In March 2021, Andy from Ramen VR asked me if I could help port the VR MMO Zenith: The Last City[zenithmmo.com] to PSVR (1 on PS4). With Holodance never quite breaking through and both narayana games and I running low on funds ... my journey took a thrilling detour.

And what a ride it's been! Working with the Ramen team on the massive world of Zenith was incredible — from the PSVR port to PS VR2, and everything in between. Console porting was fun, but as any indie dev will tell you, in small teams, you end up doing a bit of everything! After all, "specialization is for insects," as Robert Heinlein famously said[www.elise.com].

Apologies for not making a formal announcement back in the day (just a message on our public Discord[discord.com] and later, a brief note here on the forums): Within one quick week, my life had changed from being 100% dedicated to Holodance and Beat the Rhythm to being 120% dedicated to helping building a massive and awesome VR MMO.

But now, with Ramen wrapping up Zenith development[www.uploadvr.com], I'm back in action with rhythm games (and also diving deeper into meditation[jashanchittesh.com]). So, after almost four years, it's time to give you Holodance 1.5!

This update may not be as massive as Holodance 1.4, but it brings some much-needed polish, bug fixes, and—most importantly — finally fixes that osu! beatmap caching bug (sorry it took so long 🙈).

Oh, and one final thing before going into the details: If you use SteamLink with Quest, you might want to read this new guide: Playing Holodance with SteamLink

• Music Library: Improved state management! Now, selected items and scroll positions should be preserved, even when pausing or playing a song. Even filter changes should mostly work—though if things break, just navigate back a bit and keep going.
  
  
• Music Library - Quick Access - Popular: Major improvements here! The "Challenge Me" list is now split into "Challenge Me (Own)" and "Challenge Me (Others)." More info here
  
  
• Modding: Cleaned up useCache—it now only exists in Mod.json, and changes there apply to TunnelMod.json (if present). Removed useCache in PostProcessingMod.json (it was just nonsense, really).
  
  
• Minor Bugfixes: Fixed two harmless bugs that were showing up in crash logs.
  
  
• Quick Access / Popular / Challenge Me: Sorting was previously based on vote count, so new additions got lost in the crowd. Now, your own entries are listed first, and the most recent votes are shown at the top!
  
  
• Orb Trails Finally! You can now turn off orb trails correctly. More info here
  
  
• UI Polishing: Toggle-descriptions no longer block the laser pointer (yay!), and the mute button logic is inverted to make more sense—active = preview, inactive = muted. Also moved the page up/down, top/down buttons of the scrollbars back to the scrollbar. The disadvantage is that the buttons are smaller and therefore easier to miss - the advantage is that it no longer ruins the look of the UI.
  
  
• UI Polishing: Added Feet to Player Location
  
  
• UI Polishing: Laser Pointer Color(s) now automatically adapt to hand colors
  
  
• Click & drag Polishing - Part 1: Increased the maximum time between trigger down/up for clicks from 0.3 seconds to 1 second because we have received feedback that clicks don't work.
  
  
• Click & drag Polishing - Part 2: The laser pointer used to stay fixed during the entire click delay, which made dragging a pain. Now, there's a separate delay for starting a drag (currently set at 0.1 seconds).
  
  
• Click & drag Polishing - Part 3: Okay, we admit, it was still annoying. So here's the fix: If a widget can be clicked but not dragged (most widgets): Click immediately (on down). When a widget can be dragged but not clicked: Drag immediately (no delay). Only if a widget can be clicked and dragged (those are the events in the Beatographer, our beatmap editor), wait for 0.3s before starting to drag, then click. So those, you do need to click fast.
  
  
• Avatar UI: Combined Avatar selection (left/right rotation) with selection ("Incarnate") for improved UX.
  
  
• Performance: Applied a few Performance Optimizations (e.g. 1.3 KB of allocations every 6 frames due to not caching a name)
  
  
• Streamer Mode: Fixed camera animations in Streamer Mode that were slowing down during pause mode.
  
  
• Updated Unity to 2019.4.21
  
  
• Updated SteamVR Unity Plugin to 2.7.2
  
  
• Updated Oculus Integration to 23.1.0
  
  
• Localization: Major progress on localization, but it's still not fully complete.
  
  
• Music Library: Fixed osu! beatmap caching—finally!

Merry Christmas to everyone! Holodance is participating in the Steam Winter Sale 2020. If you or your friends still don't have Holodance, this is a great opportunity to get this awesome game at 50% off!

And in case you missed it: We have recently had a pretty big update - check out the Release Notes!

While still primarily working on the upcoming beatmap editor, we have fixed a few things, added a few things and it's time to push these things to the default channel for everyone to play with!

EDIT 2020-12-05: Just a tiny hotfix (1.4.1) because using finger pointing to control the YUR watch was broken; this is now fixed: You can control the YUR watch using your index finger tip but we needed to change how clicking works in the general UI because we needed drag'n'drop to work much better than it did for the beatmap editor (which is still WIP and not included in this build). That change broke finger pointing.

EDIT 2020-12-06: Another tiny hotfix (1.4.2): The scrollbars e.g. in Streamer Mode jumped when clicking. They no longer do. Also, opening Streamer Mode in VR threw exceptions in the logs until Streamer Mode was activated via the checkbox. No more exceptions are being thrown in that case.


This is a really big one: In our Streamer Mode, you could let the game automatically switch the camera perspectives for you based on the rhythm of the song since around 2016. We even have an (undocumented) OBS-automation that lets the game switch between different OBS scenes so you could automagically switch between our Streamer Mode and a LIV-composited Mixed Reality mode.

One very awesome feature that LIV introduced with their new 1.5-SDK is that games can now control the LIV-camera. So now you can use Streamer Mode in Holodance together with LIV much more easily. Obviously, changing camera perspectives in LIV only works with their avatars (not with greenscreen composited Mixed Reality) - but still that's a major step forward.

While working on that, I got so annoyed that our Streamer Mode can only be controlled via the flatscreen that I finally pulled it into VR. Another item that got stuck on my list for way too long finally done*!

Here's a video of both in action:
*(file browser didn't make it into this release - but it's almost done now)


Seems like every rhythm game had it since forever, now we have it, too: Life energy that you lose when you miss notes, and gain when you catch notes. The default in Holodance stays at No Fail but when you disable this, you can now fail sessions early when you miss too many notes. We also have Sudden Death for those who want to full combo a map. When that is active, the first note you fail fails the whole song, so you can retry a little more quickly.

One area where this new feature caused quite a few headaches was with modding: You can mod the post processing effects for the Arenas Trippy Tunnels and Zero Distraction. The result was that in those, there was no feedback when you were losing energy. This is now solved with a new state lowEnergy. For full documentation, check out the https://holodance.mod.io/guides/modding-holodance-beat-the-rhythm.

Also, for proper support of BSMG-maps, we had added a uniform 4x4 grid a while back. Now you can select this also for osu!-beatmaps.


Holodance doesn't have spatial quantization of events by default: Notes can arrive at any location, and with any rotation. So, we probably should have supported this right from the start but we didn't. Now we do. For more info, see Mapping Extensions[github.com] and Extended Mapping[bsmg.wiki].


Story Mode Level 3 has dolphins and whales ... but up until now, you couldn't hear them. Now you can. Also in Level 6. But there, only few are left.


We have this really nice Time Dilation feature, that lets you play with time (slow down / speed up, based on the movement of your hands, and in the case of guns, also movement of your head). There's also bullet time on combo events. Obviously, it's much easier to do things when time is slowed down - so there's a multiplier based on the current time scale. Unfortunately, instead of using the audio pitch (which defines the timescale of actual gameplay), I used the global time scale. We have another feature that modifies the global time scale for very fast, and very slow tracks (above 180BPM and below 48BPM). The idea behind that feature is to make the visual effects adapt to the tempo of the song ... but this also had effect on the score. Ooops. Solution: Having the tempo of very fast (and very slow) songs effect the score actually makes sense, so we keep that as a feature. There were circumstances under which this multiplier was disabled - that's fixed, so now we have consistency. Also, the multipliers are now properly separated and named to avoid any confusion that could arise from this.

• Settings / Finetune Gameplay: Added new Grid Style "Square 4x4 (BSMG Style)" so you can now play osu! maps with the same grid style (aka target area) as BSMG-maps.
  
  
• Feet Gameplay: Was broken. Fixed.
  
  
• Casual Catcher: Fixed a faulty offset in the collider.
  
  
• Major work in the backend that hopefully does not cause issues with the current builds (it's not active in those builds but you never know until you run into something unexpected).
  
  
• Fixed Vayusah - AGAIN. Breaks on every Unity update, so I have to make sure I fix that poor soul after every Unity update.
  
  
• Vive Trackers: Cleaned up the role setup.
  
  
• Scoring: Fixed issue with tempo based time multiplier triggering slow mo / highspeed multipliers.
  
  
• Scoring: We've had an orb theme multiplier that reduced the score for very large orbs (Casual Orb Theme), and increased the score for special mechanics like Beat Drop, which is significantly more difficult. But that multiplier never actually effected the score. Now it does.
  
  
• Fixed Challenge Me checkbox not being properly reset to unchecked after a map had it checked.
  
  
• Stats after Session: Timing offset was labeled with microseconds (μs). Nope, those are actually milliseconds.
  
  
• Mixed Reality: Updated LIV SDK to 1.5.1 and integrated Streamer Mode with LIV. This is super cool! Only works with LIV Avatars, though (not with actual greenscreen based Mixed Reality).
  
  
• OctaDrop-Theme: Fixed a very rare corner-case that could cause performance issues, if a map changes BPM from a comparatively high BPM to a very low value and at the same time starts a slider. The issue in this case was that too many parts would have to be instantiated (this occurred in testing when going from 140 BPM to 20 BPM and at the same time starting two long sliders).
  
  
• BSMG-Support: Added support for Mapping Extensions.
  
  
• Fixed controller management for scroll areas (haptics were broken).
  
  
• Streamer Mode: Now has an in-VR UI.
  
  
• Command Line Arguments: We let you set the Window position and size via Streamer Mode but that broke the command line arguments -screen-width, -screen-height and -screen-fullscreen. So now we explicitly parse and use those from our own code.
  
  
• Added Energy System, failing songs when missing to many notes, and sudden death (song ends immediately when you miss a single note - this is super useful if you absolutely want to full combo a track).
  
  
• Updated to Unity 2019.4.15
  
  
• Major Change in how clicking works with the UI system because we needed dragging to properly work for the beatmap editor. Previously, "trigger down" caused the click event, now "trigger up" causes the event, and while the trigger is down, the laser pointer freezes for a moment. When you click fast, you shouldn't notice much of a difference - but it's a big change in a core system, so it does come with some risk.
  
  
• Updated LIV SDK to 1.5.3 (from 1.5.1)
  
  
• Added Modding support for the new Energy System. This works via PostProcessing, using the new state LowEnergy (property lowEnergy). If the state wasn't assigned, the state InObstacle is used.
  
  
• Story Mode: Added dolphin and whale sounds to Level 3. Finally.
  
• Story Mode: Added one whale, and three dolphins to Level 6. Not having any was a little too much for Level 6. That's what has happened in Level 7.
  
• Story Mode: Fixed "Sliders" in Story Mode. These were broken a long time ago when we improved the osu!-sliders. Levels the have those sliders (but not in all tracks): 6 and 11.
  
• Story Mode: Level 6 broke in the last update. Fixed.

One issue with the combined leaderboards was that there was no way to see which weapon another player used, and whether they played with just one hand, two hands, hands and head, or maybe even with feet. So now we have two icons in the leaderboards that make this information obvious. Here's a screenshot:

Also, our calorie-based leaderboards were also "per style" which didn't really make sense, so these are now also combined. Usually, you'll want to know how a player achieved a certain burnrate, and so keeping the styles separate was really in the way. It isn't anymore.

Also, in the global leaderboards, you can now click other players to see where they are with progress.

Aside of the beatmap editor, this is probably the feature I was yearning for myself more than any other. Finally, it's there: After playing a session, you can now click "Challenge Me" to make that map appear for other players in Quick Access / Popular / Challenge Me. We used to have a forum for this, and a Discord channel (#challenge-me)[discord.gg]. Now it's integrated right into the game. At last!

• Leaderboards: Added tracked appendages and weapon icons to entries to make it easier to see with which mechanic a score was achieved.
  
• Calorie Based Leaderboards: These were "per style" but that was actually not a very good way to approach it because for fitness, you want to know what's possible and then adapt the play-style accordingly. Plus, this added a lot of leaderboards for each map. So now, the fitness leaderboards are also "any style".
  
• Leaderboards: The rank change was broken in almost all leaderboards, plus we needed room for the tracked appendages and weapon icons. So for now, the rank changes are gone and may return at some later point in time.
  
• Global Leaderboards: You can now click the players on the global leaderboard to see their game progression. One important thing to know about this: The leaderboard ranks shown there are rank when that player last played, so they may differ from the current leaderboard rankings.
  
• Challenge Me: After a session, you can now activate the "Challenge Me" toggle. When activated, the map you just played shows up for other players in Quick Access / Popular / Challenge Me. Use this to challenge other players to beat you on the leaderboard.
  
• Leaderboards: Leaderboards by default only show the best entry for each player. If you have previously achieved a higher score than in the current session, there will be two entries by you: Your top entry and the current entry. Leaderboards have a little circle on the top right - if you want to show the all scores by every person, just activate it.
  
• Finetune Gameplay: Bugfix, Particle Effects was accidentally wired up with Timing Lasers. That had two nasty effects: 1. The obvious, you could not change Particle Effects with the Toggle. 2. During initialization, the value from Particle Effects was written into Timing Lasers, causing those to be activated. We rarely want those activated, so that was pretty bad.

When you enter Quick Access in the Music Library, there is now a section Popular, right on top, with three collections of beatmaps:

The beatmaps played by most other players. Those are the ones you want to go to to compete on the leaderboards. But be sure to pick one with a difficulty that will be entertaining for you. The first few are very easy and might be quite boring for more advanced players. But there are few around difficulty 5 to 6 that should still be fun for most.

This one may not give you any maps, yet. It uses the ratings for gameplay, to avoid maps that just don't have fun gameplay, but also filters with a very rough heuristic based on your current skill level, and the skill level of other players multiplied with their challenge ratings. This will become more useful the more people actually play different beatmaps with varying difficulty levels and rate them.

Also, eventually, it will filter by the weapon and play style. It doesn't do that, yet, so you may get maps for shooting that aren't really that great for shooting.

This one just filters by the gameplay rating, so it should give you a larger variety of different maps with different difficulty levels.

Both, Best Challenge for You and Best Gameplay currently also filter by players that have actually played the map. The minimum there is three, so if you are the only person that played and rated a map, it won't show up, here ... yet. This whole area will improve over time.

Arena Selection Area: Made the bright yellow snare dark orange, and also increased the minimum distance of all these items to reduce stress when there is photosensitivity. You can disable the particle effects altogether but in order to be able to do that, you first have to active the settings (via pause, by pressing the A/X/Menu key for a second), enter "Comfort" and disable flashing. This also disables quite a few other things that were flashing in the game - but I'm not sure I caught everything. But this should already make a huge difference. If you are photosensitive (i.e. if you get headaches or worse from flashing lights), you should also disable the particle effects in the performance settings because these effects also tend to "flash".

• Major Refactoring and Cleanup on the Server. In fact, the server just moved to a different provider with this update.
  
• Beatmap Info: Fixed issue that sometimes, both the leaderboard and the web-based beatmap info would show up ... at the same time.
  
• Fixed Bug: Procedural Maps would cause trouble when saving the Beatmap to the Server
  
• Finetune Gameplay: Finally added option "Allow Catching Orbs with your Head" that you can disable if you'd rather not accidentally catch orbs or drops with your head. This is on by default because that was the behaviour we had all along. But now, you can also switch it off. But keep in mind that catching orbs with your head can also give you a decent bonus.
  
• Photosensitivity Comfort Setting ("likes flashes disabled"): Arena Selection Area: Made the bright yellow snare dark orange, and also increased the minimum distance of all these items to reduce stress when there is photosensitivity. You can disable the particle effects altogether but in order to be able to do that, you first have to active the settings (via pause, by pressing the A/X/Menu key for a second), enter "Comfort" and disable flashing. This also disables quite a few other things that were flashing in the game - but I'm not sure I caught everything. But this should already make a huge difference. If you are photosensitive (i.e. if you get headaches or worse from flashing lights), you should also disable the particle effects in the performance settings because these effects also tend to "flash".
  
• Quick Access: New section Popular, with lets you browser the most played beatmaps, as well as a very early prototype of rating-based recommendations. These do not take into account your playstyle, yet, so especially the gameplay ratings might be very off. But it's a start. This currently gets updated when you click the "Quick Access" button, and due to the system not having a lot of ratings, yet, songs that you have just rated may shop up immediately - if they were played by a minimum of three players.

During Early Access, each official update included a list of all the patch notes I made during development. In fact, I even often did this for the updates that only went to the alphadev and beta channels. We haven't done that in a while, and I believe most people probably actually prefer a more prose-style approach ... but I might be wrong, so let me know. As this list is a particularly long one, I'll throw in a video now and then. So it's perfectly fine to just scroll down and watch the videos if this would be too much reading.

In case you missed that last big update - here's a more visual and verbal description: Holodance 1.3 is here! And still on #SteamSummerSale (50% off)

For the unfiltered, chronological list of all changes since November 25, 2019 (Holodance V0.9.2: Tech and Scoring Update), continue here:


So there are the changes we've had from 0.9.2 until 1.0.0. We've had a 0.9.3 in-between but that only went to the beta/alphadev-channels.

• Arena: Meeting Mother Akash is now called Home of Mother Akash and can be used to play in Free Mode. The price to pay for that was that Mother Akash no longer blesses you with a visit in Free Mode (she still does in Story Mode, though).
  
• Home of Mother Akash: This location is 4500 meters above sea level. But that creates floating point rounding errors that caused significant stutter in tracking. So now we'll just imagine it's 4500 meters above sea level but keep actual coordinates within technical limits.
  
• Home of Mother Akash: Polished that whole Arena a lot, including new particle effects to make those chakras sparkle.
  
• Added Arenas for Levels 4 and 8 to Free Mode, with a new cloud system.
  
• Unlocking Arenas: Home of Mother Akash was previously unlocked at 2,000,000,000, we reduced this down to 1,000,000,000 now that this Arena is actually playable (and apologies to everyone who was disappointed when they got there and then couldn't actually play). We currently have 24 players with that score (only 7 above 2 billion). One will just need to play one more time, and 6 who need less then 200,000,000 to get there. The Steam leaderboard caps at 2,147,483,647 - but you can see the actual scores in the in-game leaderboard (UPDATE 2020-07-07: Well, you could until we removed that old Steam-based leaderboard and replaced it with a shiny new leaderboard based on our new community server). The new Arenas Desert High and Icy High become available at 200,000,000 (currently 97 players have this), and 300,000,000 (currently 70 players have this). The should make the journey towards 1,000,000,000 a little more interesting. Plus, there's something special coming for those clouds levels (but I still need to make sure they run on all hardware - right now, these two even overwhelm my 2080 Ti, at 100% SS which is 50% less than what Steam uses as default).
  
• Level Loading: Fixed audio glitch where music stopped playing abruptly instead of properly fading out. Also fixed issue that music faded in way too slowly when entering arena selection area.
  
• Catchers: Reduced trail length; I had considered removing those trails altogether (or making them optional) but haven't done this, yet. But I'm still open to this possibility, so if you find these trails annoying, let me know. You can already disable those trails by disabling the particle effects - but that disables a lot of other particle effects as well, so probably not what most people want.
  
• Oculus native SDK: Improved Touch haptics for catching orbs. Sliders are still a bit wonky.
  
• Haptics: Almost completely redesigned how haptics work in the game. This was necessary because over time, even SteamVR changed how this was handled, so did Oculus, and each time a new approach came through hardware or drivers, I patched it just enough so that it would still work but never really took the time to look at all the different approaches and build one properly designed solution that handles all of them. Until now. It should feel better now - but if it feels worse, please let me know.
  
• Fixed issue that changing the environment broke the selected mechanic (this was due to the arena selection accidentally behaving like Story Mode, and Story Mode using its own presets).
  
• Haptics: Haptic intensity setting (on the Style & Mechanics / Guidance settings screen) now properly works for the Rift, regardless of whether you're using native Oculus, or Oculus via SteamVR.
  
• Avatar System: Fixed issue that Avatars were rotated when the world was rotated (actually, the Avatars were not rotated but the world was, or more precisely, the world never is rotated but the player reference space is rotated which makes it look as if the world is rotated, and then, when the Avatars are not rotated with the player reference space, it looks like the Avatars are rotated ... but that's just a technical detail). One important note about this: The avatar preview does not automatically adapt to the rotations. That way, you could load them, rotate the world around 180 and then see your avatar from the back, when facing forward. This is by design. If you want the default view after rotating the world (or UI), use Reset Avatars to re-layout the preview (with the new rotations compensated for).
  
• Level Selection: "Settings" are actually "Instructions", and now they are also called that. Cleaned up the instructions, too. Story Mode moved down and added "Preview" because this is just a preview now.
  
• Library Settings: Previously called "Browser Settings" but we call this area "Music Library", so Library Settings seemed like a more appropriate name. Also, the settings are easier to understand when the source is first, so moved osu! to the beginning of each setting that is related to osu!. And added BSMG Maps to the list of possible sources.
  
• Music Database: Major refactoring in the file scanners. This was necessary because the "MP3FileScanner" which had been introduced when we added procedural mapping was done quick'n'dirty by copying the OsuFileScanner and adapting the code to work for scanning audio files. As we're adding more file scanners now, that approach needed to be cleaned up (otherwise, we'd have three and more similar but different versions of the code, and figuring out the common code paths of three such things would have probably taken exponentially longer than doing it now).
  
• Library Settings: One common user error was changing the settings but not doing a Full Rescan. We now check if there were any changes in the music sources since the last full rescan, and if there were, we do that rescan (when you close the Library Settings).
  
• osu! File Scanner: There was a change in the osu!.db file format, which broke reading the osu!.db file directly. Step 1: We also have folder scanning which reads the beatmaps directly instead of relying on osu!.db. It is much much much slower and cannot get some data that is only available in osu!.db but it's better to use this fallback than failing. So, now, that fallback is used in this case, with a warning logged. A proper fix is also on the way.
  
• Library Settings: Fixed several corner cases where different combinations of song sources would not be appropriately handled.
  
• Music Database: Fixed issue that Full Library was not activated when using "Full Rescan!"
  
• osu! File Scanner: Updated osu-database-reader to version from 2019-11-08, which has the proper fix for reading the osu!.db file in current osu!-versions. The library has been significantly refactored, so this required quite a bit of fixing in Holodance to make it work again.
  
• Music Library: Fixed issue that beatmaps were not sorted by difficulty (they were sorted by version, which is the tag for the difficulty - but alphabetically sorting by those tags didn't make sense and therefore was a bug ... that is now finally fixed).
  
• Music Library: Fixed issue that beatmaps were not properly grouped until the settings screen was opened (which people usually don't do).
  
• Core Gameplay: Reactivated the "handedness" feature that we disabled in 2015. By default, orbs can be caught with "any", but if a beatmap defines handedness for orbs (catch this one with left hand, that one with right hand), it does now make it so and catching with the wrong hand is treated like a timing failure.
  
• Scoring Algorithm: Originally, the rotation bonus was based on the maximum rotational velocity of the controller between catching two orbs (like the positional velocity bonus). After introducing directional orbs/drops, the difference between the intended rotation and actual rotation was the only possible source for rotation bonuses - even though it only actually is relevant in a very specific gameplay mode. Now, when an orb does not define a rotation, we're back to the old behavior (maximum rotational velocity), and only for direction orbs/drops, the rotational difference matters.
  
• Core Gameplay: If an orb/drop defines a rotation, being too far off now fails that event. Also, the OctaDrop theme now has explosions for failed events.
  
• Scoring Algorithm: Also, ouch, the rotation bonus calculation between intended and actual direction was seriously buggy. Fixed.
  
• OctaDrops now explode when they are not caught with the correct timing, or with the wrong hand (when handedness is active), or when the direction is very wrong.
  
• OctaDrops now also support a PickupType "None", which essentially turns them into "avoid" orbs (like mines in StepMania, or bombs in other rhythm games).
  
• General UI: Fixed one issue that could cause the UI to break (laser pointer no longer selecting anything).
  
• OctaDrops: The new tracer/slider implementation messed up the combo indicators. This should be fixed now.
  
• Controller Haptics (for Sliders): This broke during the refactoring, more polishing on all platforms (SteamVR with Vive wands, Valve Index, Oculus Touch, Windows MR, Oculus native with Rift and Quest via Link)
  
• Scoring: OctaDrops are direction-sensitive, so playing with the OctaDrop-theme is actually more difficult than with regular orbs. So the OctaDrop score multiplier has been changed from 0.9 to 1.0.
  
• Haptics ... again ... fixed the bug that haptics didn't work properly for sliders when using SteamVR. Also did quite a bit of experimentation with different hardware (Vive wands, Valve Index controllers, Rift Touch controllers, Quest Touch controllers, Windows MR Acer controllers). Interestingly, Rift Touch and the Windows MR controllers behave best, even though both don't properly support changing the frequency (Rift Touch has two "frequencies", a low one, and a high one). Valve Index controllers provide best control (frequency works really well, one could basically play a song; intensity isn't as good as with Rift Touch, though) and I think they work pretty well. Vive wands work okay. Quest via Link is frustrating: Haptic feedback is barely noticeable even at maximum intensity (UPDATE 2020-07-07: This was apparently fixed by Oculus by now). Frequency does seem to have an effect but it's hard to say for sure if it really is an effect on frequency. Also, they frequently just stop vibrating when the vibration is "too long", or the frequency is too high.
  
• Laterality: Implemented proper handling of handedness/laterality by checking whether or not the beatmap has notes that are specific to left or right (hand or foot). This now also determines whether left and right hand controller have the same color, or two different colors.
  
• Directionality: Is now also properly determined from the beatmap.
  
• Obstacles: Obstacles are now fully supported. Currently, only BSMG maps define obstacles.
  
• For Slicing, we now have a plane-based target area, instead of the usual radial / sphere based target area. This was necessary to be able to properly align the obstacles
  
• Obstacles: Much improved how entering obstacles is handled. This is definitely worth trying.
  
• Settings - Cleaned up "Style Menu": "Presets & Themes" was a fairly misleading name for what that was. This is now called "Finetune Gameplay", which is what you can do there. Also, both "Gameplay" and "Guidance" didn't really have settings that were not already available via "Finetune Gameplay", so these were removed. We did keep "Old Tweaks" so you can still make some changes to how sliders are rendered and get some more info on what some of the settings in Finetune Gameplay mean, but this will probably be removed in a future version (and the settings will be put into a config-file for those who still want to mess with them).
  
• Settings - Finetune Gameplay: Re-arranged "Guides and Feedback" so that the items appear in the order of importance (I searched "Haptic Intensity" a few times because it was hidden at the bottom of that screen). Also added direct link (button) to Audio Mixer from Hit and Miss Sounds.
  
• BSMG Mapper: For punching, the positions of the drops aren't that great when we use the same as with laserblades, so the mapper now knows the mechanic that the map will be played with and automatically changes the locations accordingly. For punching, we multiply X-position with 0.9, and Y-position with 0.8 (obstacles keep Y as it is). As we use a (0,0) = center based coordinate system, this automagically results in the correct results (that kind of coordinate system also makes it very easy for us to flip maps horizontally and vertically).
  
• BSMG Mapper: For shooting, things are a lot more complex because not only do we need to skip double, triple and quadruple notes on a single hands at the same time (that one was trivial, of course) but also, obstacles and avoid notes (mines/bombs) need to be handled entirely different from the drones that are to be shot. Fortunately, the way our orb themes are designed, this was quite easy to add.
  
• Avatar System: Added support for the new Vive tracker roles for elbows and knees (available in SteamVR starting at 1.10.9 (currently in beta).
  
• BSMG and osu! Integration: Added an (i) info button to the beatmap details that opens the beatmap on osu! or bsaver.com with details on that specific map.
  
• Added a full Web browser with a few buttons to quickly browser to relevant pages to the flatscreen UI. This is useful for logging in to the various sites that we show with the (i) button.
  
• Progress: Fixed the progress display which sometimes got stuck even though there no longer was any relevant progress.
  
• Polished the main Flatscreen UI.
  
• Shooting Mechanic: That one was quite frustrating because pulling the trigger always creates a bit of controller vibration, and that causes unfair misses. When pointing at a drone/orb, that drone/orb is now kept in the buffer for a brief moment, so losing it while shooting will no longer cause such unfair misses.
  
• Shooting Mechanic: Also, the targets were too small. Now they are larger.
  
• Added support for 360° gameplay on custom maps: We've had 360° gameplay in Holodance since 2017 but until now, this was linked to the native songs in Story Mode (Levels 3 had and still has this), and to a few arenas that triggered the rotations every 8 bars (this has been the case in Sci-Fi Attack, Robots Attack and 360° Craze). Now, the rotation information from BSMG maps is also used: In arenas that have enough space for 90 or 360 degrees and just the generic flying notes source, the rotations are directly applied. In the arenas that have flying note sources in different locations (i.e. for specific rotations), the one closest to the current rotation is automatically picked.
  
• Music Library: Changed layout of main buttons to make it more obvious what to click. Also removed some useless clutter.
  
• Music Library: Added filters for Standard, Single, No Direction, 90 degrees and 360 degrees.
  
• Music Library: Changed layout of Quick Access area.
  
• Music Library - Full Text Search: Fixed a few bugs in the full text search. I'm honestly embarrassed about this one: Those were three bugs that completely broke the full text search in all but a few edge cases (read that correctly: it worked in edge cases and did not work in most cases). It took about half an hour to fix all of them. I had noticed that something was going wrong in that search but adapted by simply only ever typing the first three letters for one specific search. Ouch!
  
• Upgraded to Unity 2019.3.1
  
• Music Library: Added support for osu! collections and BSMG playlists.
  
• Music Library: Improved how image loading is done to avoid framedrops in VR. This had already been heavily multithreaded to do anything that doesn't need to be done on Unity's main thread on separate threads. Unfortunately, when calling sub-coroutines from async-coroutines naively, they end up being regular coroutines (i.e. they run on the main thread). For cases where this was the incorrect behavior while loading images, this is now fixed.
  
• Music Library: Improved how selections are visualized on buttons.
  
• Music Library: Button layout now automatically adapts to the button's contents. When there is only the title, that title gets a very large font. Title and one subline has a large title and large subline (but the title font being larger, and also bold). Only when two sublines are really necessary, we keep the old layout where all the text is comparatively small, and the title is only more dominant by being bold (and having a slightly larger font). This should make navigating the music library much more convenient.
  
• Music Library: Removed redundant information, e.g. with Browse Music, we have the number of artists, songs and beatmaps already on the main button (below the text "Browse Music"), and then again on the "Artists" and "Songs" buttons, just in different arrangements. That was just visual noise.
  
• Music Library: Fixed a really old and annoying bug that could cause artists being messed up in the artist lists (getting the song titles where the artist name should be, and the artist being in the small section where in this context, the song title should be).
  
• Music Library: Finally added skipping directly to the beatmap list when an artist only has a single song. Previously, one would first have to select the artist, and then the single song, which was a waste of time but the initial attempt of solving this caused too much trouble. Now it just works.
  
• Music Library: Added browsing by beatmapper.
  
• Time Dilation: No longer overriding when selecting a game mechanic preset. When we set time dilation, we want to keep time dilation.
  
• Scoring Algorithm: The directional OctaDrops based on osu! have a tendency to be unfair / uncatchable. This is very different from BSMG-maps that are designed for directions. Therefore, directional orbs from osu! maps cannot be failed. They do, however, give you a pretty severe score penalty (total score is reduced to 10% of the original score, so basically, failing an osu! directional orb does not break the combo, but also gives you almost no score, which I believe is a fair solution - if you want to maximize the score, you do have quite an edge when you manage to catch them).
  
• Play Sessions: Now keeping the flying note theme (regular orbs, OctaDrops, drones and so forth) in the play sessions and also leaderboards, as these are relevant for the scoring.
  
• Play Session: Fixed issue that compressed replay-data stored the whole buffer instead of just the actual data, resulting in unnecessarily large files. Fortunately, due to the compression, the file size didn't increase much ... but still, it was a waste (and also made processing those files in regular text editors like, um, Visual Studio, quite inconvenient.

Ok, this was just the stuff between November 25, 2019, and February 28, 2020. Ready for more? Here's something fun to watch to cool off from this wall of text before running into the next one:

梅雨野おもてぃー (omotea) is a VR & Music Gamer, and YouTuber from Japan that had a few Holodance videos on Twitter and YouTube (and probably Instagram - but I hardly ever checked Instagram until recently ... wait ... nope, there's another person that hardly uses Instagram - only has 7 posts there, I like).


Often, after a release, bugs show up that no one noticed before. Happens to me, too. Didn't have much time to write release notes in that phase. Well, ok, I'll admit I also silently added new features (I did post videos about those, though).

This covers the time from Feb 28 until April 10.

• Guns: Fixed sound for guns appearing and disappearing.
  
• Fixed Issue that in-game Play Area no longer adjusted properly to real world play area.
  
• Levels 4 and 8 (Desert Clouds and Icy Clouds): Made the airplanes shootable, added new achievement: Flygskam - Paying attention in Desert Clouds and Icy Clouds and symbolically, you have removed the yearly traffic of 12 airplanes, significantly reducing CO2-emissions! Also, you understand that while blowing things up in VR is fun, true warriors improve the world without using violence. Shooting airplanes in Holodance is actually choosing not to fly.
  
• Game Mechanic Presets: Added two experimental mechanics in Finetune Gameplay, Beat Orbs and Beat Drops. These two have the orbs not flying at you (or at least, not in a way that you could just put your controller where the orb lands and the timing will be right). Instead, it's more like a drum, where the orb is there, and you need to hit it in the exact right time. This only works for beatmaps that don't have too many events. (UPDATE 2020-07-07: These are no longer hidden)
  
• Modding: There was an issue with the mod buttons showing up, so it looked like no mods were available. Fixed.
  
• BeatSaver-maps: Quite a few of these maps have the artist in the creator field, and the artist field empty. That one's fixed. Some also have the two mixed up (but both filled); that's tough to fix on the fly without an artist database, which we don't have, yet. So that needs to be fixed at some later point in time.
  
• Avatar System: Added Avatar placement points to desert arena. Now it's possible to add avatars to the arena to make it more alive. Currently, this only works in the desert arena, and only with precalibrated tracking (hands, head, no feet, waist etc., yet). I'll continue working on this tomorrow.
  
• Avatar System: Full tracking support added. (UPDATE 2020-07-07: Huh? Didn't we always have full tracking support ... ah, ok, context: Before I added that, the avatar alter egos only used the precalibrated tracking for head and hands, now they can use the full calibration with feet, knees, hip, elbows ... if you have so many Vive trackers)
  
• Avatar System: Added placement points to all arenas/environments, tweaked for levels 1, 2, 3, 12 bonus 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 and 7, Zero Distraction. So this now works for: The Desert (5), Paradise Beach (1), Above the Clouds(2), Dolphin Party(3), Sci-Fi Attack (B1), Retro Clubbing (B2), Sci-Fi Tunnels(B3), Mutant Club(4), Trippy Tunnels(5), Spooky Town(7), Zero Distraction.
  
• Avatar System: Added placement points to the remaining arenas: Levels 4 and 8 (Desert High, Icy High), Levels 6 and 7 (Underwater World, Submarine Nightmare), Level 9 (Ice Desert), Level 10 (Robots Attack), Level 11 (Asteroids), Level 12 (Home of Mother Akash) and Full 360 Craze.
  
• Arenas: Polished Full 360 Craze. Before, it was barely a demo. Now, it's an actual arena.
  
• Avatar System: For some reason, Kohaku didn't behave with the new place avatars in arena feature. Helped her play nice.
  
• Music Library: Fixed issue that sometimes, Game Presets didn't show up.
  
• Laterality: Checking for left/right hand breaks the "kicking drops with your feet" mechanic. But really, it's always fine to kick a drop that was meant for your hand. But you do need to use the right foot (i.e. drops for the left hand need to be kicked with the left foot).
  
• Laterality: BSMG-maps now automatically adapt when you can only use one hand (for whatever reason, including having selected one of the single-hand mechanics). This is also useful for practicing more advanced maps with only one hand at a time.
  
• BSMG-Maps: Now also searching for available custom songs in Oculus paths, so now your custom level library should also be automatically picked up if you have BS installed via Oculus home.
  
• Improved how walls are handled. Especially in Full 360 Craze.
  
• Windows MR: Previously didn't support skeletal input which broke our Avatar system and the hands. Now, the Windows MR drivers support skeletal input but we still had to add this properly to our bindings for those controllers.
  
• Windows MR: At the moment (2020-04-10), haptics do not work due to a bug in Windows Mixed Reality for Steam. This was fixed in the WMR for Steam Beta from 2020-04-03, so if you don't get haptics, you might want to switch to the beta channel.
  
• Gun Mechanic: Fixed that laterality wasn't properly recognized for the drone orbs, resulting in gun gameplay not being sensitive to left/right.
  
• Guns: Fixed flickering of the decals in arena The Desert.
  
• Avatar System: Made more robust, auto-calibration now also works when only one controller had been switched on during calibration / incarnation. When the second controller is then switched on later, it all works.

Ok, here's another video, this time by チャイロ - Chairo. And it seems I'm in the perfect flow of timing because this video has just appeared a minute ago on YouTube (no kidding ... I basically just typed Holodance into YouTube to find those videos ... the ones by 梅雨野おもてぃー, I had already known ... this one is new to me, even though it's apparently a repost. Well, still makes me super-happy because this seems to be one of the few YouTubers actually using BSMG-maps when playing Holodance (even though it's the orb-theme, which is so old and I kind of don't like it anymore).

Anyways, here's something to cool off for before next wall of release-notes text:

Make sure to watch it, like it, share it. Too few people post videos of Holodance.


Ok, the final stretch. I actually spent most of the time between April 10 and yesterday working on our beatmap editor. But there's still some good new stuff.

• Settings: Added Particle Effects checkbox to Finetune Gameplay because it's not obvious to search for this under Performance where it previously was (and still is).
  
• Settings: Fixed issue that Particle Effects preview didn't properly react to changed setting (particle trail kept on emitting particles even when disabling Particle Effects).
  
• OctaDrop Theme: Fixed issue that fail explosions were not effected by Particle Effects setting (i.e. the kept exploding even though the setting was disabled).
  
• Updated Unity to 2019.3.12
  
• Fixed Catcher appear and disappear animations. These had been broken for a very long time due to an internal offset that we added (which changed the hierarchy, which breaks animations in Unity). While at it also fixed the issue that the animation overrode the catcher-colors.
  
• Mutant Club: Major visual improvements. This one previously had an opaque floor, with some ugly artifacts. Now that floor is mostly transparent and lets you view the structure below, which now also rotates based on the combo. Also, a few of the walls had messed up UVs - those are fixed now. And tweaked a few of the textures.
  
• Major cleanup of the gameplay objects prefab (which previously only was half a prefab). This is primarily in preparation of the beatmap editor and multi-mechanic beatmaps, and also simplifies development in this area quite a bit ... but also had the risk of breaking things. So if anything with the controllers no longer works the way it did before, make sure to let me know!
  
• Streamer Mode: Fixed issue that postprocessing effects didn't work at all on the flatscreen when Streamer Mode was active.
  
• Tightened behavior of laser pointer holder: Previously, this would sometimes begin point in the wrong location, e.g. when enabling/disabling the catchers, or even during startup. Now this should always use the correct origin/direction in any given state.
  
• SteamVR 1.13.2 Issue: Most likely due to OpenXR support in SteamVR changing some of the values that were returned from the API, our logic for setting up the play area size broke.
  
• Added proper hand poses for all weapons (currently only supported via SteamVR, and in fact, only when you grab the weapons using Gravity Grip, which isn't available in Holodance, yet)
  
• Added YUR Integration (YUR.watch)
  
• YUR integration gives us: New leaderboards that are based on calories and burnrate, the uber-cool YUR.watch
  
• Updated integrated Web Browser: Was broken because Unity broke it, update of the browser fixed it. Me happy!
  
• Streamer Mode: Made "Smooth Player Perspective" much smoother, and much more like the player perspective.
  
• Added Rich Presence for Steam
  
• Added Rich Presence for Discord
  
• Updated Facepunch Steamworks to 2.3.2
  
• Updated Steamworks.NET to 14.0.0
  
• Made Global Leaderboards available via Game Progression
  
• Removed the old Global Leaderboard from 2016 and replaced it with the modern one from Game Progression (because Game Progression is kind of hidden).

And I'll end this with an awesome video by Sean Driskel aka Cmoche (on our official Discord), who is one of the few people that frequently streams Holodance on Twitch[www.twitch.tv] and also has quite a few Holodance videos on YouTube. Make sure to follow, like, share!

This one is a song by Muzzy, one of my favorite artists (and one that I, in fact, found out about through Holodance, while looking for awesome osu! maps). And it's in my favorite mod of Trippy Tunnels (we need more psychedelic mods like that, pretty please!)

Enjoy!

I'll be honest: Large updates like this are scary. It's always fun to put out new things on the alpha and beta channels where people kind of expect that sometimes, things may break. But having everyone try an official new version is a different story. Like, the first time I tried this one was right after rebooting the servers, to give them more processors (they were becoming too slow) - and both, the global leaderboard and new game progression panel that are now quite prominently in the arena selection area came up empty. Ouch. Apparently, it was just one service taking a little longer to boot but still ... SCARY!!!

So just in case this update breaks something severely for you - you can always go back to previous (it's one of the "beta-channels"). But be sure to let me know, either here on the Steam forums, or Discord[discord.gg], or Twitter.


With that out of the way, here's a shiny new teaser that also shows the new Beat Drop mechanic that is now officially in the game (and called Unique Rhythmic Punching in the trailer ... oh well ;-) ):

Too quick? I have another one that takes a little more time for everything - and this one also has a brief section with the updated Mutant Club arena that I mentioned in the previous posting:

I have also Tweeted about these and appreciate your retweets!

The Beat Drop mechanic, similar to shooting and slicing - but even more severely - illustrates one of the bigger challenges we have in Holodance: We have (a few) native songs, let you play with your local music, or use any osu! beatmap[osu.ppy.sh] or one of the maps created by the BSMG[bsaber.com]. And you can catch, or punch, or slice, or shoot the orbs, drops, and drones. So the game gives you lots and lots of possibilities.

But not all of the combinations are actually always fun for everyone.

What's so special about this mechanic? Hard to describe in words but if you were ever annoyed by the fact that punching and catching in VR rhythm games is more about location than about rhythm, this mechanic is for you: Because here, you have to beat the rhythm (pun intended) and you can't cheat it. And because it's still punching, you still get that visceral feel that's so cool about VR games.

For now, the biggest challenge with it, however, is finding maps that work well with it. Because with this mechanic, when a map has multiple events in a row at the same location, it just won't work. In general, BSMG maps will work better with this, and are also more interesting to play due to the directionality, than many osu! maps, especially if they have streams. But my favorite map with this so far has been Blaster & Extra Terra - Spacecraft, mapped by Pandize (Easy)[osu.ppy.sh], with one of the easier difficulties. You'll find plenty of me in that leaderboard.

While in theory, some of this could be handled with smart filters and algorithms that analyze the patterns, machines are never as good as humans (fu Agent Smith ;-) ).

That is why Holodance 1.3 introduces ratings:


After each session, you can now let the game know how you liked the song, what you thought about the gameplay, and how challenging you found this specific beatmap, in this specific session. The only rating where you should at least try to be as objective as possible is the gameplay rating.

We store these ratings together with your style setup: So ratings that you gave for the same beatmap but using the laserblades for slicing drops will go into a different bucket from your rating of that same beatmap with the new Beat Drop mechanic. One may have been pure flow, the other unplayable. It's the same principle for having different leaderboards for different play styles (in addition to the combined ones).

The song rating obviously is just per song. That one should eventually help you find more music you like.

Also, while you get better at playing the game, your perception of how challenging a specific map was will change - so you can always change your ratings after playing a map, and your current skill level will be taken into account when recommending (or not recommending) the map to other players.

For now, the ratings are just collected but I'm already working on a new area in Quick Access of the Music Library that will then suggest maps for the mechanic you picked, that worked well for other players that used the same mechanic. This will make a huge difference especially for new players that are often overwhelmed with all the options ... but it will also be helpful for seasoned players that look for more challenges that are actual fun to play.


Holodance has always been a fun workout, and YUR[yur.fit] works for any VR game, so it was possible to use Holodance with YUR before, and I certainly did. But now you can not only use the YUR.watch[yur.fit] to directly log in to YUR and start tracking right away, and watch your current stats right at your fingertips - but we have also added meta-data so you can check out which kind of gameplay burnt what amount of calories, so you get graphs like this one in the YUR app (available on Steam, for free):

See my Tweet thread about this for more details (and more graphs).

Furthermore, we have also integrated calories burnt into our game progress and leaderboards:


Holodance is designed to be a (long) journey through sound. While we have been tracking your progress all along (and migrated away from Steam before ending early access), and even had a Game Progression section hidden in the settings menus, and even had the global leaderboards with the "grind score" behind your back when you entered the game ... it was time to bring some consistency into how you progress through the game.

Right when you enter the game, you now see the game progression to your left, and the global leader board to your right. More importantly, you can now switch between the total accumulated score leaderboard, skill and style level leaderboards, and new leaderboards for total calories burnt while playing Holodance, and your maximum burnrate while playing Holodance (these last two obviously require using YUR).

If you have been playing Holodance since early early access (well, not that early[medium.com]), your total accumulated score may have been much higher than what we've tracked with the new system. That data isn't lost, it's still on Steam, used for unlocking the arenas, and the old accumulated score leaderboard still gets updated. For a while I kept "Steam stats" as an option in game progression but this is becoming increasingly time-consuming to maintain. As usual, please let me know what you think: If it's really important to you, I'll find a way to put it back in ... but some of these complexities take time that I could also use to finish the beatmap editor or the new map recommendation system.


Also, after playing a session, you now can select between a leaderboard that has all sessions, and a leaderboard only for your specific style, plus two new leaderboards based on calories burnt (multiplied with your achieved score), and burn rate (multiplied with the percentage of orbs you caught). Plus nicer stats ... which are still work in progress (so we went from ugly work in progress to good looking work in progress - but progress is being made, more on that in the next announcement ;-) ).


Discord now shows where you are playing, with which weapon, and what mechanic and map:

Steam shows significantly less:

Hello Valve, can you feel the heat?


I still have a long list of items that were done and that I haven't put into the recent release notes ... but those will go into a separate posting. And, as usual, work on Holodance continues, so there will probably be a few smaller updates during the next few days (including some comfort updates - I did not forget about those, just didn't manage to put them in, yet).

I have also made significant progress on the beatmap editor, so that will be fun once done.

For those of you that don't own Holodance, yet, this is an awesome opportunity.

As I'm in the middle of working on a pretty big update coming to Holodance in the next few days, I'll keep this unusually short: Some of the upcoming new features, like the Mutant Club upgrade are already available here on Steam via the alphadev- and beta-channels. So if you want to give those a try (and help find bugs), be sure to opt-in to either beta (that one's fairly safe but also not as hot - last update there was May 25), or alphadev (that one's bleeding edge and may sometimes break - last update there was June 23, and another one should be coming tomorrow).

Don't know how? Here's how! (That guide also explains opting in to the Steam beta - skip right to Product Betas).

And, as a little teaser and preparation for what's coming: In case you haven't heard about YUR, yet, well, now you have. It's an awesome (and free) SteamVR Fitness tracking addon. YUR automatically tracks your activity across all games, so it will work immediately as soon as you have it installed. But one thing I'm working on right now is a tighter integration for higher levels of awesomeness! So if you don't have YUR, yet, get it now!

If you want to let others know about this opportunity - here's the official Tweet!

And if you want to hop in and chat with other players (or the devs), check out our official Holodance Discord[discord.gg]!

And the current trailer ... I know ... it sucks. A new one is also coming.

So ... back to work. Bye!

If you have never heard of Holodance before, here's ...


When I began development of Holodance in early 2015, the original idea was to create a synesthetic Virtual Reality clubbing experience with trippy visuals, and twelve songs produced specifically for the game and its twelve "environments". While playing with the early prototypes, somehow the idea of making the game about dancing with dragons came up, and the direction shifted into what later became "Story Mode": Three dragons returning to planet earth to remind the human species of their duty of care for their planet.

One of the motivations behind that was to use the new medium, VR, to take players to different places. So trippy visuals turned into a beach, desert and ice desert, three environments up in the air, at varying altitudes, and three underwater environments with dolphins, whales, and increasing levels of pollution due to industrialization. Finally, an apocalyptic machines against humans 360° dystopia, an asteroid field and a place beyond time and space where you would meet "the blue mother of all dragons".

Still twelve "levels" but quite different from the original plan.

While Story Mode, with its dragons, did (and still does) have its fans, to be honest, it became clear quite early in Early Access (which began April 5, 2016) that the original idea probably would have been the smarter approach to creating a VR rhythm game. But we live to learn, so in October 2016, the very first version of Free Mode was released: This added support for osu! beatmaps (turning 7 or 8 songs available at that time to more than 10.000 songs with high quality community created beatmaps). For Free Mode, I also added new environments/arenas, including two clubs, two sci-fi arenas and a crazy 360° gameplay prototype. And the whole game started moving from its initial fantasy/environmentalism-style towards a more sci-fi approach, and kind of back towards its origins.

Long story short: Also, the scope and complexity increased hugely, Story Mode development almost completely stalled and that's why we were still in "Early Access". Still in 2016 (September 2016, to be precise), the idea for a smaller scoped, more streamlined rhythm game called Beat the Rhythm was born, a game that is primarily focused on the actual game mechanics instead of mixing dragons with Retro Clubs (anyone got the Ruirized achievement? ;-) ).

Beat the Rhythm is its own game, with its own style, and I like to call it Holodance's young brother. The cool thing is that often, the elders learn from the younger ones - so quite a few of the things you see in Holodance today were actually developed for Beat the Rhythm and ported back so our existing players can enjoy those new features already.

And that's where the custom BeatSaver-map support comes in: The big project that I'm currently working on, which will become its own (free) standalone tool but also part of both, Holodance, and Beat the Rhythm, is a universal beatmap editor designed for the community to be able to BAM! "Beatmap All Music!" ... osu! beatmaps work quite well for catching and punching orbs but if you have ever tried the slicing mechanic with osu! beatmaps in Holodance, it's quite obvious that it doesn't work that well.

The BSMG-community has done a tremendous job mapping songs specifically for that kind of mechanic, and you can now play those maps with our engine, just like osu!, and the procedural mapping that lets you play any music file on your PC without even creating a map (but with the usual caveat that procedural mapping has: it just doesn't compare with hand-crafted beatmaps, even though we do have something in the pipeline that might remedy that). You can use all the browsing features of our Music Library, plus you can even browse using the BeastSaber playlists[bsaber.com], and finally also via beatmappers. And to keep things fair, osu! collections are now also supported.

Also, we've had 360 levels in Holodance since 2017:

So of course 90/360 BeatSaver-maps are also fully supported.

Oh, and also, if you find the planes in the new environments Desert Sky and Icy Sky annoying, you can shoot them while playing a song (and even get a new achievement for that).