my proposal here.
YUV -> RGB conversion on the GPU
Normally, when video frames are decoded they don't use the typical red green and blue format.
Generally, these are decoded as three monochrome planes (essentially, three black and white textures), with the first texture being brightness information and the other two being color information. This generally results in an imperceptible difference (at least to human eyes) and much more compact information storage.
Previously, PH would convert from YUV to RGB using the CPU for every rendered frame, even some that may never be shown at all. This was bad, so now the video is decoded as-is without conversion and is sent to the GPU as three YUV planes, it is then converted into RGB by the GPU.
The result is a >900% improvement in video decoding performance. Something to be at least a bit proud of I think.
Discord rich presence improvements
Discord rich presence now uses a homegrown discord RPC wrapper, which means that it will work more reliably (specially on Linux) and it makes my life a lot easier.
I also added a new feature, the game will now provide discord with workshop preview URLs, this makes the album art for the song show up on your discord profile. Fancy.
DirectX 12
On Windows PH now uses the new DirectX 12 rendering backend, this is to improve responsiveness and frame time consistency on windows, unfortunately there appears to be some kind of memory leak on some AMD drivers and on Intel Xe, so dragons beware.
Currently we are defaulting to Vulkan but you can give the dx12 backend a go with the following command-line argument:
--rendering-driver d3d12
SDL for input
It's not news that Godot's input system is sub-par at best and questionable at worst. Hence why I decided to rip the entire input driver and replace it with SDL. SDL is a very common library for handling various aspects of application development, although here its only used for gamepad input.
The reasons are varied, but its mainly about preventing duplicate devices (such as virtual steam input devices) and properly mapping quirky controllers.
Currently SDL is only available on Linux, and it uses your system SDL2 library for now.
Input system changes
PH's input system was originally meant to work around issues caused by godot's shoddy input handling, fortunately with the addition of SDL we can now be in the 21st century and accept inputs from various controllers at the same time, all without having to go into the input menu to change between controllers.
This may also open opportunities for coop charts. Let's see what you can come up with!
Timestamped input system
One of the new stars of the show is the tickless input system, essentially inputs are constantly being read while the game is doing other things and a timestamp is assigned to each input event.
Before PH would process all input events at some point during the frame as if they happened at the time they were processed, this wasn't exactly the best idea, while it doesn't matter for most games for rhythm games like PH its quite noticeable
Once the game processes the input events, it knows at what time they happened, the game was already designed with this in mind, so gameplay can evaluated at any song position.
This results in essentially unlimited input polling rate (well, whatever your hardware can handle), even if the game is running at a lower framerate.
Nightcore modifier video support
The nightcore modifier now supports playing back video, this uses a bit more CPU but it does work.
Swansong
This month I worked very hard on Swansong's combat system, although it's too green to show much at this time, maybe next month!
Future
Thank you for reading yet another monthly update by the time I post another update I will have turned 24, oh the missery of the passing of time!
I will keep on keeping on for as long as I can, have a good one my friends.
News roundup #4 - New website now released!
Hello friends, today marks the release of some things I've been cooking for a while, hope you like them. This month has been as active as the last due to the holiday season, but I've still worked hard as much as I could to deliver these things to you.
The Project Heartbeat website revamp is something I've been cooking for a while. It has taken a few months of hard work and a lot of code restructuring to make it more extensible, faster, easier to use and prettier, let's get into the details.
The new website
New design
The first thing you will notice upon entering the website is the new design, it's much fancier and represents the in-game aesthetics much better. More importantly this has resulted in a significant code restructuring which makes styling changes to the site much easier to do on my end.
The song pages now feature the song's background art, this is thanks to Steven's excellent Project HeartAttack website, which is also now linked on the song pages. Thanks Steven!
Of course, this is only temporary, I want to move to a locally cached version of song data, for this and other purposes, unfortunately valve hasn't been very cooperative with fixing with a certain bug I'm facing, so I cannot proceed with the reliable option I was thinking of.
Score progression
The site will now store a history of your personal bests for songs as you get better at them, so you can see how much your score improved, a fancy graph is also included.
Score details
You can now see a detailed breakdown of every one of your scores, this includes a breakdown of point distribution and yet another fancy graph.
The score page also will now have a thumbnail when you post it on Twitter, Telegram, Facebook and even WhatsApp, when clicking the in-game tweet share button the link to the score will be included in the tweet if it's a PB, however this functionality isn't ready just yet on the game side.
Profile changes
You can now search on every player profile for songs based on name. You can also sort the results based on date achieved or rank, this can and will be expanded in the future.
Badges
Another important feature is badges, which are granted to people who achieve certain things or that have contributed to the game. Although currently no in-game actions grant any badges they will in the future.
There exist three badges at this time, the early access badge which all users have, the master charter badge which is given to official charters and the Patreon Supporter badge which is given to people who support this Patreon page.
Song search
Additionally, you can also search for song leaderboards in the new community songs page.
Performance and other technical funnies
The new website uses the great htmx framework which makes a tightly integrated and high performance site like the PH site a breeze to make without having to involve complicated web frameworks.
Some performance improvements have been made, some actions that were done sequentially are now done in parallel and some queries have been optimized.
Future
There are many things that I didn't implement just yet, like the aforementioned ability for the site to have access to the actual chart information and assets. This will come once Valve decides to fix the bug I am facing.
On another note, a feature I would like to include in the future at the suggestion of Steven is daily or weekly challenges, where people compete on a randomly selected song to attempt to obtain badges. I still haven't finalized how it will work, but I would like to give out three different badges per difficulty (for the podium), with a special badge reserved to whoever gets the highest score of the day/week on the song's hardest difficulty.
Swansong pitch
As swansong has evolved to the point where I can call it a viable game to build, I decided to focus my attention on defining most aspects of the rest of the game.
On January 1st 2024, after crying myself to sleep once again I had an epiphany, I finally came up with the full game-concept that I wanted, which I redacted the next day into a pitch that I can show to people, inspired mainly by the original Diablo pitch.
You can find the pitch here, please let me know what you think of it!
Future
That's it for this time, I hope everyone has an amazing new year and hopefully things will be better soon! The future is scary but exciting at the same time.
News roundup #2 & #3 - Source code release, new song, website revamp & more
(This is a summed up version of news roundup #2 and #3, I forgot to post #2 to steam so I'm merging them together whoops, hopefully I won't make the same mistake again, you can see the #3 edition of new roundup here on our Patreon)
Hello, I am once again hoping I can manage to make the news posts become monthly from now on, anyways, since we are in early December I think it's time for the updates, there are many exciting new things I've been working on.
New song: Spread my wings
A few days ago I announced (on Twitter/X whatever you wanna call it) the start of an official collaboration between Project Heartbeat and the Grazepoint eurobeat creator's circle, with the first song, "Spread My Wings" by DJ Timotei feat. Slothington from the album TouWHO?? 2.
This is the first chart made by mvluna and features artwork from resident artist Sadnesswaifu.
Source code release
While this has done a while ago I wasn't sure if it would stick, but now I am. I released the source code for Project Heartbeat publicly for everyone to take a look at, it's not open source but it's source code available, I will explore a proper open source release in the future.
Since the last update many things have happened, the new engine version of the game was finally released for testing, although it's very broken. If you are interested in checking it out please go on the Discord server and look for the new engine info channel to learn how to access it. New engine branch updates
As I said, it's very broken but it already integrates some goodies such as the new input glyphs and a new song that is currently being tested.
The new engine also has support for Steam Input emulate devices, long gone are the days of having double inputs!
While this is a preliminary port it doesn't make use of ALL the new engine features just yet (for example, the new mailbox vsync or the ability to switch controllers on the fly). But it will soon.
Please, test it out so I can work through the issues faster!
Website revamp updates
As a side project I started work on upgrading the website. I started by upgrading it to use the most recent version of actix-web and to use htmx, which should provide a more modern experience. As this means interactivity can now be expanded upon I am also working on the ability to search within the site for songs by name.
I also want to add the ability to see historical leaderboard data, that should be useful.
I would also like to do something similar to what Steven's website (Project HeartAttack) does with the songs, which is that it locally has the song data available which would be helpful. I would also like to add some form of cache for user data and avatars to increase performance of the site, as the current source of slowness is having to constantly call the Steam API which is incredibly slow.
last month I showed you a more conservative set of changes but I decided to go the extra mile and do a proper revamp to bring it more in line with the game's styling and make it more modern.
Among the new features are improvements to the responsiveness of the site on mobile devices, as well as a per-user progression history page, full with a graph (the graph is free of JavaScript btw!).
This obviously comes with massive improvements to the underlying technology powering the site, such as better database access locking and more.
There are a few things I haven't been able to implement properly yet, such as allowing the site to access the actual files of charts on the Steam Workshop, such as for using background images or some other statistics. My plan was to use the same mechanism dedicated servers in other games use, however it appears there's some kind of issue with permissions that affects Project Heartbeat only, I contacted Valve about this but they haven't been very helpful yet, hopefully this will be resolved.
As you can probably tell, the site is heavily inspired by Osu's website, if it ain't broken don't fix it.
The last thing that I want to do (which the server already has data for, I just haven't gotten around to making the actual page yet) is the ability to have a page dedicated to each score entry to see a graphed breakdown of information.
Once the replay system is working there will also be a button on the webpage that launches the game to show a replay, fancy.
Another thing I want to do to the site (and to implement in-game in the future) is badges/medals for certain achievements done to help the Project Heartbeat community, my plan is to have a general-purpose thank-you badge for people who have done great things (such as Steven and his PHA website) and a few more specific ones for things such as people who've charted officials or for having participated in the community-ran events. Of course there will be a special badge for patrons.
Project Swansong updates
The last few months have been spent on refining the parkour system for swansong. The game now uses pre-baked polygons for sideways ledge movement. This has been a majorly painful thing to do and the current solution still isn't perfect, but it will do for now, it will make it (hopefully) more reliable. I would like for the parkour demo to be ready before the end of the year, but with my health in decline i have no idea if I'll have the demo ready in time.
On other notes, I've integrated the Jolt character controller, which means the player can now go up and down steps, coupled with the IK system and the feet aren't staying in the air! This can be improved further (I have read some papers about how Assassin's Creed syndicate does it), but it looks better than most games for now.
I still haven't decided other aspects of the game, as I'm focusing on the parkour first (since it's the highlight of the game) but I have been thinking about how the gameplay loop will work and whether or not it will be semi-open world like AC1. After the parkour system is released to testing I will be focusing on combat.
This month I've spent a lot of time working on improvements to the reliability of parkour system, such as introducing an additional ring around grabbable ledges so that the character keeps a reasonable distance to it that is also consistent.
I also ended up completely rewriting the parkour logic to make more heavy use of shape casts and other trickery to make sure movements are possible, while this is a bit more labor intensive than the previous raycast only solution it seems worth it, as it has already shown a lot of promise in terms of reliability.
We are inching closer and closer to a playable prototype, hopefully by next month after I finish the wall grab point system.
Personal update
Life continues to look grim and I slip in and out of depressive and sometimes manic episodes, so I'm not putting in as many hours into working as I originally hoped. Sales also haven't been good at all, even with the boost of publicity from the winter sale. I tried to apply to a bunch of gamedev jobs without any luck at all. Hopefully things will get better over Christmas.
Goodbye friends, see you soon!
News roundup #1 - Swansong, The new engine, the 3 big projects
(Originally posted on the EIRTeam patreon) Hello friends, it's time to give you an update on the development of Project Heartbeat and everything EIRTeam.
I'm currently on vacation, so i'm using this time to work on Swansong (more on that later) and enjoy time with my family. I hope you all are also having a good summer.
Swansong
As some of you may be aware, swansong is the parallel project I'm doing to try to develop a game after Project Heartbeat, this is an adventure game with a heavy focus on parkour inspired by Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding.
Development is going better than I expected, I have recently been working mostly on polishing stuff and on foot IK, the first phase of the development of the game focuses on having a working parkour system that I can share around for people to test, perhaps here on patreon.
The character model used in the screenshots above are from the previous iteration of the project (which was 2.5d) so the quality is not good, this model won't be used in the final game, it's purely for testing.
I am lucky to have a few artist friends who are very smart and are up to working together. I have however decided to only call them in when the gameplay is mostly working to avoid wasting their time.
Project Heartbeat's 3 big projects
(Actual image of PH on the new engine)
Porting of Project Heartbeat to Godot 4 is going well, 90% of things already work, the two big ones are the multi spinbox in the editor and youtube downloads.
For the initial release of the beta of Project Heartbeat on Godot 4 Multiplayer and leaderboards will be disabled, but they'll be brough back before release.
Some of the big upgrades to PH on godot 4 come from a set of new projects I started together with this patreon, the new video decoding code which is already public. The performance of video decoding appears better, although there are again some kinks to iron out.
The other two big projects are the Input Glyph system and the new Steamworks wrapper, these aren't released yet, but will be soon. With the new Input Glyph system we have working Steam Input, so you will be able to use it when PH on Godot 4. The changes also mean controller support will be improved, you will be able to change controllers on the fly much more easily, without having to fiddle inside menus.
(By the way, I'm still trying to come up with a marketing name for PH on Godot 4, something like PH: Evolution or something like that, any suggestions?)
Discord changes
Pascal now runs an events channel on the discord, you can check it out and subscribe to it using the special role to get updates. Do note, I do not run this channel, it's entirely driven by people from the community, it's very nice to see.
The future
I'm gonna be frank with you folks, things are looking grim at this time, not just my finances but also my life in general.
As some of you may know, I've been suffering from major depressive disorder and ADHD since I was very young, this is making my life somewhat of a living hell. Having an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and feeling like I'm not worth anything. I have been coping as much as I can but I feel like I'm at a big crossroad.
Due to these issues I've always tried to be as independent when it comes to working as possible, as my very few experiences with a job have ended in what could be considered disasters (I was sacked for calling me boss a cunt). Unfortunately, when it's time to put money on the table there might be an actual need for me to find a regular job. My mother works at a medical manufacturing plant and my father is heavily disabled, so he doesn't have a regular job.
I have decided that if Swansong development hasn't picked up by the end of the year or PH hasn't rocketed off I will begin looking for a job, this will obviously mean less time to work on PH but I'll do my best.
Thank you for reading, let's keep on keeping on.
Minor update 0.17.5
0.17.5
Add bypass for wrong notes in multis that contain the note type pressed on non-macro acti ons
Add patron list to credits
Update yt-dlp
0.17.4
Fix accuracy display not being visually reset when restarting a song
Adjust slide chain loop's volume to match the start portion of it
Fix sus note property pasting issues
Fix heart notes being able to get FINE< ratings
Fix base BPM conversion from V1 to V2 charts
Add love
0.17.3
Fix issues with the leaderboards for monochrome stars
Use romanized song title in editor chart open popup
Make game fallback to the default SFX if the custom one can't be found
Fix intro skip not showing again when a song is restarted
Add love
Minor update 0.17.3
0.17.3
Fix issues with the leaderboards for monochrome stars
Use romanized song title in editor chart open popup
Make game fallback to the default SFX if the custom one can't be found
Fix intro skip not showing again when a song is restarted
