We have pushed two more versions fairly quickly in the last 24 hours - including the final V0.8 one. For the sake of completeness, the release notes (I'll post our press release with the full V0.8 release info shortly):

• 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.

• 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.

We have pushed two more versions fairly quickly in the last 24 hours - including the final V0.8 one. For the sake of completeness, the release notes (I'll post our press release with the full V0.8 release info shortly):

• 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.

• 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.

So this version that I have just pushed to default does away with the old song browser, and now has what we now call "The Music Library". I'm calling the V0.8pre1 because there will be one or two more releases (within the next 24 hours), and then, V0.8 is the official new version of Holodance.

If you get to play Holodance today or tomorrow - please let us know if you run into any serious issues! Just post the issue to the forums and I'll keep track of everything.

Basically, what the new Music Library gives you us (almost) immediate access to the full library of all ranked osu! maps. So that's approximately 12K songs, 55K beatmaps. You can browse by artist, title and genre (more ways to browse to come). Genre doesn't work as well as it should because that data simply isn't really available, yet. I think it's still useful enough to keep it.

We now also have a "random" feature, under "Take Shortcuts" (in the music library). Already, I've had a lot of fun using this, and found some songs to play with that I wouldn't have found otherwise. This one had been requested a long time ago.

• 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)

So this version that I have just pushed to default does away with the old song browser, and now has what we now call "The Music Library". I'm calling the V0.8pre1 because there will be one or two more releases (within the next 24 hours), and then, V0.8 is the official new version of Holodance.

If you get to play Holodance today or tomorrow - please let us know if you run into any serious issues! Just post the issue to the forums and I'll keep track of everything.

Basically, what the new Music Library gives you us (almost) immediate access to the full library of all ranked osu! maps. So that's approximately 12K songs, 55K beatmaps. You can browse by artist, title and genre (more ways to browse to come). Genre doesn't work as well as it should because that data simply isn't really available, yet. I think it's still useful enough to keep it.

We now also have a "random" feature, under "Take Shortcuts" (in the music library). Already, I've had a lot of fun using this, and found some songs to play with that I wouldn't have found otherwise. This one had been requested a long time ago.

• 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)

We're ramping up for the Holodance V0.8.0 release, which is a fairly big one, so we've had quite a few "alpha/beta releases" for that one - here's probably the last one before that final V0.8.0 release.


The new environments are currently in the "Experimental" area. There's three of them:

A Sci-Fi Tunnels environment ... it doesn't have Zombie or Aliens, so don't worry ... but this will eventually be a bigger thing with explorable areas. For now, it's just tunnels in 4 directions, and it has some bugs (like, missing/wrong textures, and preview stuff in the settings disappearing behind walls).

A new Sci-Fi Clubbing environment, which is really trippy. This is also early work in progress. It will look less confusing in the final version, and it will have areas to explore. The way exploration will work: By playing in an environment, you receive a score for that environment which unlocks new platforms to play from. Then, you'll be able to teleport to those platforms, to unlock the next area.

Finally, we now have Trippy Tunnels. This already reacts to combos and will eventually give you various themes to unlock.


When you have played Holodance a lot, in different environments, and with different beatmaps, you probably ran into an issue that was super-annoying: Dark orbs in a dark environment, bright orbs in a bright environment ... and worst of all: Sliders with colors that aren't particularly visible in any given environment. I have known the the Slider visualization wasn't great and really needed a major redesign but recently, in a conversation on our Official Holodance Discord Channel, it became obvious that we don't need it "at some point in time" but right now.

Adding outlines to the orbs was really easy. The Sliders were major trouble, and I'm not satisfied with them, yet, but the foundation now is there, so it's just fixing the remaining issues.


First of all: You cannot actually use the new song browser to play a beatmap, yet. That's why we still have it in the experimental area. But you can already get a feeling for how this new song browser will work.

It's a complete rewrite, where I'm using only a few good snippets of code from our old approach. In this current release, the filters work, text-based search works (still a little rough around the edges, but works), you can change the settings already ... but you cannot actually browse and select a beatmap.

But we're getting fairly close now. Expect something on the alpha-channel soon ;-)

Oh, and currently, the new song browser has no "back" button - so you need to use pause/settings to "Exit Environment" (just in case you don't know: You can always enter pause by pressing and holding the "Menu" button for about a second).

• 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).

We're ramping up for the Holodance V0.8.0 release, which is a fairly big one, so we've had quite a few "alpha/beta releases" for that one - here's probably the last one before that final V0.8.0 release.


The new environments are currently in the "Experimental" area. There's three of them:

A Sci-Fi Tunnels environment ... it doesn't have Zombie or Aliens, so don't worry ... but this will eventually be a bigger thing with explorable areas. For now, it's just tunnels in 4 directions, and it has some bugs (like, missing/wrong textures, and preview stuff in the settings disappearing behind walls).

A new Sci-Fi Clubbing environment, which is really trippy. This is also early work in progress. It will look less confusing in the final version, and it will have areas to explore. The way exploration will work: By playing in an environment, you receive a score for that environment which unlocks new platforms to play from. Then, you'll be able to teleport to those platforms, to unlock the next area.

Finally, we now have Trippy Tunnels. This already reacts to combos and will eventually give you various themes to unlock.


When you have played Holodance a lot, in different environments, and with different beatmaps, you probably ran into an issue that was super-annoying: Dark orbs in a dark environment, bright orbs in a bright environment ... and worst of all: Sliders with colors that aren't particularly visible in any given environment. I have known the the Slider visualization wasn't great and really needed a major redesign but recently, in a conversation on our Official Holodance Discord Channel, it became obvious that we don't need it "at some point in time" but right now.

Adding outlines to the orbs was really easy. The Sliders were major trouble, and I'm not satisfied with them, yet, but the foundation now is there, so it's just fixing the remaining issues.


First of all: You cannot actually use the new song browser to play a beatmap, yet. That's why we still have it in the experimental area. But you can already get a feeling for how this new song browser will work.

It's a complete rewrite, where I'm using only a few good snippets of code from our old approach. In this current release, the filters work, text-based search works (still a little rough around the edges, but works), you can change the settings already ... but you cannot actually browse and select a beatmap.

But we're getting fairly close now. Expect something on the alpha-channel soon ;-)

Oh, and currently, the new song browser has no "back" button - so you need to use pause/settings to "Exit Environment" (just in case you don't know: You can always enter pause by pressing and holding the "Menu" button for about a second).

• 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).

Most of the work currently being done goes into the upcoming new song browser but isn't ready for you to try, yet. But we've also done work in a few others areas and that's what this release is about:


I feel really bad now ... because ... Trading Cards have been available since August 27, 2017, and I only told the people in our Official Holodance Discord Channel. For lack of an official announcement with a lot more details: We have 9 trading cards, themed with our environments from both Story and Free Mode. When you complete a set and craft a badge, you can get one of 5 profile backgrounds and one of 8 alphabet-based emoticons ... that spell out HOLODANCE. Which also lets you write things like HELLO, or DANCE, or DOODLE.

The badges themselves are themed in the five elements, so that's based on Story Mode.


There's ongoing work on Story Mode, Level 5 - and we're hoping to get some feedback if you don't mind the spoiler (Level 4 is not ready, yet, so jumping right into Level 5 in its current state can be a spoiler), here's some more info: Early Access / Spoiler: Level 5 Animation Preview on Alpha Branch


Also, we did some work on the "I feel comfortable with ... Flashing Lights" comfort setting. This should now be fully functional in the Virtual Clubbing environment (which is the environment that does have quite a bit of flashing lights). This is not just about photosensitive epilepsy but there are actually quite a few people that don't like or feel uncomfortable when there are flashing lights. So when you uncheck that box, which means you don't feel comfortable with flashing lights, the intensity in Virtual Clubbing is significantly reduced.

If you don't uncheck that box, you get a warning before entering that level. I hope the warning isn't annoying for anyone but it's certainly less annoying than going into this level unprepared, if you are sensitive to flashing lights.


We store quite a bit of information locally into JSON files that you are free process whichever way you like ... like ... you could review all of your sessions, including how your scores came about. To make this process easier, we have added a few readme-files in a readme folder in the game installation folder. This is fairly technical stuff, so probably not interesting for most people - but those who are interested will hopefully like it ;-)

• 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.

Most of the work currently being done goes into the upcoming new song browser but isn't ready for you to try, yet. But we've also done work in a few others areas and that's what this release is about:


I feel really bad now ... because ... Trading Cards have been available since August 27, 2017, and I only told the people in our Official Holodance Discord Channel. For lack of an official announcement with a lot more details: We have 9 trading cards, themed with our environments from both Story and Free Mode. When you complete a set and craft a badge, you can get one of 5 profile backgrounds and one of 8 alphabet-based emoticons ... that spell out HOLODANCE. Which also lets you write things like HELLO, or DANCE, or DOODLE.

The badges themselves are themed in the five elements, so that's based on Story Mode.


There's ongoing work on Story Mode, Level 5 - and we're hoping to get some feedback if you don't mind the spoiler (Level 4 is not ready, yet, so jumping right into Level 5 in its current state can be a spoiler), here's some more info: Early Access / Spoiler: Level 5 Animation Preview on Alpha Branch


Also, we did some work on the "I feel comfortable with ... Flashing Lights" comfort setting. This should now be fully functional in the Virtual Clubbing environment (which is the environment that does have quite a bit of flashing lights). This is not just about photosensitive epilepsy but there are actually quite a few people that don't like or feel uncomfortable when there are flashing lights. So when you uncheck that box, which means you don't feel comfortable with flashing lights, the intensity in Virtual Clubbing is significantly reduced.

If you don't uncheck that box, you get a warning before entering that level. I hope the warning isn't annoying for anyone but it's certainly less annoying than going into this level unprepared, if you are sensitive to flashing lights.


We store quite a bit of information locally into JSON files that you are free process whichever way you like ... like ... you could review all of your sessions, including how your scores came about. To make this process easier, we have added a few readme-files in a readme folder in the game installation folder. This is fairly technical stuff, so probably not interesting for most people - but those who are interested will hopefully like it ;-)

• 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.

Hey everyone, we have a first "official" preview of the animations for the upcoming level 5 in story mode ready. It would be great if a few people who don't mind spoilers (after all, no one has seen level 4, yet ;-) ) could have a look at this and give feedback on the animations in this thread.

For more details, check the forum thread: Early Access / Spoiler: Level 5 Animation Preview on Alpha Branch

Hey everyone, we have a first "official" preview of the animations for the upcoming level 5 in story mode ready. It would be great if a few people who don't mind spoilers (after all, no one has seen level 4, yet ;-) ) could have a look at this and give feedback on the animations in this thread.

For more details, check the forum thread: Early Access / Spoiler: Level 5 Animation Preview on Alpha Branch