Player Bugfixes
Many people have reported issues with the player over the past few days, and I heard you. Some things changed recently on the target site and now it's not working well at all. Fortunately, since the last patch I've been digging in and trying to find every single bug that causes the player to get stuck or loop. After extensive testing and a lot of code rewriting, we have a new player! If you notice anything acting worse than before, please let me know and I'll fix it up ASAP.

Drum-style Keyboard
If you haven't tried out a drum-style keyboard in another VR game, it's a fun and intuitive way of typing in VR. If you're using the Oculus Rift, or are having issues with the SteamVR keyboard, there's now a drum-style keyboard sitting there in the search screen. Thanks to NormalVR for their fantastic CutieKeys project that was a great starting point. Head over to search to check it out!

Unity and Shader Upgrades
In this patch the game has been upgraded to use Unity 2018.1.0f2, which also led to replacing a bunch of objects that were using old legacy shaders and deprecated functionality. This upgrade also made it necessary to regenerate the lighting information for the game (you may notice a larger patch delta this time as a result.) Not much has changed, but you may notice some minor visual differences here and there, and for some video hardware, a performance improvement.

That's it - this is mostly a quality of life and bugfix update. Hope everyone has fun playing!

New update for Soundboxing out today!

LIV Mixed Reality Support!
LIV is a fantastic set of tools for doing mixed reality VR streaming. Mixed reality lets those outside of VR see what you're doing inside the game, and right now it's the best way to introduce people to VR. We're thrilled to launch first-class LIV integration today. Now go do some awesome Twitch and Youtube streams!

Controller Pause Button
I play this game a lot myself, and I know how frustrating it can be if you need to pause quickly and you can't aim at that stupid little button. As of today, hitting A or B on Oculus or the pad or menu button on Vive while in play mode, will easily and immediately pause or play the game. This should have been done long ago, sorry about that, but you can thank Job Stauffer for prodding me to fix this :)

HD Videos!
Video content has been upgraded to 720p by default, compared to the SD resolution that was being shown before in-game. When VR headsets were all low resolution, it made little sense to render HD video. But now as the resolution of these headsets gets better and better, let's take advantage!

Speech Search Fixed
Due to some changes in the speech recognition APIs we were using (Watson) it had stopped working. We've upgraded to the latest and now it should be working again.

General Upgrades

• Upgraded to use Unity 2017.4.1f1
  
• Fixed duplicated network requests and message boxes
  
• Updated to latest browser engine, postprocessing stack, VR libraries, Steam auth library
  
• Beam to game much faster

New Website
If you haven't checked it out yet - you really should visit the new website at https://www.soundboxing.co. It makes it easy to find new challenges and beam them to the VR game, share challenges and playlists, find new players to follow, and - I think you'll be surprised how good the new WebVR demo is. You can send a challenge to a friend and if they have a WebVR-compatible browser, they can play it in VR (with interactive gloves and everything) right from their browser. Thanks to Megumi Tanaka again for her fantastic work on the redesign, after the inspired work on the logo last year.

What's next
I have to apologize for the long amount of time between updates. There are some good reasons but it doesn't matter - the important thing to know is that I'm still committed to improving this game. Check out all the work done on rebuilding the website and the WebVR demo, the smaller but numerous fixes to the full game, and trust that there are some larger Soundboxing efforts going on in the background that are taking longer than I'd hoped.

Soundboxing will continue to improve for quite a long time - I see it as a decade-long endeavor. For now join me in-game, check out some challenges, and enjoy the ride!

Quick update today based on feedback from last week's patch. Here's what's new:

• Always return back to where you were in a list! This has been a major point of feedback, and the game is better for it - thanks for speaking up!
  
• Fixed bug where explosions would not show up in replay mode.
  
• Fixed issue with images quickly switching between two backgrounds.
  
• Upgraded to latest Oculus libraries.
  
• Potential crash fix.

Thanks for playing!

Quick update today based on feedback from last week's patch. Here's what's new:

• Always return back to where you were in a list! This has been a major point of feedback, and the game is better for it - thanks for speaking up!
  
• Fixed bug where explosions would not show up in replay mode.
  
• Fixed issue with images quickly switching between two backgrounds.
  
• Upgraded to latest Oculus libraries.
  
• Potential crash fix.

Thanks for playing!

In the past month or so, we've been focused on one thing: overall game polish. This meant lots of playtesting, lots of bug squashing and performance improvements, and in the end - a major rewrite of most of the game code.

Here's what we're most excited about:

A fantastic new logo!
Thanks to Megumi Tanaka for her inspired work on our new logo, meant to look both like an approaching orb or like one of the robot's eyes.



New Menus
There's no guesswork with the new menu system. You'll always find what you need, in a consistent place and with a unified panel interface.




Infinite scroll
If you were worried about your content being lost forever, you can rest easy. Now everything is available forever - just keep scrolling and Soundboxing will fetch more content from the network, on every list.




Network code rewrite
It wasn't just the menu system that got an upgrade this patch. The entire networking system was rewritten and made more efficient - so downloads and uploads happen faster, and importantly, bandwidth used is reduced by an order of magnitude. Better still, now you can continue to play the game more freely while things are down- or uploading.



Bug squashing and performance tuning
An inordinate amount of effort has gone into playtesting, fixing a lot of little bugs that cropped up, and performance issues that had crept up in recent patches. If you find more annoyances or bugs, please let us know - we continue to squash them with high priority!

Wrapping up
Overall, not much of the game has changed, but a lot of the code has changed. Now that the foundation of the game has been improved so dramatically, look forward to some rapid feature development.

Speaking of which, who wants playlists? 😉

In the past month or so, we've been focused on one thing: overall game polish. This meant lots of playtesting, lots of bug squashing and performance improvements, and in the end - a major rewrite of most of the game code.

Here's what we're most excited about:

A fantastic new logo!
Thanks to Megumi Tanaka for her inspired work on our new logo, meant to look both like an approaching orb or like one of the robot's eyes.



New Menus
There's no guesswork with the new menu system. You'll always find what you need, in a consistent place and with a unified panel interface.




Infinite scroll
If you were worried about your content being lost forever, you can rest easy. Now everything is available forever - just keep scrolling and Soundboxing will fetch more content from the network, on every list.




Network code rewrite
It wasn't just the menu system that got an upgrade this patch. The entire networking system was rewritten and made more efficient - so downloads and uploads happen faster, and importantly, bandwidth used is reduced by an order of magnitude. Better still, now you can continue to play the game more freely while things are down- or uploading.



Bug squashing and performance tuning
An inordinate amount of effort has gone into playtesting, fixing a lot of little bugs that cropped up, and performance issues that had crept up in recent patches. If you find more annoyances or bugs, please let us know - we continue to squash them with high priority!

Wrapping up
Overall, not much of the game has changed, but a lot of the code has changed. Now that the foundation of the game has been improved so dramatically, look forward to some rapid feature development.

Speaking of which, who wants playlists? 😉

Let's cut to the chase: Soundboxing graphics used to suck. People have been having a blast, and over time the polish has improved, but this update today is the first to include a big noticeable graphics upgrade. I think you're going to like it!

Four brand new, high quality environments, with real lighting! Until today, Soundboxing was using flat shading, which was simple and fast but it did not look impressive. With this update, Soundboxing takes advantage of Unity's modern global illumination graphics pipeline to render in much higher quality.

Also hopefully fixed in this patch is the dreaded "Player Loading" bug which has plagued some users on startup. There may be another cause for that message besides what has been fixed this patch, so if it continues to be an issue, please let me know.

Let's cut to the chase: Soundboxing graphics used to suck. People have been having a blast, and over time the polish has improved, but this update today is the first to include a big noticeable graphics upgrade. I think you're going to like it!

Four brand new, high quality environments, with real lighting! Until today, Soundboxing was using flat shading, which was simple and fast but it did not look impressive. With this update, Soundboxing takes advantage of Unity's modern global illumination graphics pipeline to render in much higher quality.

Also hopefully fixed in this patch is the dreaded "Player Loading" bug which has plagued some users on startup. There may be another cause for that message besides what has been fixed this patch, so if it continues to be an issue, please let me know.

Excited to announce a new update - this time with good stuff both for Vive and Oculus players!

• Adjustable orb height
  
• Oculus Rift+Touch native support
  
• Leaderboards that show more than just the top 10!
  
• Bugs fixed

Adjustable orb height
If someone makes a challenge and isn't the same height as you, it's frustrating to reach some of the orbs. Ditto if the ceiling is low or the tracking area is narrow. No more! Now you can move and scale to choose where the orbs will hit.


Oculus Rift+Touch native support
You asked, and I'm here with good news: Oculus native support! For anyone who's had problems with the OpenVR-based Rift+Touch support, give this a shot. Note that the build that is bundled with Steam still uses Steam to log you in. Simply choose the Oculus launch option when launching the game.

Improved leaderboards
Tired of only being able to see the top 10 scores? Now you can see all of them! Nothing fancy about the buttons, but now you can see your score even if you didn't beat the best.


Bugs fixed
There were numerous small bugs fixed in this update - some counts appeared wrong because they ran out of room for digits, etc.

Since the last big patch, I've been so happy to see the variety of different types of challenges people are creating! Keep on keeping it weird.

Enjoy and dance on!

Excited to announce a new update - this time with good stuff both for Vive and Oculus players!

• Adjustable orb height
  
• Oculus Rift+Touch native support
  
• Leaderboards that show more than just the top 10!
  
• Bugs fixed

Adjustable orb height
If someone makes a challenge and isn't the same height as you, it's frustrating to reach some of the orbs. Ditto if the ceiling is low or the tracking area is narrow. No more! Now you can move and scale to choose where the orbs will hit.


Oculus Rift+Touch native support
You asked, and I'm here with good news: Oculus native support! For anyone who's had problems with the OpenVR-based Rift+Touch support, give this a shot. Note that the build that is bundled with Steam still uses Steam to log you in. Simply choose the Oculus launch option when launching the game.

Improved leaderboards
Tired of only being able to see the top 10 scores? Now you can see all of them! Nothing fancy about the buttons, but now you can see your score even if you didn't beat the best.


Bugs fixed
There were numerous small bugs fixed in this update - some counts appeared wrong because they ran out of room for digits, etc.

Since the last big patch, I've been so happy to see the variety of different types of challenges people are creating! Keep on keeping it weird.

Enjoy and dance on!