Hi, I'm back!
In March 2021, Andy from Ramen VR asked me if I could help port the VR MMO Zenith: The Last City to PSVR (1 on PS4). With Holodance never quite breaking through and both narayana games and I running low on funds ... my journey took a thrilling detour.
And what a ride it's been! Working with the Ramen team on the massive world of Zenith was incredible — from the PSVR port to PS VR2, and everything in between. Console porting was fun, but as any indie dev will tell you, in small teams, you end up doing a bit of everything! After all, "specialization is for insects," as Robert Heinlein famously said.
Apologies for not making a formal announcement back in the day (just a message on our public Discord and later, a brief note here on the forums): Within one quick week, my life had changed from being 100% dedicated to Holodance and Beat the Rhythm to being 120% dedicated to helping building a massive and awesome VR MMO.
But now, with Ramen wrapping up Zenith development, I'm back in action with rhythm games (and also diving deeper into meditation). So, after almost four years, it's time to give you Holodance 1.5!
This update may not be as massive as Holodance 1.4, but it brings some much-needed polish, bug fixes, and—most importantly — finally fixes that osu! beatmap caching bug (sorry it took so long 🙈).
Oh, and one final thing before going into the details: If you use SteamLink with Quest, you might want to read this new guide: Playing Holodance with SteamLink
Patch Notes in Detail
- Music Library: Improved state management! Now, selected items and scroll positions should be preserved, even when pausing or playing a song. Even filter changes should mostly work—though if things break, just navigate back a bit and keep going.
- Music Library - Quick Access - Popular: Major improvements here! The "Challenge Me" list is now split into "Challenge Me (Own)" and "Challenge Me (Others)." More info here
- Modding: Cleaned up useCache—it now only exists in Mod.json, and changes there apply to TunnelMod.json (if present). Removed useCache in PostProcessingMod.json (it was just nonsense, really).
- Minor Bugfixes: Fixed two harmless bugs that were showing up in crash logs.
- Quick Access / Popular / Challenge Me: Sorting was previously based on vote count, so new additions got lost in the crowd. Now, your own entries are listed first, and the most recent votes are shown at the top!
- Orb Trails Finally! You can now turn off orb trails correctly. More info here
- UI Polishing: Toggle-descriptions no longer block the laser pointer (yay!), and the mute button logic is inverted to make more sense—active = preview, inactive = muted. Also moved the page up/down, top/down buttons of the scrollbars back to the scrollbar. The disadvantage is that the buttons are smaller and therefore easier to miss - the advantage is that it no longer ruins the look of the UI.
- UI Polishing: Added Feet to Player Location
- UI Polishing: Laser Pointer Color(s) now automatically adapt to hand colors
- Click & drag Polishing - Part 1: Increased the maximum time between trigger down/up for clicks from 0.3 seconds to 1 second because we have received feedback that clicks don't work.
- Click & drag Polishing - Part 2: The laser pointer used to stay fixed during the entire click delay, which made dragging a pain. Now, there's a separate delay for starting a drag (currently set at 0.1 seconds).
- Click & drag Polishing - Part 3: Okay, we admit, it was still annoying. So here's the fix: If a widget can be clicked but not dragged (most widgets): Click immediately (on down). When a widget can be dragged but not clicked: Drag immediately (no delay). Only if a widget can be clicked and dragged (those are the events in the Beatographer, our beatmap editor), wait for 0.3s before starting to drag, then click. So those, you do need to click fast.
- Avatar UI: Combined Avatar selection (left/right rotation) with selection ("Incarnate") for improved UX.
- Performance: Applied a few Performance Optimizations (e.g. 1.3 KB of allocations every 6 frames due to not caching a name)
- Streamer Mode: Fixed camera animations in Streamer Mode that were slowing down during pause mode.
- Updated Unity to 2019.4.21
- Updated SteamVR Unity Plugin to 2.7.2
- Updated Oculus Integration to 23.1.0
- Localization: Major progress on localization, but it's still not fully complete.
- Music Library: Fixed osu! beatmap caching—finally!
