Big day, players!

K/DA’s hit POP/STARS is officially releasing in Beat Saber with this update! We've partnered with Riot Games to bring you one of the best tracks of this year together with the very first customized level in Beat Saber!

Check the League of Legends' website

Additionally, this update comes with:

• Practice mode settings screen now plays audio preview when you change song start time.
  
• Practice mode starts the level with a brief intro before a specified start time to avoid insta fail.

Happy Holiday from Beat Saber team!

We have little something for you guys! New track 'One Hope' by KNOWER is exclusively releasing in Beat Saber today!

We are super excited because KNOWER is one of our most favorite bands and this is a chance for us to bring you nice new music and something we really enjoy. Have fun!

Additionally, this update comes with:

• Cubes move and jump as in v0.11.2.
  
• Practice mode now supports 200% speed.
  
• Visual tweaks/changes.

...and you know what? More coming shortly.

Hi all,
we decided to release a beta (or a preview) version build showing what may come in future updates. If you would like to check the build please take a look in Steam beta branch named "beta".

Main changes from 0.12.0p1:

• Cubes move and jump as in v0.11.2.
  
• Practice mode now supports 200% speed.
  
• Visual tweaks/changes.

Just a little DISCLAIMER - everything you see in this beta is subject to change and although the build should "work", please understand that some things could be broken, limited, incomplete or experimental so be kind to us and please don't consider this a "real" version. :) Using the beta version can delete your Beat Saber scores, settings, progress and other data so a full backup is recommended. We appreciate any feedback, bug reports or suggestions you may have regarding the build. There is also a new forum dedicated to that named "Beta".

Thanks

Just a small hotfix to address some issues reported in last update.

• Fixed delayed cut effect sounds.
  
• Reverted scoring algorithm, saber length, cube colliders and audio settings as they were in v0.11.2.

Our lead developer Jan 'Split' Ilavsky put together a blog post about Beat Saber v0.12.0 update. We know few issues occurred with the update so here you have it all explained. Hotfix is coming later today!

👇 👇 👇 👇 👇

Dear Beat Saber players,

we released version 0.12.0 and some of you were not very satisfied with some of the changes we made. This blog post should explain our reasons for some of them.

This situation happened mainly because we were under big time pressure and didn’t have enough time to test everything as much as we would love to. We believe that new great things can happen only if we keep trying, so it is possible that this will happen again while we are still in early access. But don’t worry. We listen to the community carefully and evaluate every single change.

PS VR vs PC

Some players think that some changes were made because of performance or other reasons related to PS VR. That’s not true. All the decisions are made just because we are trying to make the game as good as possible. None of the platforms is our priority. The game is our priority. We don’t do any compromises in the PC version because of PS VR or other way around.

Note Cut Sounds

Several things happened to the sound effects. First of all we are still trying to make them sound as good as possible and we will probably break this few more times in the future.

• Timing Bug — When making audio for VR there are nice ways how to process it in a way that it sounds more 3D. On PC we use MS HRTF Spatializer to do this. Unfortunately, it is not available on PS VR so we had to come up with different audio settings in order to port the game to PlayStation. When we got back to PC version we just turned the spatializer back on, but we didn’t realize that it actually adds a small delay (or at least we think it does and we will investigate this more).
  
• Muting sounds before they finish — Our goal is to make music and sound FX sound as clear as possible. In order to do so we use some techniques from audio mixing. One of them is to get rid of sounds which are not needed any more, because they are too quiet or another similar sound started playing. Our algorithm for detecting when to fade out a sound was built on next note position. Unfortunately, it looks like many more things need to be taken into account. For now, we are just reverting everything back to how it was and will work on this a little bit more.
  
• Slightly different sounds — This is also connected to PS VR version. We had to EQ the sound FX a little bit differently when not using a spatializer and we forgot to change that back.

Sabers’ Length

This wasn’t changed. We just moved the relative position of the handle in order to match controllers more precisely. This will be tweaked even more to match the original feel as much as possible.



Different Scoring Algorithm

There was a small scoring algorithm bug in previous versions. When you cut the note we compute the trajectory of your saber and use that to give you some points. Unfortunately by mistake the algorithm doesn’t use the last position before the cut into account. The result of this is that faster you are cutting, bigger the angles needs to be to get the same score. We have fixed this, but it looks like now the game is too easy for most of the pros. We will probably roll back this “fix” or will try to find a way how to implement the “bug” in more predictable way.

Different Colliders

Beat Saber detects collision by overlapping box created from saber positions and two box colliders which are connected to cube note. The first collider is much bigger than the actual note and detects only the good cuts. Second one is a little bit smaller than note and can detect both bad and good cuts. This combination allows us to compensate any tracking problems and make the game feel more awesome. :) When the note approaches the the player it rotates a little bit towards the players head. In the previous version both of the colliders rotated with the note, but we realized this is not a very good approach and we removed the rotation from the bigger collider. The result is that the game became a little bit harder (especially in expert+ levels) and it’s easier to get a better cut score (by approximately 2%). In the end we will roll back this change and will use the old system which everyone loved and new system with different collider sizes will be used for pro mode which should come out very soon.



New Lighting System

This will be a little bit technical. Lights in Beat Saber are made using very uncommon technique. They are actually not lights, they just generate something we call bloom pre pass fog texture. This fog is then applied on all the geometry in forward rendering. Originally we used additive blending for rendering light lines. This caused a problem where many lights behind each other combined their strength. New system uses max blending operation which makes solo lights to shine more and multiple lights are not blown as much as before. We truly think that this new system is much better, but we are thinking about supporting both new and old system so each level can use a different one.

Cubes Shading

We have changed the shader on the cubes for two reasons.

• We wanted to make the game more enjoyable by color blind people and old dark cubes were quite hard to distinguish. Jan, our lead designer, is color blind too by the way.
  
• New colors match the environment a little bit better.

We haven’t decided yet if this is the final look and we will experiment a little bit more in the future. We might even try to use the old look but with small enhancements.

Obstacle Walls

We think that there’s some space for improvements here and the walls shader parameters will be tweaked more in the future.

TLDR

We know about all the issues and they will be fixed as soon as possible! ;)

Jan “Split” Ilavsky & The Beat Saber Team

We are back with another update. This time we improved and changed many things. Some of them are not visible, but will allow us to update game much more frequently.

• Added Expert+ difficulty for all songs (standard mode only).
  
• New fancy sabers.
  
• New modifiers to spice the gameplay and to add multiplier to your final score.
  
• 'Practice mode' - you can start at any time of the song and also set it's speed.
  
• Added options to swap sabers, to turn off in-game HUD, to turn off SFX and to reduce note cut debris.
  
• New in-game UI for song progress, relative score, immediate rank and Full Combo indicator.
  
• New UI style in menus.
  
• Added full credits.
  
• Lights and rendering optimizations.
  
• Improved performance across the gameplay.
  
• Basically tons of new stuff and optimizations...

Dear players,

we know there was no update in a while but we have been working on the game as a whole a lot!

The team has been adding, improving, and optimising many aspects in the game. Yes, it took us a while but we are now almost done and ready to share with you the new PC update. When? Within upcoming days!

What's coming?

• Expert+ levels
  
• New modifiers
  
• Lights optimisation
  
• New sabers
  
• Practice mode
  
• Optimised game performance
  
• Improved graphics
  
• Player statistics
  
• And more!

We are now fully back on track with PC development and super excited to bring you all the stuff we have been working on lately.

In the meantime, you can watch our first Q&A stream ever. We know we are far away from any professional streamers. For sure, it was a bit awkward sometimes, but we had fun and it was great to answer your questions! In the stream, we were talking about Beat Saber, our past steps, future plans, road map, and much more (like schnitzels and stuff…:D).

WATCH THE STREAM HERE

We would like to thank you for your never ending patience and excitement. It's so amazing to see how supportive you are – even if some steps took our tiny indie game studio from Prague a little longer than expected.

ALSO: If you like Beat Saber a lot, you can nominate us in The Steam Awards – find the nomination button on our profile -> VISIT OUR PROFILE


THANK YOU and we will be back with the update within few days!

Beat Saber team <3

This update comes mainly to fix some important issues but also we did another refactoring of the codebase so it will make our job easier for the future.

• Fixed critical bug when sound effects were not properly recycled which could sometimes cause performance problems or even crashes on some systems.
  
• Fixed volume settings which were reset to default when restarting the game.
  
• Fixed continuous rumble in haptics system.
  
• Fixed losing combo when getting head into obstacle while paused.
  
• Added animation to side screens.
  
• Added full release notes.
  
• Added health and safety warning.

This minor update of Beat Saber adds Angel Voices by Virtual Self as a new track into the game and it is now available by default from the start. No need to "unlock" it by finding an Easter egg anymore.

Additionally we also fixed incorrect BPM for $100 Bills level in One Saber mode which made it look like it ended in the middle of the level.

PS.: If you were running mods and are now having issues we would like to inform you that all currently available mods are not official (not made by us) so we can't really help you when they stop working and we can't provide much support. It is because every mod right now is more like a hack to the game because Beat Saber never provided a way to be properly moddable like you may know from other games. Please contact authors of your mods to provide the support and please wait until they update them for the current version. We will also try to help with this as much as possible.

Thank you.

Not only we added an easter egg with the new exclusive track. Also, we did some bug fixing and added some stuff. Additionally we did heavy refactoring of almost everything inside.

• Settings for how in-game menu can be triggered added (instantly or long press)
  
• Volume settings added
  
• Swap Colors settings added
  
• Static Lights gameplay options added
  
• No Obstacles gameplay options added
  
• "Cut in any direction" tutorial voiceover and text added
  
• Fixed simultaneous vibration of both Oculus Touch controllers (only with -vrmode oculus)
  
• Fixed calculation of maximum possible score
  
• Fixed bug where you can spawn too far from the platform
  
• Legendary Hardcore Flying Car!

Enjoy!