Today, we finally finished a new Holodance gameplay teaser which is based on the most recent version of the game (0.7.2). We have also included a few shots from older versions, including some of our Mixed Reality sessions during Gamescom 2016 in Cologne.

Here's the link to the video on Vimeo:

Holodance V0.7.2 Gameplay Teaser (Long Version)

On YouTube, we have both a shorter and longer version (and the shorter version has some audio-issues):

Holodance V0.7.2 Gameplay Teaser (Long Version)

Holodance V0.7.2 Gameplay Teaser

If you'd like to discuss this trailer, you can do so either in our forums or also on Reddit: /r/vive, /r/oculus or /r/virtualreality

This new video (the long version) should also show up on the Steam Store page; but I'm not perfectly sure because I'm already off my office computers and working with a MacBook Pro which doesn't seem to play any trailers on the Steam Store. Otherwise, it's the short version with the audio issues that I had uploaded first. Oh well ;-)

I'm taking a short vacation now, for a meditation retreat until January 4th, 2017. Today and tomorrow, I'll still check for any questions, then I'm offline for a few days. And then, 2017 arrives and will be awesome :-)

Today, we finally finished a new Holodance gameplay teaser which is based on the most recent version of the game (0.7.2). We have also included a few shots from older versions, including some of our Mixed Reality sessions during Gamescom 2016 in Cologne.

Here's the link to the video on Vimeo:

Holodance V0.7.2 Gameplay Teaser (Long Version)

On YouTube, we have both a shorter and longer version (and the shorter version has some audio-issues):

Holodance V0.7.2 Gameplay Teaser (Long Version)

Holodance V0.7.2 Gameplay Teaser

If you'd like to discuss this trailer, you can do so either in our forums or also on Reddit: /r/vive, /r/oculus or /r/virtualreality

This new video (the long version) should also show up on the Steam Store page; but I'm not perfectly sure because I'm already off my office computers and working with a MacBook Pro which doesn't seem to play any trailers on the Steam Store. Otherwise, it's the short version with the audio issues that I had uploaded first. Oh well ;-)

I'm taking a short vacation now, for a meditation retreat until January 4th, 2017. Today and tomorrow, I'll still check for any questions, then I'm offline for a few days. And then, 2017 arrives and will be awesome :-)

This will be the last update this year because I'm starting a one week meditation retreat a few hours from now (yeah, it got late again ;-) ). Most important thing are a few fixes and the new "Expert Settings" which let customize how Sliders look.

Still need to create a new gameplay teaser video with this version ... and it's late ... so ... here's the details:

• UI: Major cleanup of Pause and Settings UI (some details follow)
  
• Pause Menu: Added a way to cancel back to the level (instead of cancelling into the main menu which requires loading the environment again)
  
• UI: Renamed "Advanced Style Settings" simply to "Style Settings" to make room for "Expert Settings"; also changed the layout of the UI a little to have more clarity and better consistency between "Settings" and "Pause"
  
• UI: Removed "Unlock Available Story" from Settings. This wasn't really useful, consumed space and could cause confusion.
  
• UI: Added Expert Settings which are currently mostly used to set Sliders up the way you like them. This is super-experimental and won't stay in the game in the current form. We're looking for your feedback to shape / polish this accordingly. Ideally, we'd like to have one default style that works for most people, and options so people that like a different style can get that as well. Expert Settings also has "Song Skipping" which is what I'll be using to shoot the new gameplay trailer. Something like this will also be available in a polished form primarily for YouTubers that want to shoot a specific section of a song from different angles or in different environments.
  
• Level-00-Neutral (default level for osu!-beatmaps): Tweaked visuals of the orb source a tiny bit and made its location persistent, so now when you do "Orb Source Setup" in this environment, the game will remember where you put it. You can use this together with "Orb Timing" (which is how many quarter notes the orbs take to fly towards you after being created) to create different play styles and also work around sloppy physics, if you encounter them (stuff like orbs that you actually should have caught but that were not registered as such).
  
• UI: Removed "Score-Factor" from Orb Source Setup because we're currently not using this and will also tweak this value according to player feedback. In the current form, it was only misleading. It will return.
  
• UI: Moved "Orb Source Setup" button from main pause menu to Expert Settings. "Orb Source Setup" is only available for very specific environments and is also there primarily to gather feedback from players: Which is your favorite distance / location?
  
• Temporarily disabled skipping in levels 2 and 3 (because it was causing unexpected and ugly behavior in those 2 levels and will be fixed with the next animation update)
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Fixed another issue in the file scanner that was similar to the one we've had in 0.7.0. This happens with beatmaps that throw off the beatmap parser. Such beatmaps will be ignored for now and give you errors in the log but should no longer crash the file scanner.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Fixed an issue when one osu songs folder has multiple audio files. Holodance was using one audio file for all, which doesn't work in this case. Thanks to Noe for reporting this one, and the file scanner crash above.
  
• Added a little trail effect to the controllers; this can be disabled with the particles (I'm assuming that people like the particle effects also like this little trail-effect, hope I'm not wrong but I'm sure you'll let me know if I am)
  
• Added full local tracking of songs played, including player movement. This last part is from a replay-feature we've had in the very first prototypes of Holodance but then broke by adding new features and never cared enough to fix it or develop it into something more solid. But that will now be coming fairly soon.

This will be the last update this year because I'm starting a one week meditation retreat a few hours from now (yeah, it got late again ;-) ). Most important thing are a few fixes and the new "Expert Settings" which let customize how Sliders look.

Still need to create a new gameplay teaser video with this version ... and it's late ... so ... here's the details:

• UI: Major cleanup of Pause and Settings UI (some details follow)
  
• Pause Menu: Added a way to cancel back to the level (instead of cancelling into the main menu which requires loading the environment again)
  
• UI: Renamed "Advanced Style Settings" simply to "Style Settings" to make room for "Expert Settings"; also changed the layout of the UI a little to have more clarity and better consistency between "Settings" and "Pause"
  
• UI: Removed "Unlock Available Story" from Settings. This wasn't really useful, consumed space and could cause confusion.
  
• UI: Added Expert Settings which are currently mostly used to set Sliders up the way you like them. This is super-experimental and won't stay in the game in the current form. We're looking for your feedback to shape / polish this accordingly. Ideally, we'd like to have one default style that works for most people, and options so people that like a different style can get that as well. Expert Settings also has "Song Skipping" which is what I'll be using to shoot the new gameplay trailer. Something like this will also be available in a polished form primarily for YouTubers that want to shoot a specific section of a song from different angles or in different environments.
  
• Level-00-Neutral (default level for osu!-beatmaps): Tweaked visuals of the orb source a tiny bit and made its location persistent, so now when you do "Orb Source Setup" in this environment, the game will remember where you put it. You can use this together with "Orb Timing" (which is how many quarter notes the orbs take to fly towards you after being created) to create different play styles and also work around sloppy physics, if you encounter them (stuff like orbs that you actually should have caught but that were not registered as such).
  
• UI: Removed "Score-Factor" from Orb Source Setup because we're currently not using this and will also tweak this value according to player feedback. In the current form, it was only misleading. It will return.
  
• UI: Moved "Orb Source Setup" button from main pause menu to Expert Settings. "Orb Source Setup" is only available for very specific environments and is also there primarily to gather feedback from players: Which is your favorite distance / location?
  
• Temporarily disabled skipping in levels 2 and 3 (because it was causing unexpected and ugly behavior in those 2 levels and will be fixed with the next animation update)
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Fixed another issue in the file scanner that was similar to the one we've had in 0.7.0. This happens with beatmaps that throw off the beatmap parser. Such beatmaps will be ignored for now and give you errors in the log but should no longer crash the file scanner.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Fixed an issue when one osu songs folder has multiple audio files. Holodance was using one audio file for all, which doesn't work in this case. Thanks to Noe for reporting this one, and the file scanner crash above.
  
• Added a little trail effect to the controllers; this can be disabled with the particles (I'm assuming that people like the particle effects also like this little trail-effect, hope I'm not wrong but I'm sure you'll let me know if I am)
  
• Added full local tracking of songs played, including player movement. This last part is from a replay-feature we've had in the very first prototypes of Holodance but then broke by adding new features and never cared enough to fix it or develop it into something more solid. But that will now be coming fairly soon.

Sorry for being a little spammy with releases - but 0.7.1 is another important one, even if it's fairly small (unsurprisingly, given that we just put 0.7.0 out yesterday morning and 0.7.0b1 yesterday in the evening ;-) ).

The most important thing: The previous Slider updated kind of sucked, so here's another Slider update that hopefully will rock. Just a random note for those interested in these kinds of things: Yesterday, when playtesting Holodance with Camellia - d:for the DELTA, at about 4 am, my head and heart literally almost exploded from joy. No kidding. And there were no drugs involved. Just the pure bliss of hearing awesome beats and moving with the rhythm and seeing those orbs and sliders right in my face. One time, I literally stopped playing and just danced for a minute or so.

Well, ok, um ... enough of that. Here's the dry facts of V0.7.1:

• Fixed a bug in the file browser that could cause empty lists with full libraries. (that one was already in V0.7.0b1, which really should have been V0.7.0p1 instead of b1 ;-) ).
  
• Fixed text color in grouping / sorting drop down list. This was white, should have been orange. Also toned down background because it stood out too intensely.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Major improvements to progress indication and tracking of the osu file scanner.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Using trail renderer instead of particles for Sliders now. This looks much better.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Made keeping data like favorites, last played songs or statistics about played beatmaps more reliable.

Sorry for being a little spammy with releases - but 0.7.1 is another important one, even if it's fairly small (unsurprisingly, given that we just put 0.7.0 out yesterday morning and 0.7.0b1 yesterday in the evening ;-) ).

The most important thing: The previous Slider updated kind of sucked, so here's another Slider update that hopefully will rock. Just a random note for those interested in these kinds of things: Yesterday, when playtesting Holodance with Camellia - d:for the DELTA, at about 4 am, my head and heart literally almost exploded from joy. No kidding. And there were no drugs involved. Just the pure bliss of hearing awesome beats and moving with the rhythm and seeing those orbs and sliders right in my face. One time, I literally stopped playing and just danced for a minute or so.

Well, ok, um ... enough of that. Here's the dry facts of V0.7.1:

• Fixed a bug in the file browser that could cause empty lists with full libraries. (that one was already in V0.7.0b1, which really should have been V0.7.0p1 instead of b1 ;-) ).
  
• Fixed text color in grouping / sorting drop down list. This was white, should have been orange. Also toned down background because it stood out too intensely.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Major improvements to progress indication and tracking of the osu file scanner.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Using trail renderer instead of particles for Sliders now. This looks much better.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Made keeping data like favorites, last played songs or statistics about played beatmaps more reliable.

Update 1 (2016-12-24, morning): It seems V0.7.0 has a bug in the osu!-browser, so we put this into the beta-branch for now. The default branch now has 0.6.3b2 until this is fixed.

Update 2 (2016-12-24, late night): We have now released V0.7.0b1, which patches the issue in V0.7.0. There still seems to be an issue with keeping favorites and last played songs that I'm investigating, but we've moved 0.7.0b1 to the default and beta branch now, so this is now the current version. There will probably another update this year, with more fixes and polishing, and also some options (not everyone likes the new Slider-style).

Update 3 (2016-12-25, 5am): Ok, the Slider visualization in 0.7.0 kind of sucked. Sorry about that. I think I've got it right now. Doing a build right now and will release that tomorrow when back in the office (builds currently take about an hour; that's another thing that needs to be fixed ;-) ).

So this is a really big one, that's why we moved from 0.6.2, or 0.6.3b2 on the beta-branch directly to V0.7.0: With the new logo, we have redesigned most of the UI. A few screens are still in the old still and we will further polish the UI but the game now has a much more consistent look in terms of what we really want to achieve:

Imagine "dancing in the Holodeck". That's kind of obviously what the "Holo" in "Holodance" came from. The "story-mode" is really just one possible experience you can have while dancing in the Holodeck. And of course, "dancing" just means tuning into the rhythm and freely moving with the music. There's orbs you need to catch, yeah, and curves you need to follow, but we're not gonna tell you how to move because we consider dancing really a free expressive movement of rhythm and joy. Holodeck is kind of sci-fi, so that's what drives the style now. It's a big change and we hope you like it as much as we do!

Then, we have received a lot of feedback regarding our osu file browser. Shuffle (random song selection) did not make it into this release, yet, sorry - but a lot of important changes did: First of all, audio-preview! At last! We were missing that, too. Then, thanks to StreyVolt for many suggestions including adding a Difficulty Filter. You can now finally also add and browse your Favorites as well as browser a list of all Last Played songs. Grouping can be disabled if you prefer browsing a flat list (which now is much faster due to both a scrollbar and first/last buttons).

Also, all filter settings are now persistent, so you don't have to set up everything from scratch each time you enter the game. We love it, and I hope you will, too!

The prototype-slider visualization is now been replaced with spiraling particles that show up right in front of you while the orb arrives. There's more work to be done on this one, but it's hopefully a major improvement over the previous style.

That particular feature didn't make into the story-mode floating curves, yet, but, the story-mode also got some love: We noticed that a lot of people drop out from level 2 to level 3, which is really unfortunate because level 3 is one of our internal favorites. So thanks to the suggestion made by zahntorg, after completing the first track in level 2 you can now immediately skip to level 3. We have also much improved tracking your progress for each track of each song, using an actual "passed flag" for each individual track instead of the progress counter we use for unlocking tracks and levels.

There's a lot more, so here's the full release notes in detail (including the two 0.6.3 beta releases that never made it into the default-branch because 0.7.0 was coming too fast):

• Added a way to change the orb source location (this currently works in Level-00-Neutral and Bonus-02-Clubbing); we use this to find the ideal distance that the orbs need to pass in the given time but will keep this in the game for your convenience. Reducing the distance makes the orbs arrive more slowly which may make the game a little easier; for that purpose we have added a score factor that will reduce the score per orb based on that distance.
  
• osu-beatmaps: There was an issue that closing and opening the file browser caused no songs to be displayed. This is fixed now, hopefully without nasty side-effects.
  
• Environments: Bonus-02-Clubbing has been significantly improved. This is still just a prototype - but it's slowly starting to take shape.
  
• Story-Mode: For the track-checkmarks in the level/environment selection, we now keep track of the actual tracks played since the last reset. This makes the experience much nicer when you unlock certain levels because the game won't pretend you already have passed levels that you actually didn't pass (which it previously did). Also, this was kind of needed for the "skip to level 3" feature we're adding (otherwise, players could easily miss some of the nicest tracks in level 2). As this feature is new and we hadn't tracked the data in this way before, the game will show no tracks passed, even if you had already passed all tracks. Consider this a nice opportunity to check out the current versions of those tracks. Things may have changed since you last played them :-)
  
• Story-Mode: To get from level 2 to level 3, you now only need to pass the first track of level 1. When, after that, you return to the level selection, you get a button to skip to level 3. Thanks to player zahntorg for making that suggestion (we had been wondering how we can make more players enter level 3 because level 3 is really awesome ... this feels like a really good way to achieve that :wink: ). You can (and should), of course, still play all tracks in level 2 because of them teaches you something new. But you don't have to wait as long to get to level 3 as before, so you get more variety of content quicker. This also is in tune with the game being very lighthearted and easy in the beginning, and incrementally getting more difficult and leaving you less choice (in some ways), to underline the arc of the story.
  
• Added the current version of the new Holodance-Logo in various places. Our new logo will still get a little more polishing, but it fits the new style of the game so much better than the old one that we just had to put it in. Right. Now.
  
• Companion Window UI: Updated the "minimal UI" in the companion Window UI to the our new UI style. Streamer Mode UI is done, too. The other areas will follow over time.
  
• Companion Window UI: Finished the loading screen; this now also has a loading progress and consistent UI-style.
  
• In-VR UI: Most areas of the game now use a new UI sci-fi style. This is still work in progress.
  
• Fixed two bugs related to the multipliers: The magic player hands no longer started rotating faster and the multiplier rings were no longer shown. The reason was that instead of passing the multiplier, 0 was passed in one kind of hard to see place.
  
• Renamed "Sandbox-Mode" to "Free Mode". Thanks to zahntorg for making that suggestion!
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Made osu! filters persistent across sessions. I got tired of disabling Catch, Taiko and Mania all the time, and probably so did you. Also, the default is now only osu and catch because both of those work very well in Holodance, while Taiko and Mania are kind of a different experience.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Added new lists for last played beatmaps and favorite beatmaps. And, of course, beatmaps can now also be put into your list of favorites.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: A faulty beatmap like "504958 Panda Eyes - On My Own\Panda Eyes - On My Own (Plaudible) [Hobbes2's Light Insane].osu" could crash the osu file scanner. Made the file scanner more robust so beatmaps like that will simply be ignored.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Older beatmaps seem to not have beatmapSetId and beatmapId as meta-data. Trying to work around this by using the ID in the folder in such cases. As we also don't have a beatmapId in those cases, we use the difficulty instead. This will make osu-leaderboards much more reliable because before, all maps that didn't have those properties set went into the same leaderboard.
  
• Story-Mode: We have now added tracking for when you meet someone very special in the game during Early Access. We'll prepare a little surprise for those who get there.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Now also showing the "beatmap name" with the beatmaps, instead of only the song title, artist and beatmap creator (and difficulty, and game mode).
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Fixed various small UI issues, like hover effects being off or too intense, or not properly reverting to "non-hovered state" after selecting something, or the group dropdown not being properly greyed out when disabled and so forth.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause controller vibrations get stuck when pausing the game (resulting in the controller permanently vibrating until you leave pause).
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Added a min/max difficulty filter so that you can show only a specific range of difficulties.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Added a scrollbar and paging to first / last page, and a group toggle that lets you disable grouping.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Beatmaps are now always sorted by difficulty.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: We're now locally keeping track of score and maximum score of each song and beatmap.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: You now get an audio-preview when selecting a song. At last!
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Improved detection of the osu songs base folder. This should now work fairly reliably under most circumstances, without any player interaction.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: We're now overwriting the position for Spinners that comes from the beatmap. In osu!, Spinners are always centered, and so they should in Holodance. Apparently, some beatmaps had funny locations - thanks to Noe for letting me know.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: New Slider visualization. This one is based on particles so you can see through it. Also, it shows up where the player is, instead of flying towards the player (but the orb still flies towards the player).
  
• Collision Detection: In the companion (flatscreen) window, after clicking "Activate Full UI", you now see a little panel with two checkboxes to activate Interpolation (this is on by default), or "Always Interpolate" (this is off by default). By unchecking "Interpolate", you should be able to restore the behavior of 0.6.0, which in general should make collisions less reliable (that's why we had changed it) but apparently in some cases does the opposite (we have at least one player that has reliable collision detection with 0.6.0 but not with any version after 0.6.1). "Always Interpolate" will disable a performance optimization where interpolation is only activated when the orbs are in the player area. This is there so we can hopefully further isolate the issue in case disabling "Interpolate" does not help. It overrides "Interpolate", so when you have "Always Interpolate" checked, the state of "Interpolate" does not matter much.

Update 1 (2016-12-24, morning): It seems V0.7.0 has a bug in the osu!-browser, so we put this into the beta-branch for now. The default branch now has 0.6.3b2 until this is fixed.

Update 2 (2016-12-24, late night): We have now released V0.7.0b1, which patches the issue in V0.7.0. There still seems to be an issue with keeping favorites and last played songs that I'm investigating, but we've moved 0.7.0b1 to the default and beta branch now, so this is now the current version. There will probably another update this year, with more fixes and polishing, and also some options (not everyone likes the new Slider-style).

Update 3 (2016-12-25, 5am): Ok, the Slider visualization in 0.7.0 kind of sucked. Sorry about that. I think I've got it right now. Doing a build right now and will release that tomorrow when back in the office (builds currently take about an hour; that's another thing that needs to be fixed ;-) ).

So this is a really big one, that's why we moved from 0.6.2, or 0.6.3b2 on the beta-branch directly to V0.7.0: With the new logo, we have redesigned most of the UI. A few screens are still in the old still and we will further polish the UI but the game now has a much more consistent look in terms of what we really want to achieve:

Imagine "dancing in the Holodeck". That's kind of obviously what the "Holo" in "Holodance" came from. The "story-mode" is really just one possible experience you can have while dancing in the Holodeck. And of course, "dancing" just means tuning into the rhythm and freely moving with the music. There's orbs you need to catch, yeah, and curves you need to follow, but we're not gonna tell you how to move because we consider dancing really a free expressive movement of rhythm and joy. Holodeck is kind of sci-fi, so that's what drives the style now. It's a big change and we hope you like it as much as we do!

Then, we have received a lot of feedback regarding our osu file browser. Shuffle (random song selection) did not make it into this release, yet, sorry - but a lot of important changes did: First of all, audio-preview! At last! We were missing that, too. Then, thanks to StreyVolt for many suggestions including adding a Difficulty Filter. You can now finally also add and browse your Favorites as well as browser a list of all Last Played songs. Grouping can be disabled if you prefer browsing a flat list (which now is much faster due to both a scrollbar and first/last buttons).

Also, all filter settings are now persistent, so you don't have to set up everything from scratch each time you enter the game. We love it, and I hope you will, too!

The prototype-slider visualization is now been replaced with spiraling particles that show up right in front of you while the orb arrives. There's more work to be done on this one, but it's hopefully a major improvement over the previous style.

That particular feature didn't make into the story-mode floating curves, yet, but, the story-mode also got some love: We noticed that a lot of people drop out from level 2 to level 3, which is really unfortunate because level 3 is one of our internal favorites. So thanks to the suggestion made by zahntorg, after completing the first track in level 2 you can now immediately skip to level 3. We have also much improved tracking your progress for each track of each song, using an actual "passed flag" for each individual track instead of the progress counter we use for unlocking tracks and levels.

There's a lot more, so here's the full release notes in detail (including the two 0.6.3 beta releases that never made it into the default-branch because 0.7.0 was coming too fast):

• Added a way to change the orb source location (this currently works in Level-00-Neutral and Bonus-02-Clubbing); we use this to find the ideal distance that the orbs need to pass in the given time but will keep this in the game for your convenience. Reducing the distance makes the orbs arrive more slowly which may make the game a little easier; for that purpose we have added a score factor that will reduce the score per orb based on that distance.
  
• osu-beatmaps: There was an issue that closing and opening the file browser caused no songs to be displayed. This is fixed now, hopefully without nasty side-effects.
  
• Environments: Bonus-02-Clubbing has been significantly improved. This is still just a prototype - but it's slowly starting to take shape.
  
• Story-Mode: For the track-checkmarks in the level/environment selection, we now keep track of the actual tracks played since the last reset. This makes the experience much nicer when you unlock certain levels because the game won't pretend you already have passed levels that you actually didn't pass (which it previously did). Also, this was kind of needed for the "skip to level 3" feature we're adding (otherwise, players could easily miss some of the nicest tracks in level 2). As this feature is new and we hadn't tracked the data in this way before, the game will show no tracks passed, even if you had already passed all tracks. Consider this a nice opportunity to check out the current versions of those tracks. Things may have changed since you last played them :-)
  
• Story-Mode: To get from level 2 to level 3, you now only need to pass the first track of level 1. When, after that, you return to the level selection, you get a button to skip to level 3. Thanks to player zahntorg for making that suggestion (we had been wondering how we can make more players enter level 3 because level 3 is really awesome ... this feels like a really good way to achieve that :wink: ). You can (and should), of course, still play all tracks in level 2 because of them teaches you something new. But you don't have to wait as long to get to level 3 as before, so you get more variety of content quicker. This also is in tune with the game being very lighthearted and easy in the beginning, and incrementally getting more difficult and leaving you less choice (in some ways), to underline the arc of the story.
  
• Added the current version of the new Holodance-Logo in various places. Our new logo will still get a little more polishing, but it fits the new style of the game so much better than the old one that we just had to put it in. Right. Now.
  
• Companion Window UI: Updated the "minimal UI" in the companion Window UI to the our new UI style. Streamer Mode UI is done, too. The other areas will follow over time.
  
• Companion Window UI: Finished the loading screen; this now also has a loading progress and consistent UI-style.
  
• In-VR UI: Most areas of the game now use a new UI sci-fi style. This is still work in progress.
  
• Fixed two bugs related to the multipliers: The magic player hands no longer started rotating faster and the multiplier rings were no longer shown. The reason was that instead of passing the multiplier, 0 was passed in one kind of hard to see place.
  
• Renamed "Sandbox-Mode" to "Free Mode". Thanks to zahntorg for making that suggestion!
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Made osu! filters persistent across sessions. I got tired of disabling Catch, Taiko and Mania all the time, and probably so did you. Also, the default is now only osu and catch because both of those work very well in Holodance, while Taiko and Mania are kind of a different experience.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Added new lists for last played beatmaps and favorite beatmaps. And, of course, beatmaps can now also be put into your list of favorites.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: A faulty beatmap like "504958 Panda Eyes - On My Own\Panda Eyes - On My Own (Plaudible) [Hobbes2's Light Insane].osu" could crash the osu file scanner. Made the file scanner more robust so beatmaps like that will simply be ignored.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Older beatmaps seem to not have beatmapSetId and beatmapId as meta-data. Trying to work around this by using the ID in the folder in such cases. As we also don't have a beatmapId in those cases, we use the difficulty instead. This will make osu-leaderboards much more reliable because before, all maps that didn't have those properties set went into the same leaderboard.
  
• Story-Mode: We have now added tracking for when you meet someone very special in the game during Early Access. We'll prepare a little surprise for those who get there.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Now also showing the "beatmap name" with the beatmaps, instead of only the song title, artist and beatmap creator (and difficulty, and game mode).
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Fixed various small UI issues, like hover effects being off or too intense, or not properly reverting to "non-hovered state" after selecting something, or the group dropdown not being properly greyed out when disabled and so forth.
  
• Fixed a bug that could cause controller vibrations get stuck when pausing the game (resulting in the controller permanently vibrating until you leave pause).
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Added a min/max difficulty filter so that you can show only a specific range of difficulties.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Added a scrollbar and paging to first / last page, and a group toggle that lets you disable grouping.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Beatmaps are now always sorted by difficulty.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: We're now locally keeping track of score and maximum score of each song and beatmap.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: You now get an audio-preview when selecting a song. At last!
  
• osu!-beatmaps: Improved detection of the osu songs base folder. This should now work fairly reliably under most circumstances, without any player interaction.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: We're now overwriting the position for Spinners that comes from the beatmap. In osu!, Spinners are always centered, and so they should in Holodance. Apparently, some beatmaps had funny locations - thanks to Noe for letting me know.
  
• osu!-beatmaps: New Slider visualization. This one is based on particles so you can see through it. Also, it shows up where the player is, instead of flying towards the player (but the orb still flies towards the player).
  
• Collision Detection: In the companion (flatscreen) window, after clicking "Activate Full UI", you now see a little panel with two checkboxes to activate Interpolation (this is on by default), or "Always Interpolate" (this is off by default). By unchecking "Interpolate", you should be able to restore the behavior of 0.6.0, which in general should make collisions less reliable (that's why we had changed it) but apparently in some cases does the opposite (we have at least one player that has reliable collision detection with 0.6.0 but not with any version after 0.6.1). "Always Interpolate" will disable a performance optimization where interpolation is only activated when the orbs are in the player area. This is there so we can hopefully further isolate the issue in case disabling "Interpolate" does not help. It overrides "Interpolate", so when you have "Always Interpolate" checked, the state of "Interpolate" does not matter much.

Update: We now have V0.6.3b2, with "release notes" in the forum to avoid patch note spam

For a little while, we pushed our releases both to the beta and default branch at the same time. We also have been keeping a "previous" branch that you can use if we push a release to the default branch that creates a problem for you.

Today, we are becoming more active on the beta-branch again: This is a very small update (keep in mind, the last full release was just two days ago, and yesterday was Sunday ;-) ).

But still, it adds a little tool to two environments that lets you change where the orbs are coming from. We put this in to gather some feedback on which distance you feel is ideal. It also makes testing this much easier for ourselves.

You'll notice a button both in the pause menu as well as the osu-file browser when you use Level-00-Neutral and Bonus-02-Clubbing.

What's also in this beta-branch release is a small iteration on the clubbing level. This version is really just here to get an idea of the rough layout and scale of that level but it already looks less than just a few primitives thrown together in Unity compared to the previous prototype.

And a tiny bugfix for the osu file browser. You should now longer need to use the refresh button to restore the list after you have left and returned to the osu beatmap file browser. Little things can make our lives so much better. I just hope that one didn't break anything (little things often do ;-) ).

Either way, there's more coming soon.

And if you're wondering how you can get this beta-branch-build ... here's a link for you: Opting In and Out of Steam Client and Product Betas

Update: We now have V0.6.3b2, with "release notes" in the forum to avoid patch note spam

For a little while, we pushed our releases both to the beta and default branch at the same time. We also have been keeping a "previous" branch that you can use if we push a release to the default branch that creates a problem for you.

Today, we are becoming more active on the beta-branch again: This is a very small update (keep in mind, the last full release was just two days ago, and yesterday was Sunday ;-) ).

But still, it adds a little tool to two environments that lets you change where the orbs are coming from. We put this in to gather some feedback on which distance you feel is ideal. It also makes testing this much easier for ourselves.

You'll notice a button both in the pause menu as well as the osu-file browser when you use Level-00-Neutral and Bonus-02-Clubbing.

What's also in this beta-branch release is a small iteration on the clubbing level. This version is really just here to get an idea of the rough layout and scale of that level but it already looks less than just a few primitives thrown together in Unity compared to the previous prototype.

And a tiny bugfix for the osu file browser. You should now longer need to use the refresh button to restore the list after you have left and returned to the osu beatmap file browser. Little things can make our lives so much better. I just hope that one didn't break anything (little things often do ;-) ).

Either way, there's more coming soon.

And if you're wondering how you can get this beta-branch-build ... here's a link for you: Opting In and Out of Steam Client and Product Betas