Hello, I decided to start making changelogs for the big beta updates.

In case you aren't familiar with it, Phoenix is the name given to the new version of Project Heartbeat running on Godot 4, this version has been widely revamped with many new bells and whistles, including the new subtick system. You can learn more about it here:

[previewyoutube=8EgtpCrbdSg;full]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8EgtpCrbdSg[/previewyoutube]

This update consists of 80+ changes to the game's code, mostly fixes but some minor new features.

Fixes

• Fix workshop browser
  
• Remove controller selector since it isn't required anymore
  
• Remove simplified chinese translation that wasn't ready for prime-time yet.
  
• Fix loading screen crashes
  
• Fix some BPM changes not being applied
  
• Fix an issue that would cause the game to crash when opening the editor
  
• Fix notes not cleaning up properly when being deleted in the editor
  
• Fix and improve behavior cursor auto-hide
  
• Fix editing angles in the editor by clicking on the stage
  
• Fix some editor time conversion errors
  
• Fix folders
  
• Fix midi, DSC and PPD importers.
  
• Fix minor (inconsequential) memory leaks
  
• Fix result rating styling
  
• Optimize stylebox vertex count
  
• Fix clipping in pregame screen.
  
• Fix 3D menu scaling
  
• Fix editor trying to use hidpi and failing at it strepitously
  
• Fix lyrics rendering
  
• Fix UI scaling changing when exiting the editor
  
• Fix some popups not spawning centered
  
• Fix note input lockout during fade-in
  
• Fix slide chain drawers not doing the appear animation properly
  
• Reduce editor font size to better match old PH
  
• Fix missing editor toolbar icon and recolor waveform icon
  
• Fix note movement gizmo losing tracking when moving the mouse too fast
  
• Fix song variants crashing the game
  
• Fix editor area select
  
• Fix song list search passing keyboard input through in some circumstances
  
• Fix song restart fade-in input lockout
  
• Re-add yellow selection triangle to notes in the editor timeline
  
• Fix arrange wheel
  
• Fix pregame screen modifier buttons not being usable with a keyboard/gamepad
  
• Fix pause menu stealing focus when clicking in an empty place
  
• Optimize credits section
  
• Fix results screen minimap
  
• Fix results screen graph
  
• Bring back and further optimize pause menu blur
  
• Fix slide hold score not showing
  
• Fix editor shortcut styling
  
• Fix song metadata editor using save file dialogs instead of open file dialogs
  
• Fix note appear effect animation speed
  
• Add hack to reimplement old engine note high amplitude high frequency effects
  
• Improve modifier localization
  
• Fix modifier selector scaling
  
• Fix hidden modifier
  

• Add note usage icons to workshop browser item thumbnail
  
  
  
• Add new result screen test button to debug menu
  
  
• The main menu is now real 3D, which should massively reduce power consumption and make most GUI elements look better.
  
• Menu elements now have a 0 cost frosted glass effect behind them.
  
  
  
  
• Pre-game screen now has a small leaderboard with information about previous plays, this will be improved upon in a future patch.
  
• Temporary project heartbeat phoenix logo
  
• Add migration system for old engine input maps
  
• Make sustains actually usable when using the hidden modifier
  

[previewyoutube=8EgtpCrbdSg;full][/previewyoutube]

The trailer I told you guys about in the last post is finally done and released, please check it out!

Cheers.

(This story was originally posted to the EIRTeam Patreon here)
Hello, sorry for the delay but I've been down for most of the month due to health issues, fortunately I've still managed to continue work full steam ahead.

Unfortunately due to a badly timed company restructuring I didn't manage to get into the big studio I told you guys about last time, that was a hard blow specially because it would have been very helpful economically, oh well.

Project Heartbeat Phoenix

I've been struggling with coming up with a catchy name for the new engine update, I think I finally have one I like, Project Heartbeat Phoenix, let me know what you think about it.

[h2]Subtick promo video[/h2]



I've been thinking about making promo videos for Phoenix, this includes the new subtick system, I already have a video ready that I will have Kyuuon voice, hopefully it's well received.

[h2]Fonts[/h2]

I did some work on unifying fonts across the whole game to better support non-Latin character languages, if I did my job well every single label now supports Chinese, Japanese, Korean and Cyrillic characters (I hope).

[h2]Localization[/h2]



I did some work on improving the localization system, it's now basically ready for me to send to translation companies to translate it.
I tried to find a service where I can let people contribute localizations, but I would have to self-host and thinking about it with the cost of proper translation it would probably end up being more expensive.
I also considered AI translation but people would probably not like it and Valve may be made about it.
My current plans for localization languages in PH will be:

• English
  
• Spanish
  
• Catalan
  
• Japanese
  
• Chinese (Simplified)
  
• Chinese (Traditional)
  
• Russian
  
• Ukrainian
  

• Fixed a long-standing where the waveform would veer off-sync depending on the amount of horizontal scroll
  
• Fixed async loading data races on boot
  
• Fix main menu mouse accuracy
  
• Fix scrolling using the mouse in various places
  

Hello again friends, welcome again to the monthly progress post. I've been busy working on things for both PH and Swansong and I'm very excited to how well things are turning out.

I also had the opportunity to get interviewed for a job, i managed to pass two interviews and a technical test quite well, but I still haven't received a finally answer, it's at a pretty nice local studio so the money would come in handy, I could even hire people to work on PH if the workload is too big for me, so the continuity of the game wouldn't be a concern.

Project Heartbeat



[h2]New content on the way[/h2]



A few new songs are either charted or about to be charted, they will be added to the game as they are ready, at least 3 new songs are being worked on, here's a sneek peek at how the artwork for one will look.

It's made by Guinii, our resident anime women enthusiast.

[h2]The early access finale update[/h2]

I have decided to rename the Godot 4 port to the "early access finale" update, this update will be the final update before the game comes out of early access, however this doesn't mean I won't continue working on the game. I just feel like its in a very good position where it can be justified to be called a full game.

[h2]Challenges proposal[/h2]

After the very successful launch of the new website design I am pleased to announce that I've started work on challenges, challenges will allow players to fight against each other on randomly selected songs, details are still to be determined so I suggest you read my proposal here.

[h2]YUV -> RGB conversion on the GPU[/h2]



Normally, when video frames are decoded they don't use the typical red green and blue format.

Generally, these are decoded as three monochrome planes (essentially, three black and white textures), with the first texture being brightness information and the other two being color information.
This generally results in an imperceptible difference (at least to human eyes) and much more compact information storage.

Previously, PH would convert from YUV to RGB using the CPU for every rendered frame, even some that may never be shown at all. This was bad, so now the video is decoded as-is without conversion and is sent to the GPU as three YUV planes, it is then converted into RGB by the GPU.

The result is a >900% improvement in video decoding performance. Something to be at least a bit proud of I think.

[h2]Discord rich presence improvements[/h2]



Discord rich presence now uses a homegrown discord RPC wrapper, which means that it will work more reliably (specially on Linux) and it makes my life a lot easier.

I also added a new feature, the game will now provide discord with workshop preview URLs, this makes the album art for the song show up on your discord profile. Fancy.

[h2]DirectX 12[/h2]

On Windows PH now uses the new DirectX 12 rendering backend, this is to improve responsiveness and frame time consistency on windows, unfortunately there appears to be some kind of memory leak on some AMD drivers and on Intel Xe, so dragons beware.

Currently we are defaulting to Vulkan but you can give the dx12 backend a go with the following command-line argument:

--rendering-driver d3d12

[h2]SDL for input[/h2]



It's not news that Godot's input system is sub-par at best and questionable at worst. Hence why I decided to rip the entire input driver and replace it with SDL. SDL is a very common library for handling various aspects of application development, although here its only used for gamepad input.

The reasons are varied, but its mainly about preventing duplicate devices (such as virtual steam input devices) and properly mapping quirky controllers.

Currently SDL is only available on Linux, and it uses your system SDL2 library for now.

[h2]Input system changes[/h2]

PH's input system was originally meant to work around issues caused by godot's shoddy input handling, fortunately with the addition of SDL we can now be in the 21st century and accept inputs from various controllers at the same time, all without having to go into the input menu to change between controllers.

This may also open opportunities for coop charts. Let's see what you can come up with!

[h2]Timestamped input system[/h2]

One of the new stars of the show is the tickless input system, essentially inputs are constantly being read while the game is doing other things and a timestamp is assigned to each input event.

Before PH would process all input events at some point during the frame as if they happened at the time they were processed, this wasn't exactly the best idea, while it doesn't matter for most games for rhythm games like PH its quite noticeable

Once the game processes the input events, it knows at what time they happened, the game was already designed with this in mind, so gameplay can evaluated at any song position.

This results in essentially unlimited input polling rate (well, whatever your hardware can handle), even if the game is running at a lower framerate.

[h2]Nightcore modifier video support[/h2]

The nightcore modifier now supports playing back video, this uses a bit more CPU but it does work.

Swansong



This month I worked very hard on Swansong's combat system, although it's too green to show much at this time, maybe next month!

Future



Thank you for reading yet another monthly update by the time I post another update I will have turned 24, oh the missery of the passing of time!

I will keep on keeping on for as long as I can, have a good one my friends.

Hello friends, today marks the release of some things I've been cooking for a while, hope you like them.
This month has been as active as the last due to the holiday season, but I've still worked hard as much as I could to deliver these things to you.

The Project Heartbeat website revamp is something I've been cooking for a while. It has taken a few months of hard work and a lot of code restructuring to make it more extensible, faster, easier to use and prettier, let's get into the details.

The new website
[h2]New design[/h2]



The first thing you will notice upon entering the website is the new design, it's much fancier and represents the in-game aesthetics much better. More importantly this has resulted in a significant code restructuring which makes styling changes to the site much easier to do on my end.

The song pages now feature the song's background art, this is thanks to Steven's excellent Project HeartAttack website, which is also now linked on the song pages. Thanks Steven!

Of course, this is only temporary, I want to move to a locally cached version of song data, for this and other purposes, unfortunately valve hasn't been very cooperative with fixing with a certain bug I'm facing, so I cannot proceed with the reliable option I was thinking of.

[h2]Score progression[/h2]



The site will now store a history of your personal bests for songs as you get better at them, so you can see how much your score improved, a fancy graph is also included.

[h2]Score details[/h2]



You can now see a detailed breakdown of every one of your scores, this includes a breakdown of point distribution and yet another fancy graph.



The score page also will now have a thumbnail when you post it on Twitter, Telegram, Facebook and even WhatsApp, when clicking the in-game tweet share button the link to the score will be included in the tweet if it's a PB, however this functionality isn't ready just yet on the game side.

[h2]Profile changes[/h2]



You can now search on every player profile for songs based on name. You can also sort the results based on date achieved or rank, this can and will be expanded in the future.

[h2]Badges[/h2]



Another important feature is badges, which are granted to people who achieve certain things or that have contributed to the game. Although currently no in-game actions grant any badges they will in the future.

There exist three badges at this time, the early access badge which all users have, the master charter badge which is given to official charters and the Patreon Supporter badge which is given to people who support this Patreon page.

[h2]Song search[/h2]



Additionally, you can also search for song leaderboards in the new community songs page.

[h2]Performance and other technical funnies[/h2]

The new website uses the great htmx framework which makes a tightly integrated and high performance site like the PH site a breeze to make without having to involve complicated web frameworks.

Some performance improvements have been made, some actions that were done sequentially are now done in parallel and some queries have been optimized.

[h2]Future[/h2]

There are many things that I didn't implement just yet, like the aforementioned ability for the site to have access to the actual chart information and assets. This will come once Valve decides to fix the bug I am facing.

On another note, a feature I would like to include in the future at the suggestion of Steven is daily or weekly challenges, where people compete on a randomly selected song to attempt to obtain badges. I still haven't finalized how it will work, but I would like to give out three different badges per difficulty (for the podium), with a special badge reserved to whoever gets the highest score of the day/week on the song's hardest difficulty.

Swansong pitch



As swansong has evolved to the point where I can call it a viable game to build, I decided to focus my attention on defining most aspects of the rest of the game.

On January 1st 2024, after crying myself to sleep once again I had an epiphany, I finally came up with the full game-concept that I wanted, which I redacted the next day into a pitch that I can show to people, inspired mainly by the original Diablo pitch.

You can find the pitch here, please let me know what you think of it!

Future



That's it for this time, I hope everyone has an amazing new year and hopefully things will be better soon! The future is scary but exciting at the same time.

(This is a summed up version of news roundup #2 and #3, I forgot to post #2 to steam so I'm merging them together whoops, hopefully I won't make the same mistake again, you can see the #3 edition of new roundup here on our Patreon)

Hello, I am once again hoping I can manage to make the news posts become monthly from now on, anyways, since we are in early December I think it's time for the updates, there are many exciting new things I've been working on.

New song: Spread my wings

[previewyoutube=EfnZ-EtHay0;full][/previewyoutube]

A few days ago I announced (on Twitter/X whatever you wanna call it) the start of an official collaboration between Project Heartbeat and the Grazepoint eurobeat creator's circle, with the first song, "Spread My Wings" by DJ Timotei feat. Slothington from the album TouWHO?? 2.

This is the first chart made by mvluna and features artwork from resident artist Sadnesswaifu.

Source code release

While this has done a while ago I wasn't sure if it would stick, but now I am. I released the source code for Project Heartbeat publicly for everyone to take a look at, it's not open source but it's source code available, I will explore a proper open source release in the future.

You can check the source code here.

New engine branch updates



Since the last update many things have happened, the new engine version of the game was finally released for testing, although it's very broken. If you are interested in checking it out please go on the Discord server and look for the new engine info channel to learn how to access it.
New engine branch updates



As I said, it's very broken but it already integrates some goodies such as the new input glyphs and a new song that is currently being tested.

The new engine also has support for Steam Input emulate devices, long gone are the days of having double inputs!

While this is a preliminary port it doesn't make use of ALL the new engine features just yet (for example, the new mailbox vsync or the ability to switch controllers on the fly). But it will soon.

Please, test it out so I can work through the issues faster!

Website revamp updates



As a side project I started work on upgrading the website. I started by upgrading it to use the most recent version of actix-web and to use htmx, which should provide a more modern experience. As this means interactivity can now be expanded upon I am also working on the ability to search within the site for songs by name.

I also want to add the ability to see historical leaderboard data, that should be useful.

I would also like to do something similar to what Steven's website (Project HeartAttack) does with the songs, which is that it locally has the song data available which would be helpful. I would also like to add some form of cache for user data and avatars to increase performance of the site, as the current source of slowness is having to constantly call the Steam API which is incredibly slow.

last month I showed you a more conservative set of changes but I decided to go the extra mile and do a proper revamp to bring it more in line with the game's styling and make it more modern.

Among the new features are improvements to the responsiveness of the site on mobile devices, as well as a per-user progression history page, full with a graph (the graph is free of JavaScript btw!).

This obviously comes with massive improvements to the underlying technology powering the site, such as better database access locking and more.



There are a few things I haven't been able to implement properly yet, such as allowing the site to access the actual files of charts on the Steam Workshop, such as for using background images or some other statistics. My plan was to use the same mechanism dedicated servers in other games use, however it appears there's some kind of issue with permissions that affects Project Heartbeat only, I contacted Valve about this but they haven't been very helpful yet, hopefully this will be resolved.

As you can probably tell, the site is heavily inspired by Osu's website, if it ain't broken don't fix it.

The last thing that I want to do (which the server already has data for, I just haven't gotten around to making the actual page yet) is the ability to have a page dedicated to each score entry to see a graphed breakdown of information.

Once the replay system is working there will also be a button on the webpage that launches the game to show a replay, fancy.



Another thing I want to do to the site (and to implement in-game in the future) is badges/medals for certain achievements done to help the Project Heartbeat community, my plan is to have a general-purpose thank-you badge for people who have done great things (such as Steven and his PHA website) and a few more specific ones for things such as people who've charted officials or for having participated in the community-ran events. Of course there will be a special badge for patrons.

Project Swansong updates



The last few months have been spent on refining the parkour system for swansong. The game now uses pre-baked polygons for sideways ledge movement. This has been a majorly painful thing to do and the current solution still isn't perfect, but it will do for now, it will make it (hopefully) more reliable. I would like for the parkour demo to be ready before the end of the year, but with my health in decline i have no idea if I'll have the demo ready in time.

On other notes, I've integrated the Jolt character controller, which means the player can now go up and down steps, coupled with the IK system and the feet aren't staying in the air! This can be improved further (I have read some papers about how Assassin's Creed syndicate does it), but it looks better than most games for now.

I still haven't decided other aspects of the game, as I'm focusing on the parkour first (since it's the highlight of the game) but I have been thinking about how the gameplay loop will work and whether or not it will be semi-open world like AC1. After the parkour system is released to testing I will be focusing on combat.

This month I've spent a lot of time working on improvements to the reliability of parkour system, such as introducing an additional ring around grabbable ledges so that the character keeps a reasonable distance to it that is also consistent.

I also ended up completely rewriting the parkour logic to make more heavy use of shape casts and other trickery to make sure movements are possible, while this is a bit more labor intensive than the previous raycast only solution it seems worth it, as it has already shown a lot of promise in terms of reliability.

We are inching closer and closer to a playable prototype, hopefully by next month after I finish the wall grab point system.



Personal update



Life continues to look grim and I slip in and out of depressive and sometimes manic episodes, so I'm not putting in as many hours into working as I originally hoped. Sales also haven't been good at all, even with the boost of publicity from the winter sale. I tried to apply to a bunch of gamedev jobs without any luck at all. Hopefully things will get better over Christmas.

Goodbye friends, see you soon!

(Originally posted on the EIRTeam patreon)
Hello friends, it's time to give you an update on the development of Project Heartbeat and everything EIRTeam.

I'm currently on vacation, so i'm using this time to work on Swansong (more on that later) and enjoy time with my family. I hope you all are also having a good summer.

Swansong



As some of you may be aware, swansong is the parallel project I'm doing to try to develop a game after Project Heartbeat, this is an adventure game with a heavy focus on parkour inspired by Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid and Death Stranding.

Development is going better than I expected, I have recently been working mostly on polishing stuff and on foot IK, the first phase of the development of the game focuses on having a working parkour system that I can share around for people to test, perhaps here on patreon.

The character model used in the screenshots above are from the previous iteration of the project (which was 2.5d) so the quality is not good, this model won't be used in the final game, it's purely for testing.

I am lucky to have a few artist friends who are very smart and are up to working together. I have however decided to only call them in when the gameplay is mostly working to avoid wasting their time.

Project Heartbeat's 3 big projects


(Actual image of PH on the new engine)

Porting of Project Heartbeat to Godot 4 is going well, 90% of things already work, the two big ones are the multi spinbox in the editor and youtube downloads.

For the initial release of the beta of Project Heartbeat on Godot 4 Multiplayer and leaderboards will be disabled, but they'll be brough back before release.

Some of the big upgrades to PH on godot 4 come from a set of new projects I started together with this patreon, the new video decoding code which is already public. The performance of video decoding appears better, although there are again some kinks to iron out.

The other two big projects are the Input Glyph system and the new Steamworks wrapper, these aren't released yet, but will be soon. With the new Input Glyph system we have working Steam Input, so you will be able to use it when PH on Godot 4. The changes also mean controller support will be improved, you will be able to change controllers on the fly much more easily, without having to fiddle inside menus.

(By the way, I'm still trying to come up with a marketing name for PH on Godot 4, something like PH: Evolution or something like that, any suggestions?)

Discord changes



Pascal now runs an events channel on the discord, you can check it out and subscribe to it using the special role to get updates.
Do note, I do not run this channel, it's entirely driven by people from the community, it's very nice to see.

The future
I'm gonna be frank with you folks, things are looking grim at this time, not just my finances but also my life in general.

As some of you may know, I've been suffering from major depressive disorder and ADHD since I was very young, this is making my life somewhat of a living hell. Having an overwhelming feeling of loneliness and feeling like I'm not worth anything. I have been coping as much as I can but I feel like I'm at a big crossroad.

Due to these issues I've always tried to be as independent when it comes to working as possible, as my very few experiences with a job have ended in what could be considered disasters (I was sacked for calling me boss a cunt). Unfortunately, when it's time to put money on the table there might be an actual need for me to find a regular job. My mother works at a medical manufacturing plant and my father is heavily disabled, so he doesn't have a regular job.

I have decided that if Swansong development hasn't picked up by the end of the year or PH hasn't rocketed off I will begin looking for a job, this will obviously mean less time to work on PH but I'll do my best.

Thank you for reading, let's keep on keeping on.

0.17.3

• Fix issues with the leaderboards for monochrome stars
  
• Use romanized song title in editor chart open popup
  
• Make game fallback to the default SFX if the custom one can't be found
  
• Fix intro skip not showing again when a song is restarted
  
• Add love
  

Project Heartbeat 0.17 is here, this update is MASSIVE, with a revamped version of the new media downloader (that had to be rolled back due to issues discovered after release), a massive editor overhaul, better MM+ support and a complete rewrite of the gameplay code of the game for increased performance and reliability, a big NVIDIA fix for windows users, along with some new and highly requested features.

This is likely our biggest update yet (I think), and it marks the third anniversary for Project Heartbeat, the little rhythm game that could.

I have also decided to make the game 40% off, just to celebrate a bit more ;)

New content
[h2]New song: Monochrome Stars[/h2]

[previewyoutube=2G1zFisSyUY;full][/previewyoutube]

The final SuganoMusic licensed song, a funky nostalgic song, Licensed from SuganoMusic, vocals and lyrics by shironegi, composed by obama.
The song was charted by resident idol enjoyer
The artwork was masterfully created by Mariale, who incidentally is also the singer for the OTHER song in this update. That's right, there's two!

[h2]New song: Dime Linda[/h2]

[previewyoutube=7Bg3Osvux7I;full][/previewyoutube]

Our first song in a language that isn't English or Japanese, done in Spanish by Mariale, one of the resident Project Heartbeat illustrators, I think it's quite different from anything else we've had before, so I hope you can find it enjoyable!

The chart was made by BunBun, a new PH charter.

The artwork comes from David Revoy's open source webcomic (Pepper & Carrot), with proper credits, of course.

The editor update

The editor has received a much-requested do-over, it now looks better and is nicer to use, with some new features that I'm sure you will enjoy.
This is done mainly by Lino.

[h2]A short introduction to the new editor[/h2]
Project Heartbeat has, since very early in development, had a chart editor, which people could use to create charts for the community. It worked fine, but it had a lot of rough edges and inconsistencies.
Furthermore, most of its design was based on UPDC, a chart editor that, while revolutionary for its time, doesnt hold up too well to more modern standards.
Over time, as more and more stuff was added, trying to keep it up to date with the features of the game and adding more tools was getting complicated, and the codebase was pretty messy.
So, enter, the New Editor:



[h2]Major changes:[/h2]

• A more modern, sleek look, with rounded edges and bigger focus on icons over text.
  
• The editor is now mostly grouped into modules.
  
• Every module has big and clear buttons, with clear icons and a description which you can read by hovering over them.
  
• Everything has a shortcut!
  
• There is a new tempo system, with the timeline grid changing according to the tempo.
  
• Selecting and editing multiple notes at the same time is now properly supported, with the entire power (and a bit more!) of the old expression runner available inside of every property spinbox.
  
• All the tools got a fresh coat of paint, making them more responsive, easy to use and powerful. Also, some cool new ones were added!
  
• You can now open external charts (From the workshop, officials, or the imported sources) as read only, so you can study charting and get inspired from the community.
  
• Comfy Studio charts (.csfm files) can be imported right into the editor.
  
• You can import charts alongside your current chart now, instead of overwriting it every time (useful for collaborations with people who dont like charting in PH)
  
• F and F2nd chart importing was fixed, and the editor can now load them effortlessly (even decrypting them if necessary).
  
• A new built-in script manager, with file management and a code editor with syntax highlighting.
  
• An arrange wheel with multiple snap settings.
  
• Support for irregular time sigs.
  
• Proper speed changes (for example, set speed to 150%).
  
• Playtesting shows the video and meta as if you were playing the chart normally.
  
• A collection of static note templates, with tools to make your own or download them from the community
  
• And much. much more!
  

• Brutal, who helped me with all my whinings about music theory.
  
• Pascal, for always providing feedback.
  
• Neorash, for pointing out bugs when the update released.
  
• Samyuu, the father of the diva editors.
  
• Everyone in the PH community, for their support and help throughout the development of this update.
  
• And EIREXE, for putting up with my BS.
  

• "Play hit sounds only when a note is hit": Exactly what it says, note sounds will only play when you hit a note correctly
  
• Sustains will now have a custom "held" looping sounds that gets higher and higher pitched.
  
• Autoplay now uses the audio scheduling system, which means that note hit sounds should be perfectly in sync most of the time
  
• Double notes now have a small delay while playing the normal non double note sound, this is because the recent changes had reduced latency so much it was becoming obvious that the sound was being played and then stopped when the double note sound was played.
  
• Hold precision issues have been removed, which means that hold scores will no longer be -1 compared to what they should be.
  

• Enabled wrap around in the pause menu
  
• Added the option to pause when the focus is lost by the game window
  
• Made workshop upload form resizable
  
• Fixed rollback issues when using high timing offsets
  

!! WARNING !!

[h2]If you plan to try this beta and edit songs, please back up your charts, as they might be corrupted by some of the inevitable bugs that come with major code rewrites. Leaderboards are also disabled for the beta branch.[/h2]

Hello, one of the things I've been working on recently is rewriting all of the gameplay components, there are many reasons for this that I'll go over shortly.

Reasons for the rewrite

The truth is when I started working on PH in September 2019 I never expected the game to reach the point its reached today. For example originally I was never going to have the console gameplay style, but over time I decided to add it.

The problem is that due to the way the code was structured it was very prone to failure and strange issues caused by edge case problems (it doesn't help that the PH community is very creative and does many weird things with notes).

With this rewrite I aim to create a simpler base on which new note types can be implemented in a consistent less buggy form, with a proper architecture for handling multi-notes consistently.

Please, try it out and give me feedback!

Major changes

• The autoplay system is now a modifier, the checkbox in the debug menu will be removed soon.
  
• Autoplay hit sounds are now scheduled, so they should be much more accurate.
  
• Multi note visual behavior has been improved to better match diva
  
• Sustains now have looping sounds when held, and a different release sound
  
• Sustains now currently count as two notes when a WORST rating is given
  

• Hidden modifier doesn't work (yet)
  
• Double heart notes don't use the double heart note sound
  
  
• Single slides break when holding their direction before they enter in range
  
  
• Slide, normal and heart notes don't ignore eachother's inputs
  

Welcome to Project Heartbeat 0.16, after three months in development hopefully it will have been worth the wait.

This update is probably going to be the final big feature update to the game, as the focus now remains on getting more content in, bugfixing and polish, hopefully the new changes are to your liking.

The update is also not as big as other updates, because most of the work has been on big things with far reaching consequences (like the new version of the audio engine). The last few months have been hard, I spent around a month working hard on the game on big stuff such as the MM+ loader. Then I spent another month mostly bed ridden and finally spent a whole month trying to pick up a car.

It's been a terrible summer and I hope to leave it behind.

Anyways, let's get to the new stuff.

NEW CONTENT

[h2]New Song: Confession[/h2]

[previewyoutube=S6HU0i2PxDk;full][/previewyoutube]

A new song from Takanashi Koubou, this very nice song was charted by resident idol enjoyer Yahoo, the artwork was made by David Revoy for his webcomic Pepper & Carrot, which we are using because the comic is creative commons licensed, check it out.

The song is composed by TTL, sang by Kanata and written by LUNA.

NEW FEATURES / CHANGES

[h2]Shinobu Z[/h2]

A few updates ago I shipped the first version of Shinobu. Shinobu is our Open Source bespoke audio engine designed with rhythm games and other low latency applications in mind, powered by the great miniaudio library.

Shinobu was very well received by the community and made the game's foundations so solid some might argue that, as a rhythm game engine, Project Heartbeat is less prone to issues than some commercial titles such as Project DIVA MegaMix+

After the success of Shinobu I set out to engineer a reworked version of the audio engine, the main goals of this design project were reducing memory usage and increasing memory safety, thus augmenting reliability and preventing crashes caused by the engine.

This was once again a worthy endeavor, as Shinobu Z is now included in update 0.16, this update achieves higher levels of memory safety and performance while using less memory. For this he API has been completely reworked to allow binding songs to the Godot scene tree, among other things.

Overall, you should expect a 10% improvement in memory usage and reduced loading times for songs in the song list and in the game itself.

[h2]Project DIVA MegaMix+ loader[/h2]



In may of this year our colleagues at SEGA released Project DIVA MegaMix+ on Steam which has achieved positive reception.

Because of how similar the gameplay styles and due to how some costumers enjoy playing both games based on their different respective strengths Project Heartbeat now includes the ability to load content from Project DIVA MegaMix+ through the new MegaMix+ content loader in update 0.16. This new functionality can load the full song list of a legally purchased copy of the game so you can enjoy playing with your content in a different engine. This is similar to playing OpenTTD or using an emulator such as CEMU.

This system reads the files as they are, without modification, and even supports loading content designed to work with DivaModLoader. We hope you enjoy both games to their full extent.

The loader uses the Steam API to find your installation of MegaMix+ and verify ownership of the game, this is just a simple ownership check done by steam itself and doesn't involve Denuvo or any other similar technology.

Furthermore, through playing Project DIVA MegaMix+ content on portable systems such as the Steam Deck one can obtain longer battery life, as Project Heartbeat uses very little battery due to it not having 3D animations and using an engine that was designed for low power devices such as the PSP and the Nintendo DS, the battery usage is so low the default FPS on the deck is set to 120 FPS, yet it maintains 4-5 hours of battery life from a full charge.

[h2]Audio normalization system rework[/h2]

The code for audio normalization has been modernized and improved, this should yield much faster audio normalizations.

[h2]Streamer mode[/h2]



A lot of Project Heartbeat players tend to play the game on stream, for this we have added a new feature that we hope will be able to enrich their streaming experience for them and their followers.

The new streamer mode is a simple but effective option that allows exporting to files both cover art and background art right from the game as you are playing it. This allows you, the streamer, to display both artwork and currently being played song information right on your streaming interface.

If we ever move to Godot 4.0, an option to open another window to show extra stats of the current gameplay session to your viewers might be added, but for the time being please enjoy the new functionality.

We have also released a simple guide that explains how to use it, you can check it here.

[h2]Audio downloader rework[/h2]

One of the major complaints we got from gamers was the rudimentary nature of it. We agree.

Introducing: The new audio downloader, this is a major improvement over the old system, since it now handles the downloading of song media inside the game itself, thus being able to give you feedback about the status of the download, simultaneous downloads, better error information and more.

The system continues to use youtube-dl internally to obtain the information required for downloading the data, but the rest is handled by the game itself.

As this is a highly experimental feature, we ask for some patience while we sort out the inevitable bugs with it.

[h2]Game over chibi Aiko[/h2]



We thought that we would give the health system a bit more personality by including a crying Aiko when the random game over quotes are shown.

[h2]Option to clean unused and deleting song media[/h2]

You can now delete the song media from each song's pregame screen, and delete all unused media from options -> content inside the options menu.

Other minor changes and bugfixes

• Fallback to default user directory when the user specified content path does not exist.
  
• Add support for using PageUp/PageDown in the song list.
  
• Fix skin editor applying clear bar colors wrongly
  
• Fix YoutubeDL cache saving issues
  
• Add new YTDL downloader code.
  

I would have released this for 0.15, but it wasn't quite ready yet, hope you enjoy this new song!

[previewyoutube=_K2UNDZt5J0;full][/previewyoutube]

This is ETERNAL, the new song featuring in Project Heartbeat. As it's tradition it's a Touhou cover from the Takanashi Koubou creator's circle.
The song is composed by DJ Timotei & Violet Delta, with lyrics by Kaito, written by Yaso and charted exclusively for Project Heartbeat by newcomer charter snail with the lower difficulties made by the great Yahoo mememaster.

The artwork was made specifically for Project Heartbeat by the great Guinii featuring Touhou Project girl Hina Kagiyama doing her usual spinning stuff that she's known for.

Hopefully you will enjoy this new song release! A few more songs are in the works, including a special non-eurobeat guest artist from Spain and another song from SuganoMusic!

More news soon!

Thank you for your continued support.

Welcome to Project Heartbeat 0.15, this is a smaller update than what you are used to, the objective of this update is mostly to make the game more friendly to new players, but it also includes some other new stuff, such as new song and the long-awaited skin editor!

Hopefully you all enjoy your adventures with the blue chipmunk later this week!

New content
[h2]New song: Reprisal[/h2]

[previewyoutube=7g7qcID_GX8;full][/previewyoutube]

A new song for Project Heartbeat! funnily enough this song was licensed through shitposting on the fumofumo server.
The background artwork shows a Techno Pro Spirit style Toyota MR2 made by Lucas Corral, check his stuff out.
The song is charted by yahoo, arranged by Turbo, with lyrics by ShinkoNet and Turbo and with vocals provided by the great Odyssey Eurobeat!

New features
[h2]Skin editor[/h2]



One of the long-awaited features for Project Heartbeat: the Skin Editor.

It's a slightly complicated tool, but hopefully the built-in guide will be enough for you to understand it, I suggest playing around with it!

You can set your own songs to "recommend" a skin from the workshop, those songs will automagically download the skin, obviously this can be disabled if wanted in the song settings by the player.

Other changes[/h2]

Visualizer rework & new main menu visualizer



For the different visualizers throughout the game PH does spectrum analysis on the song currently being played, what PH did was a linear average sampling of frequencies from 0 to 20 khz, however the human ear doesn't work in a linear fashion, so this was stupid, in fact commercial spectrum analyzers don't work this way.

Additionally, the new spectrum analysis code can decay over time to make a smoother output, all of this should give the in-game visualizer a nice, more detailed output, which corresponds better to what you are hearing.



Finally, this has been used to create a new visualizer for the main menu (hidden in the song list) that you can see above, fancy.

[h2]New UI elements[/h2]

Some parts of the game UI use a new type of element to display multiple selections.

[h2]Controls editor rework[/h2]



Controls editor now shows the related note and button icons, as well a small text that should be enough to figure out how to do macros.

[h2]Sorting system[/h2]



The sort dialog is now different, featuring a new checkbox that lets you only select songs that have media downloaded.
It's barebones at the moment, but more features will be added eventually!

[h2][Wrong note cross[/h2]



One of the things I noticed when showing off PH at the in-person event was that people didn't realise wrong notes were wrong, so I've decided to add a small X next to the wrong ratings to make it more obvious, hopefully this will be enough.

[h2]Bugfixes[/h2]

• Fix editor error when resizing the timeline
  
• Fix invalid user settings files breaking the game when loading
  
• Fix intro skip bugs
  
• Fix discord rich presence
  
• Fix DSC songs being broken since shinobu
  
• Fix diagnostics debug screenshot being semi-transparent
  
• Fix option description in song settings sometimes overflowing
  
• Fix practice mode issue where the latency change option would be pressable even in seek mode.
  
• Fix audio issues on steam deck caused by steam deck's old version of pipewire, the game now defaults to ALSA on the deck, if you want to force pulse on the deck you can add the "--shinobu-backend pulseaudio" command line argument.
  
• Fix crash when exiting and re entering the latency tester
  
• Fix shinobu seeking bugs that broke negative start times
  
• Fix latency tester crashes on windows (for real this time)
  
• Fix minor memory leak when restarting songs
  
• Add safety margin to song end check
  
• Fix workshop item state shenanigans in workshop browser
  
• Fix custom sfx not reloading automatically
  
• Fix editor crash when changing song after testplaying.
  
• Fix more edge cases that would cause songs to never end
  
• Fix pregame opening per song settings failing when backing out and returning to the pregame screen.
  

Work on Project Heartbeat 0.15 has already started in the beta branch, this update which is codenamed Goth Girl School Idol Club.

Among the new features is the all-new UI Skin Editor, with complete workshop integration like you are used to!

With this new custom tool, you can create your own skins. Currently there is no documentation on how to use this tool, However reading the size and anchors article from the godot documentation might give you some basic clues on how to get started!

The skin editor features a resource management system to import your own fonts and textures, you can edit all the UI components such as the clear bar or the song title by using the inspector on the right hand side. Additionally the system supports animated textures everywhere, which means that anywhere you can place a texture, you can make it animate. Currently this feature is a bit WIP so you can't change hte FPS yet, that will come soon.

The tool is heavily inspired by the Osu! Lazer skin editor, it might be a less pretty but it more than makes up in the customizability department.

You can copy the default skin (and in the future, any skin you are subscribed to) to use as a base for your own UI shenanigans.

Yahoo has already uploaded the first skin to the workshop, please check it out!

I hope you enjoy this new feature.

0.14.1

• Fix practice mode issue where the latency change option would be pressable even in seek mode.
  
• Fix audio issues on steam deck caused by steam deck's old version of pipewire, the game now defaults to ALSA on the deck, if you want to force pulse on the deck you can add the "--shinobu-backend pulseaudio" command line argument.
  
• Fix crash when exiting and re entering the latency tester
  

Welcome to yet another update to the rhythm game that refuses to die, this is the single biggest update in terms of technical stuff we've done since the game was released over two years ago in March 26th 2020. A lot has changed and a lot will change and I'm super proud of this one.

Shout-outs as always to lino for taking care of ensuring the editor doesn't blow itself into pieces and adding a bunch of nice new features.

Some of the things here might sound familiar, this is because some (like the song) were released in minor updates for 0.13, but they are still listed here as they were part of the development process for 0.14.

New song: Love sacrifice

[previewyoutube=ME5KysG3VQo;full][/previewyoutube]

This is Love Sacrifice, the new song featuring in Project Heartbeat and the first new song of the year. As it's tradition it's a Touhou cover from the Takanashi Koubou creator's circle.
The song is composed by SaiNa, sang by Queue, composed by BeatCharger and charted exclusively for Project Heartbeat by resident meme master Yahoo.

The artwork was made specifically for Project Heartbeat by the great Guinii featuring Touhou Project girls Renko Usami and Maribel Hearn of the Girls' Secret Sealing Club lying in a field together in slightly lesbian fashion.

Hopefully you will enjoy this new song release! A few more songs are in the works, including a special non-eurobeat guest artist from Spain.

Big changes

[h2]The Shinobu audio engine[/h2]



One of the biggest issues Project Heartbeat has faced is the Godot audio stack, while sufficient and good enough for most games it really isn't suited for use in rhythm games.

For this reason I spent worked on a new audio engine specifically for Project Heartbeat, it's called the Shinobu engine. It's the biggest engine customization I've done yet and it really does fix many of the issues you guys had with the game.

This new audio engine is based uses the excellent miniaudio sound library. If you need a good library for all your audio needs miniaudio is the king, it's beautiful.

Here's what shinobu does:

• Better performance
  
• No more desyncs
  
• Less battery use and better thermals whooo steam deck!
  
• Latency should be lower
  
• You can now configure the buffer size in options -> audio
  
• More smooth note movement
  
• Ability to adjust your buffer size
  

telling us that "If a system uniformly samples an analog signal at a rate that exceeds the signals highest frequency by at least a factor of two, the original analog signal can be perfectly recovered from the discrete values produced by sampling." and as human hearing caps at around 20k kHz it is enough for us).

This means that there has to be an intermediary buffer that gets filled with a bunch of frames, this is the main source of audio latency, as telling the engine to play say a note SFX as soon as possible might take a bit until the OS asks for samples again, reducing this buffer is important to reduce latency, however this must be done with care as CPU usage goes up the lower the buffer size is (for example, at 10 ms the mixing happens 100 times a second).

Timing is then done by using the amount of samples consumed by the audio system every time it asks for it.

Another issue is your operating system, sometimes your audio driver might not allow smaller buffer sizes, Shinobu will try the lowest possible buffer size the operating system gives it (but always bigger than the buffer size you set in audio->buffer size).

As the audio buffer might sometimes be higher than the frame time i.e it might be >16 ms worth of samples timing from that might be jittery, this is why it now uses an internal high precision clock to interpolate the time between updates. This is an alternative to just lowering Shinobu's internal buffer size which increases CPU usage and doesn't give us any benefit in terms of playback latency.

[h2]DJA finally the default[/h2]

Direct joystick access has finally become the default method for analog input in the game, there are still some quirks with heart sustains multis, but it should now be ok for the great majority of people.

[h2]New workshop browser UI[/h2]



I've changed the workshop browser from the grid design you are used to to a less cluttered design which I feel doesn't feel as claustrophobic as the old one, it also has some extra space we can use for other things, talking about other things...

[h2]Romanized title support in the workshop browser[/h2]

The workshop browser will now show the romanized title of the song if it is available, funnily enough PH was already uploading the romanized titles, but I forgor to implement actually being able to view them, whoops.

Do note that searching the workshop by romanized titles is not available, this is a limitation imposed on me by Steam and there's nothing I can do about it.

[h2]Random song button[/h2]



The random song button has been added, a highly requested feature, I also made it pretty looking (and also pretty gay, which is nice). Yes it even works in folders!

[h2]Song list sorting changes[/h2]



The workshop section of the song list has new sorting options available, they are exclusive to this section, for this reason the sorting mode on the workshop is now separate from the other sections.

[h2]Chart sections[/h2]



You can now specify chart sections inside the editor, these are shared between charts of the same song just like lyrics are. Sections can have a name and a color given to them, currently they are only visible in the editor and practice mode, but soon they will be used to give you more detailed information on your scores.

[h2]Practice mode rework[/h2]





Lino has reworked practice mode, you can now switch between modes to adjust latency options, playback speed and other information.

Additionally, a lot of new information is visible in the practice mode information section to the right.

Editor changes

[h3]Search[/h3]



When selecting a chart, you can now search for it by name instead of having to dig through the list

[h3]DIVA F2nd edit importer[/h3]



Lino has made an importer for f2nd edits, these have to be decrypted for them to be read by the game, but I will be looking into how to load encrypted files in the future.

This will allow people to preserve their edits in case Sony wants to pull a fast one on the community again.

[h3]Song settings editor[/h3]



There's now an editor settings section for song-specific settings, you can also use this to test your song variants.

[h3]Sync toolbox[/h3]



Lino added a toolbox with a bunch of tools to aid in syncing songs, fancy.

Minor changes

• Make combo reset in practice mode whenever stats get reset
  
• Add 1440p to desired video resolution options
  
• Enable wrap around in options menu and main menu
  
• Add CPU-based fallback for slide particles in GLES2
  
• Use fancy two pass gaussian blur for the pause menu instead of the current textureLod based solution which doesn't work in GLES2 PokeKMS
  
• Save the last selected folder in file dialogs
  
• Search for the original title and the romaji of songs when searching in the song list
  
• Editor: Add a "Reset position to default" button
  
• Editor: Add more shortcuts and separate a lot of them
  
• Editor: Add a hold graphic to the editor
  
• Editor: Queue notes placed during playback for better consistency
  
• Added a button to change the multiplayer host
  

Bug fixes

• Fix random quotes not being random (???)
  
• Fix workshop upload form replacing metadata when downloading a song while it's open
  
• Update YTDL
  
• Fix various menu focus issues
  
• Fix godot focus stupidity
  
• Fix joypad prompts breaking changing from keyboard to controller
  
• Fix gamepad keyboard prompts breaking when forcing a prompt type and returning to auto detect
  
• Fix background music player not using preview_end at all skull face no space
  
• Release drag even if _gui_input doesnt catch the event and allow cross-chart copies
  
• Remove video requirement from variant sync & add warnings when using non audio only variants with video
  
• Fix song list focus loss issue
  
• Fix minor focus bug when selecting custom SFX
  
• Disable forced VSYNC in the editor
  
• Release focus on all editor inputs upon pressing accept or cancel
  
• Fix focus issues on pregame screen
  
• Fix editor scale not updating when using control+scroll wheel
  
• Fix visualizer in GLES2
  
• Fix GLES2 title bar in-game
  
• Disable menu FPS limits when using the latency tester
  
• Fix song list engine regression
  
• Disable forced VSYNC in the editor
  
• Fix lyrics not appearing after restart
  
• Reset input manager on restart (Fixes issue with input carryover)
  
• Fixed most multiplayer issues and weird race conditions
  

Other stuff

[h2]Project Heartbeat on Steam Deck[/h2]



It's been reported that PH on deck works fine by various parties, such as Liam from GamingOnLinux and some people on Reddit. If you are the owner of one please give it a go.

I will receive mine this week, so if there's any rough edges I'll take a look at them when I receive mine.

[h2]Project Heartbeat @ Sarri Manga & official merch[/h2]



I together with Guinii will be attending a local event known as Sarri Manga, we will have a demo booth of the game using the event edition.

We will be selling posters of the game! These will optionally come with a Steam key for the game, so if you happen to be a local and are interested in it please come visit us! We will be at stand number 3, near the entrance.

Besides the PH posters we will be selling postcard-sized prints of Guinii's Remilia Scarlet artwork. I originally wanted to also sell the nsfw version of this but this idea was promptly shut down. We live in a society.

There are no plans to sell these online (yet) but I might one day, let me know if you are interested.

[h2]Future[/h2]

It's not over yet. I will probably resume work on the mgs3-inspired game next week (after the event) but I have a few ideas of the things I want to see in PH in the future. These include replays and an optional life bar, more info soon.

One of the biggest issues Project Heartbeat has faced is the Godot audio stack, while sufficient and good enough for most games it really isn't suited for use in rhythm games.

For this reason I spent this week working on a new audio engine specifically for Project Heartbeat, it's called the Shinobu engine. Keep reading to learn how you can test it and why it's very important for the future of PH!

This new audio engine is based uses the excellent miniaudio sound library. If you need a good library for all your audio needs miniaudio is the king, it's beautiful.

TL;DR: What it means for you

• Lower latency
  
• Better performance
  
• No more desyncs!
  
• More smooth note movement
  
• Ability to adjust your buffer size
  

telling us that "If a system uniformly samples an analog signal at a rate that exceeds the signals highest frequency by at least a factor of two, the original analog signal can be perfectly recovered from the discrete values produced by sampling." and as human hearing caps at around 20k kHz it is enough for us).

This means that there has to be an intermediary buffer that gets filled with a bunch of frames, this is the main source of audio latency, as telling the engine to play say a note SFX as soon as possible might take a bit until the OS asks for samples again, reducing this buffer is important to reduce latency, however this must be done with care as CPU usage goes up the lower the buffer size is (for example, at 10 ms the mixing happens 100 times a second).

Timing is then done by using thea mount of samples consumed by the audio system every time it asks for it.

Another issue is your operating system, sometimes your audio driver might not allow smaller buffer sizes, Shinobu will try the lowest possible buffer size the operating system gives it (but always bigger than the buffer size you set in audio->buffer size).

As the audio buffer might sometimes be higher than the frame time i.e it might be >16 ms worth of samples timing from that might be jittery, this is why it now uses an internal high precision clock to interpolate the time between updates. This is an alternative to just lowering Shinobu's internal buffer size which increases CPU usage.

This buffer size setting might actually be unnecessary, I am not sure: we will have to test over the following months, but if it works we might just target the lowest latency the OS gives us and match the internal buffer to that and interpolate away the rest.

How to test shinobu



Go to your Steam library, right click the game's cover art/name and select properties, click on betas and enter the super duper secret password MARINSTHIGHS, then click the blue button to opt into the bet branch! If you want to return to the normal game just set it back to "None".

What's left to do

The only major thing that isn't implemented in Shinobu is the spectrum analyzer the visualizer used, I will try to implement it using Godot's spectrum analyzer as a reference.

Source code

As it's tradition, shinobu's source code is available in our modified version of godot as a module:

https://github.com/eirteam/godot/tree/0.14/modules/shinobu

Hullo,

As you might have heard, the Steam Deck launched last week. We believe Project Heartbeat is an excellent game to play on the deck.

Unofortunately we haven't been among the lucky few who received a devkit from Valve before release, so the game is not Steam Deck verified. We will verify the game as soon as we get the ability to do so.

In the meantime, it's likely PH already works on your Steam Deck if you have one, Liam from GamingOnLinux tested the game and said it worked fine, so while we don't have an official blessing for Steam Deck verification we reckon the game should work fine already. Obviously Liam didn't conduct an exhaustive test, but we don't think there's any reason why PH shouldn't work on the Deck.

A few versions ago we did a lot of work to support all different aspect ratios (this includes 16:10 as in the Deck), as well as improvements surrounding controller usage, mouse hiding and other funky important things.

This very post is visible on a Steam Deck by pressing the compatibility details button on PH's library page and pressing Y.





We have reserved a Steam Deck as normal costumers for testing, we are scheduled to get it before the end of March, hopefully sooner than later.

Happy button mashing.

-EIREXE

0.13.8

• GLES2 is now the main renderer on Windows, due to better performance, GLES3 is still available as a launch option though
  
• Many fixes to the GLES2 renderer's graphic displays, including the visualizer, slide particles and etc
  

As 0.14 is still far away, I have decided to push this new song early into the public branch for everyone.
Enjoy!

[previewyoutube=ME5KysG3VQo;full]https://youtu.be/ME5KysG3VQo[/previewyoutube]

This is Love Sacrifice, the new song featuring in Project Heartbeat and the first new song of the year. As it's tradition it's a Touhou cover from the Takanashi Koubou creator's circle.
The song is composed by SaiNa, sang by Queue, composed by BeatCharger and charted exclusively for Project Heartbeat by resident meme master Yahoo.

The artwork was made specifically for Project Heartbeat by the great Guinii featuring Touhou Project girls Renko Usami and Maribel Hearn of the lying in a field together in slightly gay fashion.

Hopefully you will enjoy this new song release! A few more songs are in the works, including a special non-eurobeat guest artist from Spain.

More news soon!

Thank you for your continued support.

0.13.1

• Fixed downloads failing under certain circumstances
  
• Fix multiplayer
  

Song variants



You can now add variants to songs so they have alternative video/audio depending on what variant you selected! This is useful for different mixes of the same song.

New note type: Heart sustains



Yes, we've finally gone mad, heart sustain notes are now exposed in the editor, previously you needed a hack for them, but you are now allowed to use them for any song, go wild.

Video download queue



After 1000 years in development, the video queue is now ready to use! You can cancel queued downloads and all that fancy stuff.

Download all button



There's now a button to download all songs, this wasn't done before because we didn't have a way to cancel downloads, but now we do!

Negative start times

Songs can now start at negative times, this required some engine hacking but it does work fine!!

Display option changes



The game now has a new option for what monitor to use, you can now use the current monitor!

Latency changes



Some code regarding latency has changed, this should result in lower latency, we also no longer use the driver provided latency info, so we suggest using the latency tester to figure out your latency.

PPD support changes

[h2]Negative start times[/h2]

Just like with PH songs, PPD songs now support negative start times.

[h2]PPD Downloader improvements[/h2]

The PPD downloader can now download songs from any website supported by yt-dlp that provides h264 video! This includes NicoNico and google drive!

The PPD downloader will also download thumbnails from the video and use it as cover art

Additionally, it will also pre-normalize the audio volumes of the songs while downloading!

[h2]Unzipping improvements[/h2]

PPD songs now unzip much much faster and more reliably, for this change the folder download path has been changed to songs/ppd_{PPD Website ID} instead of using the title as before, this helps with dealing with japanese characters on some operating systems.

[h2]Remove install and song option[/h2]



You can now remove your currently imported PPD install, and individual songs too from the PPD manager!

[h2]Star counting[/h2]

The PPD importer now tried to parse the star count of PPD songs in many ways to try what sticks, it may still not work for all cases but it works for way more cases than before.

Video download changes

The video downloader now uses aria2 for faster download speeds, we also now use yt-dlp instead of youtube-dl!

Additionally I used some black magic to slim down the ffmpeg binaries, so the game now takes a fair bit less space on disk!

Background music disable option changes

Enabling disabling the background music in the main menu doesn't require a restart anymore.

Double heart custom sounds



Double heart notes now have a custom sound option available, so you can use a separate one from the default sound.

Editor changes

Me and Lino have been hard at work supercharging the editor

[h2]Timeline drawing optimizations[/h2]

Due to an oversight, timeline drawing got slower the more you scrolled through a very long song, this has now been properly fixed!

[h2]Playback speed[/h2]



You can now change the playback speed in the editor on the new bottom left slider, fancy.

[h2]Add an universal interpolator[/h2]



Lino made this fancy tool to interpolate any property

[h2]Metronome generator[/h2]



Editor now has a metronome generation tool

[h2]Fix timeline culling[/h2]



Timeline culling has been massively revamped, so you shouldn't get ghost notes when zooming in and out anymore!

[h2]Editor autosaves on playback[/h2]

The editor will now autosave when playing the song

[h2]Hold display[/h2]



The editor will now show the range of hold notes, so you can plan them ahead.

[h2]Editor scrolling change[/h2]



I made the editor scroll differently, the playhead will keep going until it hits the center, then the whole timeline will move with it.

[h2]Video stutter fix[/h2]

Playing a song with a video does not produce a stutter anymore.

[h2]Async shader compilation[/h2]

The game will now compile shaders in another OpenGL context, which should help prevent stutters when hitting notes for the first time in the session.

[h2]Game slimdown[/h2]

Using some black magic (AKA UPX), the included ffmpeg binaries have been slimmed down to oblivion, this made the game go from ~670 mb to ~460, PH is putting in some gains!

[h2]Arrange menu wheel[/h2]



Lino made this nifty tool to arrange notes in a straight line. It can be accessed with the tab key.

[h2]Automatically place notes in a straight line[/h2]



With autoplace enabled the editor will automatically put notes in a straight line at the bottom of the screen while creating them.

[h2]Editor angle snapping[/h2]



You can now snap the angle of a note by pressing control while placing a note.

Bug fixes/Minor changes

• Editor: Compensate for first sustain correctly and optimize arrange code
  
• Fix slide double rating
  
• fix DJA
  
• Disable mipmapping on vulkan
  
• Fix issue showing the first phrase in lyrics
  
• Fix loading screen stalls (not sure how though)
  
• Fix reset inconsistencies
  
• Fix visual bug that caused max hold score points to not be displayed properly
  
• Add audio file existing on disk verification when uploading to the workshop
  
• Fix button styling with anti alias
  
• Fix multis in editor being broken due to engine bug
  
• Update J. Stebbins credits
  
• Fix difficulty edit bug
  
• Select yes as default when opening the download song media popup
  
• Editor: Sanitize angle upon angle arrange and note shift
  
• Fix not being able to delete modifiers when using the keyboard
  
• Update song list when _added_time is updated on startup (fixes subscribed song sort order being absolutely fucked)
  
• Editor: Always assume 1/16th snap for arranging
  
• Editor: Add a ScrollContainer for the arrange tab
  
• Fix error on close related to vibration killing
  
• Fix running game without steam
  
• Editor: Autoplace notes which havent been moved around upon note time change
  
• Editor: Autoplace multis automatically
  
• Editor: Autoplace imported MIDI files
  
• Editor: Make BPM be minimum 1
  
• Stop vibration properly when a slide note drawer disappears
  
• Editor: Automatically arrange angles when autoarranging
  
• Make loadingu text fully white
  
• Editor: Add a safety net for pos_modified on old charts
  
• Fix incomplete PPD files killing the load thread
  
• Editor: Make the toolbox and inspector resizeable
  
• Editor: Take autoplaced notes as HBBaseNote instead of HBNoteData
  
• Editor: Allow note creation from within scripts
  
• Make slide multis ignore normal note presses
  

0.12.2

• Fix offline workshop support (hi steamdeck users)
  
• Feature: Go back to previously selected folder when pressing "Go back"
  

• Fixed in-game scaling of resolutions taller than 16:9 (fixes steam deck)
  

Here we are again.

0.12 is ready, this update is pretty big, it also comes with some big news, off we go:

New song: Going my way (DJ Timotei EDIT)

[previewyoutube=kTx61fyqDEI;full][/previewyoutube]

A new song licensed from the Eurobeat circle Takanashi Kobo, this song has been charted by Yahoo and illustrated by Reixart.

Website and user rankings







Project Heartbeat now has an official website, this includes web based leaderboards and user rankings a la osu, the ranking system's points have been tentatively named pp (for funny reasons).

Do note we want to revisit and probably redo this algorithm eventually, as it didn't perform quite as expected so a bespoke solution is gonna be needed.

You can find the website at ph.eirteam.moe

Steam Deck support



While we weren't among the lucky few to get a devkit, but we managed to get the game ready for Steam Deck anyways through some black magic (and some new Steam SDK releases). It will now use the new text input features of SteamOS 3.0 where available.

Another features include better scaling of the menus in general, particularly for the main menu.

Big picture mode gamepad text input support



When running the game inside Steam Big Picture you can now use the keyboard whenever you have to type something.

Controller overhaul

As part of the aforementioned deck support we have updated how the controller support works.
The selected controller is now the first one we detect an input from, when a controller is being used the mouse gets hidden.

Song search



What took you so long? - Kazuhira Miller, probably

h264 mainlined



After some investigation I discovered that neither my country nor my closest neighbor (France, unfortunately) recognize software patents, thus I've taken the decision to mainline h264 support for PPD migration.

Ordinary songs will continue to use vp9 for the time being, in case we have to remove it, but I don't think we will.

Previously you had to install a plugin, hopefully this simpler solution will make transitioning easier.

Editor shortcut remapping



You can now remap most shortcuts in the editor

Load time improvements



Load times have been greatly improved across the board by removing some 4D chess code I accidentally added, song load is instant most of the time, and audio normalization is cached, so even if the first load isn't instant subsequent loads should be.

GLES2 improvements

Some minor fixes have been made to make GLES2 support better for those that need it.

Rewritten main menu music playback

The code used to playback songs in the main menu has been made more reliable and more performant, now audio normalization is used where available, else it uses a compressor to try and keep volume under control.

Updated localization

Most localization files for catalan and spanish have been updated

Direct Joystick Access fixes

Last update we introduced direct joystick access, which allows controls to behave in a nicer way by combining the two axis of a joystick for detection, this didn't really work well so it was relegated to an optional feature, new changes and bugfixes should make it now better although some issues have been found that prevent it from becoming the default yet.

ShiftJIS support for PPD zips



When downloading PPD charts you may have noticed it sometimes failed to find the data.ini even though it was there.
This was caused because the file names were encoded in an encoding system known as ShiftJIS (JIS stands for Japanese Industry Standard) this encoding is fairly exotic in the west but very common in japan, at least years ago (everyone seems to finally have agreed on UTF-8).
The game will now try converting the raw file name data into ShiftJIS if it fails to decode it as UTF-8, which should be nice.

Editor changes



A bunch of editor changes, courtesy of lino.

Add X/Y snap for grid notes
You can now slide around notes in a straight line by pressing shift while dragging them

Practice mode stats in playtest
The practice mode stats have been added to playtest in the editor

Autoslide option
Added an autoslide option to make slide spacing be correct

More per-song editor settings

More editor settings will now be saved when you save your song:

• Snap to the timeline
  
• Show video
  
• Show BG
  
• Show grid
  
• Snap to grid
  
• Grid resolution
  
• Autoarrange HV separation
  
• Autoarrange diagonal separation
  
• Use stage center for transformations
  
• Angle circles from the inside
  
• Circle size
  
• Circle separation
  
• Advanced circle mode
  

.11 is here, this update is pretty big, amongst the news are Lino joining Project Heartbeat development as a volunteer, the return of the switch version, and many many long-time requested improvements.

NEW CONTENT

[h2]New song: Through the night 2019[/h2]

[previewyoutube=TYqqAu5Iwes;full][/previewyoutube]

Through the night 2019 is yet another song from SuganoMusic, the song is sang by Renko (same person who sang core creation) produced by Sugano, charted by Yahoo.
The art was comissioned from and masterfully created by guinii4, a local Spanish artist, please check out her work!

[h2]Return of the switch version[/h2]



The switch version for hacked machines of Project Heartbeat has now returned, you can learn how to use it by reading this guide.

Included are some upgrades to the switch code that plagued the original one with issues, it's still fairly slow because we aren't using any illegally obtained SDK, instead we are using the community developed libnx and mesa nouveau video driver, which is unfortunately slow, but it's playable at least.

NEW FEATURES

[h2]New history format[/h2]

The history now stores the score ratings and percentage separatedly, so whenever you get a higher number in any of those it gets saved.

[h2]Direct joystick access[/h2]



Direct joystick access allows the game to access your controller's joysticks directly, this allows the two axis directions (vertical and horizontal) to be combined, which prevents issues such as spinning the joystick triggering heart notes, because some people (ab)used this for heart spams it's an option.

This feature only works with controllers that are in the internal controller database (They are now marked as known in Options -> Input).

[h2]Menu optimizations & changes[/h2]



The menu now uses some new optimizations that makes it faster, the internal render targets are now scaled according to your resolution.

The menu animations are now bouncier.

You can now press R3 or G to show the currently playing song.

The song list also now shows when a song needs its media to be downloaded

[h3]Results Screen[/h3]



The results screen has been changed to look nicer (thanks lino)

[h2]SFX system rework[/h2]

The game now separates between heart notes and slide notes, plus it also has a different sound when pressing a heart or a slider without there being one nearby.

[h2]Auto download workshop songs in multiplayer[/h2]

The game will now download workshop songs automatically when you are playing in multiplayer

[h2]Borderless windowed[/h2]

The game now supports 3 window modes, windowed, borderless windowed and fullscreen, additionally you can now select the display in which the game will be displayed.

[h2]Show console option[/h2]

The console is now hidden by default, it can be restored in the options menu.

[h2]Editor changes[/h2]

[h3]Waveform preview[/h3]



Taken from Godot's source code, I've ported some code related to the waveform preview subsystem and used it in the editor timeline.

[h3]Circle transforms[/h3]



Courtesy of Lino we now have new options to create circles

[h3]Minor changes[/h3]

• Add the ability to pan around the timeline using shift + scroll wheel
  
• Show selected timing point count in the info bar
  
• Disable main game input while testplaying
  
• The editor now allows holding to the left and right to navigate the timeline quickly
  
• The rotation transform spinbox is now editable
  
• Correct the way the flip slides transforms selected notes
  
• Autoarrange is now smarter
  
• Notes are deselected when changing songs
  
• Added shortcuts for many things, check the editor manual for info on them.
  
• Testplay now shows the song's name
  

• Heart and slide inputs now ignore each other
  
• Limit discord rich presence poll rate to 5 polls per second
  
• Rewritten memory management in preparation of switching to release mode
  
• Add angle flipping transformation
  
• Add select all to editor
  
• Volume now goes up to 750%
  
• Use string filename sanitizer for difficulty json
  

• Make script runner force an inspector sync
  
• Fix song list stealing focus when clicking between items
  
• Check for shift only if event is InputEventKey. in SongList
  
• Make song jump work more more nicely
  
• Revert back to normal note attributes when there are no multis (with automulti)
  
• Give love to save as dialog
  
• Fix editor zoom bug
  
• Fix: Shrink UI width for the transformation tab. bug
  
• Fix workshop uploading issues
  
• Prevent the user from creating holds on slide chain pieces
  

Project Heartbeat 0.10 is here! This update was slightly interrupted by me having surgery so it isn't as big as usual it is also mostly a housekeeping and bug fixing update, but it does bring some new major features and new content!

NEW CONTENT

[h2]NEW SONG: Core Creation[/h2]

[previewyoutube=fO8Kq-dZsvQ;full][/previewyoutube]

Core Creation is a song by Renko and Sugano, this song is a cover of the popular "Bad Apple!!" song from the Touhou Project series, the chart was made by blizzin and the artwork was created by Mariale. I hope you will enjoy it!


NEW FEATURES

[h2]Resource Packs[/h2]





Project Heartbeat now has a Resource Pack system, with a brand new editor to boot, you can replace graphics from the game with custom ones, change properties and even upload them to the workshop!

The graphics that can be changed and tuned will be expanded upon in the future.

The options menu now has a Resource Pack section, from here you can select what resource pack you want, you can also override the currently selected resource pack's notes with the notes from another pack in case you are used to them but want to enjoy the rest of the selected resource pack!

[h2]Extended PPD Loader[/h2]



By popular request, I've added a way to import your whole PPD installation's song folder, the only difficulty is that you have to provide the .dll/.so files that are able to load h264 files like the ones PPD uses, the new importer maintains your PPD folder structure and can play MP4 files, AVI files and a long et cetera.

If you are interested in this feature, please hit us up in the discord, we'll gladly help you.

[h2]DSC Loader improvements[/h2]



Initially I was considering removing the DSC Loader altogether, but I was convinced not to do so, this is why I've expanded upon what types of files it can load, I've also given them their own category.

The DSC loader can now load Project DIVA Dreamy Theater 2nd/DIVA F/DIVA F2nd DSCs, this was motivated by the closure of the PlayStation Network on the VITA and PlayStation 3 to be able to preserve those edits in PH, although the closure seems to have been aborted now the code was already done so \_()_/

The way DIVA OGGs are played has also been improved, the voice and instrumental will now sync better and the loading times will be improved.

You can also load the full song list from a copy of DT2nd, fancy.

[h2]Changes to how some notes are handled[/h2]

Previously, multi notes with two notes of the same type didn't work, this has been fixed, hitting other notes during sliders has also been fixed, this means that some very old charts and some PPD specials work again.

[h2]Editor changes[/h2]

More usability changes have been made to the editor:

[h3]Community charting guide[/h3]

Snail has kindly provided a new charting guide, which you can read here, this guide is also included in the editor, and complements the editor manual.

[h3]Keyboard Lyrics Workflow[/h3]

A new way of working with lyrics has been added, you can now use the following hotkeys:

Control+J: Create phrase start
Control+K: Create lyric
Control+L: Create phrase end

[h3]Editor action notification system[/h3]

The editor will now display some actions as floating text when you enter them, for example pasting, saving, etc.

[h2]Video playback changes[/h2]

The way videos are played back has been radically changed, they should now be much smoother to use, for example when rolling back from a pause the video frame we are seeking to is fetched in the background and not when the rollback is done, which prevents minor stuttering when rolling back, this also makes editor video playback much more accurate.

[h2]Results screen graph[/h2]



There's a new tab in the results screen that lets you see a graph, this graph will help you see where you made a mistake and how close you were to your targets!

[h2]VRAM usage optimizations[/h2]

I discovered some ways to reduce VRAM usage greatly, this is also in part thanks to the new resource pack system.

[h2]Main Menu viewport scaling[/h2]

A new optimization has changed the way the main menu is drawn, this makes it vary some internal resolutions depending on the resolution the game is running at, which should increase performance when using resolutions other than 1080p.

[h2]Color channel swapping filters[/h2]



The ability to swap some of the game's color channels has been added, this has the potential to aid some people with some forms of colorblindness, it's an imperfect solution but it was simple to add and it might be useful to someone.

Other changes

• Fix scroll list hold to scroll on drifty PS4 controllers.
  
• Optimize VRAM usage
  
• Add the ability to change sound volume per sound effect
  
• Add song count indicator to song list
  
• Show difficulty in workshop browser using pre-uploaded metadata (doesn't work for some old charts).
  
• Change how note hit effects are drawn to make them faster
  
• Entering a property in the inspector will now release focus from the field you are editing.
  
• Place the multi note laser behind all graphics
  
• Change visualizer algorithm to a smoother one
  
• Make menus use the SFX audio bus
  

• Fix hitting two notes of the same type in a multi
  
• Fix hitting notes during slide chains
  
• Fix epilepsy warning placement
  
• Fix editor note selection with clock arms disabled
  
• Make YTDL force IPV4 because microsoft are completely braindead
  
• Fix sustain Z order
  
• Rework wav loading to prevent crackling noises
  
• Make hardware clock option selectable
  
• Multiple scroll list bugfixes
  
• Fix leaderboard scrolling being disabled sometimes
  
• Fix button overlapping in the workshop tabbing system
  
• Fix input overlapping issues in song list
  
• Fix newlistitem error
  
• Prevent subsequent playback issues when finishing a video in the editor
  
• Fix issues with controls rebinding
  

• Update ytdl
  
• Fix laggy I/O print statements when hitting slide chains
  

Fix holding to scroll in the song list

Hello Project Heartbeat gamers, this is a small patch issued to fix a small issue with the game.

- Fix gigantic VRAM memory leak

Cheers.

Welcome to Project Heartbeat 0.9 this is our first update of 2021 and also the anniversary update, Project Heartbeat will be turning 1 year old next month, so this update celebrates its release!

Let's get right into the new stuff.

NEW CONTENT

[h2]NEW SONG: Sands of Time[/h2]

[previewyoutube=ppnRzFVYPo0;full][/previewyoutube]

Sands of Time is now live, the artwork was masterfully made by artist Mariale, the chart was made by Blizzin.

The song comes from the Initial D inspired games "Densha de D" based on the manga of the same name, it's produced by Sugano and sang by Travis Stebbins.

NEW FEATURES

[h2]In-game workshop browser[/h2]



New functionality to browse the workshop from inside the game has been added, this allows you to subscribe from within the game and will automatically download media. You can make the media auto-download only download audio through a new option added to the options menu.

[h2]Mini-tutorial[/h2]



To help new players I've added a mini-tutorial before the song starts that tells you how to hit the notes that it contains.



[h2]Editor minimap[/h2]



The editor now features a minimap to aid with scrolling to sections of the song quickly.

[h2]New latency display[/h2]



A new Osu! inspired latency display has been added, this shows you what the difference between your inputs and the perfect timing is and also shows an average, the different bands show different timing windows (so COOL in the center, FINE next to it and so on).

[h2]Editor slide chain flipping[/h2]



A new transform has been added to the editor's transform tools that allows you to flip slide chains horizontally.

[h2]Audio only downloads[/h2]



It is now possible to download only audio for songs that use videos, before you needed to download the video and then disable audio, this new option disables it and then downloads only the audio.

[h2]New song list[/h2]



The way the song list works has been changed, the new code is more efficient and makes the song list look and animate nicely, it also makes it much more mouse friendly, this code is also used by the workshop browser, and will slowly be used in more places in the game where scrollable lists are involved.

As another change, locally installed, workshop and editor charts are now separated in the song list.

This song list also wraps around, fancy.

The new song list also adds a new look for the song's cover art and an animation when slecting it.

[h2]Controller input changes[/h2]



Previously the game would use the input from the latest controller to press a button, this was problematic because it would cause double inputs and performance issues when using emulated controllers.

The new system only allows for one controller to be used, it will automatically use the first controller it finds the first time and store it, so that every time you run the game that controller will be used.

If when running the game that controller is no longer present, it will default to the first controller it finds.

The controller in use can be chosen in Options -> Input

[h2]Note hit effect changes[/h2]

The note hit effect has been changed, it now feels a bit bouncy, I have also optimized how note hit effects are displayed and removed which should lead to better performance particularly for slide chains.

[h2]Epilepsy warning[/h2]



You can now enable an epilepsy warning in the graphics tab of the song metadata editor, this is encouraged for charts that have videos with rapidly flashing colors.

[h2]Editor scripting[/h2]



Editor scripting allows you to write scripts to change notes around, this is like a supercharged version of the expression editor.

[h2]Chart note usage display[/h2]



Charts in the song list now show what types of notes are used in it, this is per-song and per-chart.

[h2]Intro skip marker[/h2]



You can now mark the point to where the intro skip feature will jump to in the editor.

[h2]Nintendo notes[/h2]



There are new notes for nintendo controllers, the new shapes created for them has been also adapted for use in the xbox icon pack, so they share the shape but not the colors.

[h2]Achievements[/h2]



Achievements have finally arrived to Project Heartbeat, more will be added in the future.

[h2]Engine changes[/h2]

The engine version has been upgraded to a newer version of the godot 3.2.4 branch, also a patch by RandomShaper has been added that should make some threaded operations safer and thus reduce crashing.

BUG FIXES & minor changes

• Optimizer visualizer code
  
• Added the ability to toggle the game's UI (control+H)
  
• Fix layering in multiplayer
  
• Fix results screen showing info partially before waiting for workshop vote info
  
• Optimize slide particle deletion timing
  
• Fix long standing bug that caused button prompts to not change when changing them in options.
  
• Disable leftover test.png debug feature
  
• Add a HACK to fix case issues for charts made on Windows for Linux users
  
• Fix issues with folders section
  
• Fix audio preview playback being out of order sometimes
  
• Fix opening song settings in-game
  
• Add new PPD deprecation disclaimer
  
• Fix being able to make illegal notes in the editor
  
• Update youtube-dl and force it to use the python3 alias
  
• Fix editor plugin tools not behaving properly
  
• Fix song preview graphics not showing when pausing
  
• Fix many memory leaks
  
• Remove usage of SFX pooling for ordinary SFX
  
• Use song volume normalization in editor playtest
  
• Fix returning from a song that's in a folder
  
• Make youtube-dl create cache folder in user dir (fixes downloaded video list not being saved when using custom content directories)
  
• Fix opening song settings in-game
  
• Add new PPD deprecation disclaimer
  

Fix deleting charts not saving instantly
- Fix loading charts with unknown (usually unreleased) timing points failing

Fixed multi hint sometimes not being visible despite it being enabled

Fix issue that made the game require re-downloading of user song media every time the game starts when using a custom content directory.

Fixed multiplayer UI layering

Fixed error when opening folder list without having any folders
- Disable multi threaded texture loading by default

• Fix notes being cutoff
  
• Intelligently disable multi threaded texture allocation on windows without ANGLE
  
• Fix song settings editor not hiding when resuming with start button.
  
• Add new PPD deprecation disclaimer
  
• Update youtube-dl and force it to use the python3 alias
  
• Fix being able to make illegal notes in the editor
  
• Fix editor plugin tools not behaving properly
  

For the Steam Winter sale Project Heartbeat now has a 30% discount, go get it while you can or tell your friends if you already have the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1216230/Project_Heartbeat/

[previewyoutube=3WsAgByLERs;full][/previewyoutube]

Project Heartbeat 0.8 is now available, this update is relatively decent size and comes with mostly under-the-hood improvements, but it also packs some long time requested features and changes.

A new song was scheduled for this update however it didn't make it in time, hopefully we'll have it in the next update.

Important changes

[h2]Lyrics system[/h2]



A new lyrics system has been integrated into the game, this allows showing lyrics on screen in two ways, simple full phrases or karaoke-style syllable progression.

You can disable the lyrics or change their position and color in the options menu under the "visual" section.

This feature is also enabled for PPD charts that come with lyrics.

[h2]Translation system and new translations[/h2]



The game is now officially translated to Spanish and Catalan, the game will try to select the language based on your machine's settings however you can also force a particular language in the "Game" section of the options menu.

[h2]PPD Manager Tool[/h2]



The PPD Manager Tool allows you to change your PPD song's artwork and youtube URLs easily from within it.

[h2]Timing window modifier[/h2]



Introducing the timing window modifier, this modifier allows you to change the timing window of all notes, keep in mind using this disables leaderboard usage. I hope this will be a fun modifier to play around with.

[h2]Arrows changes[/h2]



Arrow notes have been changed in looks, they now have target colors that match the note colors.

[h2]Performance improvements[/h2]

Project Heartbeat is powered by Godot Engine, Godot added a new feature that allows PH to draw notes in a single burst instead of drawing each note and note sprite one by one, this translates into a very big performance improvement, in some cases doubling the FPS.

There have also been a lot of under the hood changes to improve performance and make the experience smoother, you will particularly notice these in the main menu song list and in the editor.

[h2]Latency improvements[/h2]

0.8 comes with some new PH-specific engine audio driver modifications which translates into a massive latency reduction, PH will try to go as low as your audio driver will allow.

For windows users, this feature is only available if you are using Windows 10.

Editor changes

[h2]Timeline revamp[/h2]



The way you navigate the timeline and the way it looks have received a big change, the new sleeker design should make it easier for you to distinguish each row.

New keyboard shortcuts have been added to navigate the timeline, create basic notes and select notes. You can learn more about them in the editor's manual.

[h2]Multi presets[/h2]



A new multi presets tab has been added to the editor, you can use this new feature to arrange multi notes in many different ways, there are also dynamic presets that you can use for some specific cases, I hope you enjoy experimenting with them.

[h2]Note transforms[/h2]



This update also adds some new note transformation options, these allow you to do things such as rotate a group of notes around their center, interpolate note rotations and other fancy things, please try different combinations and see what you can come up with!

Other minor changes

• Change how SFX and Input are handled for the game.
  
• Add ability to reset playtest in editor by using the contextual button (F or select by default).
  
• Disable caching.
  
• Move version text to bottom right and make it hide when hovered.
  
• Invert song title and author
  
• Add black outline to ratings
  
• Add practice mode click to seek and fix practice mode progress and timing label when using start_time.
  
• Add check for downloaded youtube dl videos when starting multiplayer games.
  
• Add DIVA audio split support to main menu and multiplayer.
  
• Added the ability to load into the editor by using the --song-editor command line argument.
  
• Make notes be drawn on top of the timeline
  
• Use audio normalization in the editor.
  
• Show the sine wave on selected notes.
  

• Fix note duplication bug.
  
• Fix fine position breaking undo_redo.
  
• Fix rare multiplayer race condition causing post-game to never happen or update.
  
• Fix first song played in menu not using normalized volume.
  
• Fix fullscreen not being set properly when the game starts causing it to cover half a screen.
  
• Fix joining steam lobbies from an invite.
  
• Fix editor crash when opening a second song.
  
• Fix song load error related to youtube_url based songs and DSC splitting.
  
• Fix pre-game screen deadlock.
  
• Fix slide particles changing in size when hit too late.
  
• Fix DSCLoader randomly failing
  
• Fix song chart meta editor rounding up scores.
  

The Steam Game Awards are here, we would be very thankful if you could nominate us for the Labor of Love award, as we feel that's the most fitting after the many months of post-early access release development!

Thank you for your continued support!

For the Steam Autumn sale Project Heartbeat now has a 30% discount, go get it while you can or tell your friends if you already have the game!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1216230/Project_Heartbeat/

Project Heartbeat 0.7.0 is now available, this update is one of the biggest yet and is the culmination of an effort to bring some long-requested features to the game.

NEW CONTENT

[h2]NEW SONG: Blossoming Spell[/h2]

[previewyoutube=4GO1kGCNV5o;full][/previewyoutube]

Blossoming Spell is our first song from Impedance Eurobeat, our new partner, there are many more songs coming from this artist circle in the future. Blossoming Spell is an interesting catchy song. The chart was created by Twoncity.

CHANGES & NEW FEATURES

[h2]New leaderboards & leveling system[/h2]



After many months of work the new leaderboards are finally available, this new system allows all workshop and PPD songs to be ranked. As an extra feature we have also added a level and experience system.

[h2]PPD Downloader[/h2]



A new tool to automatically download PPD charts from their URL has been added, this is an experimental tool at this time (and performance isn't great) but I hope it's useful to someone.

[h2]Audio Volume Normalization[/h2]

Audio normalization has been added through a new rust module, this makes all songs sound like they have the same volume.

[h2]Loading Screen[/h2]



The game now features a new loading screen, this loading screen is used to have some time to do the audio normalization and other things.

[h2]Mouse UI[/h2]

The ability to use the mouse to navigate most menus has been added, some menus still don't entirely work but for most usual tasks such as playing songs should be working perfectly.

[h2]Song Cache[/h2]

Songs are now cached, this decreases startup times by storing song metadata in a cache file, the same goes for audio normalization.

[h2]youtube-dl error handling[/h2]

youtube-dl now shows errors when they happen, we have also switched to a fork of youtube-dl that is still in development after the RIAA's unlawful takedown of the main youtube-dl repository earlier this month

[h2]New UI scaling and styling & note changes[/h2]





The UI has been changed to be prettier, this includes design and scaling changes, the scaling should now be consistent so that users with higher and lower res screens will see the game with the same element sizes.

The main menu has also been changed, with new elements and the removal of the music player (a pop-up now replaces it).

The basic PlayStation notes have also been changed with a different design and sizes based on your feedback.

The sliders now have a new hit effect with stylized stars.

[h2]DSC importing[/h2]

Project Heartbeat is now able to load DSC files from FT and M39s from within the editor, with more game formats support to follow in the future.

It was planned to have the possibility of simply pointing the game to a legally-obtained copy of those games to load it automatically (including mdata) but this wasn't ready, although it's still possible to use this feature through command line arguments if you want so ask around in the discord for more info on this.

[h2]Nintendo Switch homebrew port[/h2]



An experimental port of the game for Nintendo Switch has been added, this is fairly broken and won't receive any official support but feel free to use it, check the text file in the game's folder for more info.

Other fixes & changes

• Fix custom song WAV loading not properly using the file's mixrate and stereo data.
  
• Change great and excellent thresholds to 90 and 95.
  
• Use scrolling labels for song titles in a lot of places.
  
• Add missing logo to song list preview.
  
• Fix UGC download message error.
  
• Fix slide chains in multi with other notes (I hate you a tiny bit).
  
• You can now precisely place notes in the editor by pressing shift + arrow keys.
  
• Also, there are now labels that show the current time in the timeline.
  
• The note ratings are now drawn beneath the note if the note is too high.
  
• PPD notes that are too close to each other (10 ms range) are now merged into multis, this is because in PPD multis don't really have to happen at the same time, yeah I don't get it either.
  
• You can now hide the artist name so that only the logo is shown.
  
• Editor selection limits have been removed
  
• Fix an issue related to voted items breaking leaderboard and result entering.
  
• Sliders now vibrate the controller.
  

Project Heartbeat is available with a 20% discount! Get it while you can!!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1216230/Project_Heartbeat/

Hello! Welcome to Project Heartbeat 0.6.0, this update introduces many under the hood changes yet again, but also some new features, let's get right into it.

NEW FEATURES & IMPROVEMENTS

[h2]Practice mode[/h2]

[previewyoutube=AQqoCXu0o88;full][/previewyoutube]

A new practice mode has been added, you can move forwards and backwards throughout the song, create your own waypoints to return to later and even see extra stats to help you know how well you are doing.

[h2]Folders[/h2]

[previewyoutube=6uZZRq3UUdk;full][/previewyoutube]

You can now create arbitrary folder structures to organize your songs however you want. Check the video above for a quick rundown of this feature.

[h2]Custom note sound support[/h2]



You can now make your own note sounds and use them by placing them in the custom_sounds folder in your content folder.

[h2]New button prompts[/h2]



A new button prompt system has been added, this will accurately change based on the controller you are using, if this doesn't work for you you can override it in the game's settings.

[h2]Decimal BPM support[/h2]

You can now add decimals to BPM

[h2]Icon & hit effect changes[/h2]



The way the game's icons look has changed, the outlines have been increased and the underglow has been fixed, additionaly the color on some of the notes has been changed to make them stand out more.

Hit effects have also been slightly changed to make them more visible.

[h2]Analog input changes[/h2]

I've changed how analog inputs are handled in general, this means that you no longer need to setup analog sticks differently from analog (slide) actions, it should also be more consistent.

[h2]Icon pack support improvements[/h2]

Icon pack support has been improved and it should be way more stable now, also a new simpler icon pack has been provided, you simply have to edit the atlas.png and the icon_pack.json to change the name.

You can find the easy pack here:

https://github.com/EIRTeam/ph_modding/releases/tag/1.0

[h2]Editor video & backgrounds[/h2]



The editor now has backgrounds just like the game, video also works but it's slightly yanky, you can disable this in the bottom right buttons, next to the grid toggle.

[h2]Gamepad visualizer[/h2]



You can now visualize the current gamepad's input, you can do this by pressing Control+G.

The visualizer is enabled automatically in practice mode.

Bug fixes & minor changes

• Double notes (including hearts) are now slightly bigger.
  
• Multi-threaded game loading has been partially disabled, now only song loading is multi threaded.
  
• Added sustains for arrow notes.
  
• A scrollbar has been added to the editor tools tab.
  
• Fixed some issues with the arrange tools.
  
• The way multi note lasers are made has changed, which should fix some issues some people faced with them.
  
• Fix user receiving a perfect rating when showing result with only wrong failures.
  
• Fix slide chain loop sound being unused.
  
• Fix custom icon loading.
  
• Fix a single character error for imademo.
  
• Song volume now affects editor and main menu playback.
  
• Fixed offset tool in editor.
  
• Capped note selection in editor.
  
• Game should fallback to GLES2 automatically instead of giving errors.
  
• Support has been added for hybrid (F2nd and AFT style) PPD charts.
  
• Message queue size has been raised to support bigger charts.
  

Project Heartbeat is available with a 20% discount! Get it while you can!!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1216230/Project_Heartbeat/

[previewyoutube=sNs0ANCaAKc;full]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sNs0ANCaAKc[/previewyoutube]

RedLine 2018 is now available in the game, this song is a very upbeat song from the popular doujin game Densha de D.

This song is sang by T. Stebbins (known also as Odyssey Eurobeat) and produced by SuganoMusic.

The artwork was comissioned from Andrea Balaguer (@TriggeredHikaru), a very talented artist from Spain, I recommend you follow her work (and if you want, comission something form her).

The song was charted by our resident master charter Blizzin.

This song makes use of the new notes we introduced back in 0.4.0, I hope you enjoy it!

Hello! Welcome to Project Heartbeat 0.5.0, this update introduces many under the hood changes yet again, but also some new features, let's get right into it.

NEW CONTENT

[h2]NEW SONG: Getaway[/h2]

[previewyoutube=IYWKRbY48vY;leftthumb][/previewyoutube]



Getaway is now available, this song produced by SuganoMusic, written and sang by the great Anthony McBazooka was intended to ship early on in the game's life, however some things happened and we couldn't ship it on time.

The artwork was made by Emmilly (sadnesswaifu) and finished by me (I only did the shading on the car and drew the visible wheel, she did everything else).

This chart has been beautifully crafted by twoncity.

NEW FEATURES & IMPROVEMENTS

[h2]Discord rich presence[/h2]



Discord rich presence is now available on Windows and Linux, this will show what game you are playing (or editing).

For the tech-people: This is my first shipped module using the Rust programming language, it's a technology I really like a lot so expect to see more rust-based code in the future.

The source code for the rust module is available here: https://github.com/EIRTeam/project_heartbeat_discord

[h2]Tweet button[/h2]



You can now tweet your score right from the post-game screen through the new shiny Tweet button.

[h2]Main menu music disable option[/h2]



You can now disable music from being played in the main menu through a new option.

[h2]VSync option[/h2]

VSync can now be enabled in the options, keep in mind this is likely to introduce more input lag, but might be necessary for some people.

[h2]"Convert to" dropdown in the editor[/h2]



You can now convert between note button types (so for example turn an up note into a right note) through a new submenu in the right click menu.

[h2]Custom icon pack support[/h2]

One of the new things added to 0.5.0 is our first foray into the world of modding, a new GitHub repository has been created with examples and documentation on how to do this.

Icon pack creation documentation

[h2]Add ability to change URLs in PPD songs[/h2]



You can now change the video url in PPD songs through a button in the pre-game screen.

[h2]Score is now shown in song list[/h2]



You can now see your maximum score directly on the song list.

[h2]Play count[/h2]



The number of times you've played a song is now shown in the pre-game screen, this will be further expanded with more stats in the future.

[h2]Note caching[/h2]



To make the game perform well on very modest systems, the game now prepares all notes on startup and loads them even before they are neded, this comes at a loading time penalty but can greatly increase FPS on some systems.

If your computer is capable enough and you want faster loading times you can disable this in options under "Game -> Load all notes when song starts"

This option is disabled in the editor.

[h2]Slide chain rewrite[/h2]



The way slide chains are drawn and handled has been rewritten, this new system should be much more reliable and also allows you to pause mid-chain in the editor.

[h2]Sound effect pooling[/h2]

Sound effects are now pooled instead of being loaded on demand, this should prevent stuttering on some systems.

[h2]Hold exploit fixes[/h2]

Some users noted that it was still possible to exploit holds through some complicated controller trickery, this has been fixed, please experiment with the new hold system, it should feel closer to what you are used to.

[h2]PPD double heart importing improvements[/h2]

Some PPD charts failed to load double hearts properly do to an edge case in how they were handled, this has now been fixed.

[h2]Multiplayer improvements[/h2]

Some aspects of multiplayer have been reworked, it should now perform a bit better and songs with non-ASCII (Japanese, Russian, Chinese etc...) characters will now load properly.

[h2]Open user directory button[/h2]



In tools there's now an option to open the user directory for convenience.

[h2]Editor general architecture improvements[/h2]

A lot of the editor has been rewritten, this should lead to much better performance and less bugs (particularly the legendary slide chain "sirens").

Amongst the changes included is note culling, which causes notes in the timeline to be ignored if they are not visible, the algorithm that does this has been carefully made to extract as much performance possible.

[h2]Experimental ANGLE builds for Windows[/h2]

Some Windows users using NVIDIA Optimus reported frame pacing issues, this is due to a bug presented in some optimus cards and only affects OpenGL.

In order to fix this I have ported the engine to ANGLE, ANGLE is a compatibility layer that translates the game's graphics calls from OpenGL to DirectX 11 and Vulkan.

This build is completely experimental and unsupported, the DirectX 11 backend will be used in an unannounced port to a new platform, so if you could test it that would be great.

To test the ANGLE versions go to your game's directory on Steam (you can access it by right clicking PH on the library -> Properties -> Local files -> Browse local files) and click on the .bat file that matches your desired version:

- Use run_vulkan.bat to run the vulkan version.
- Use run_dx11.bat to run the DirectX 11 version.

There are two additional aspects you should know about these versions:

- Obviously this is not a native port to DX11 and Vulkan, an official Vulkan port is planned for next year, this means that performance will probably not be as good (or good at all depending on the system) which is why this build is provided without support.
- The visualizer might be slow on both, so I'd recommend disabling it.
- The Vulkan version uses the same feature level as the GLES2 version of the ordinary game, this is because ANGLE doesn't implement OpenGL ES 3.2 yet.
- I recommend optimus users with frame pacing issues to use Vulkan and enable VSync

OTHER MINOR FIXES

- Fix crash when using the add to favorites button on difficulties.
- Added a new failsafe for YoutubeDL installations, this should make it so that if the installation fails (or is stopped halfway) the game will be able to recognise this.
- The editor now ignored input properly while a song is being playtested.
- Changed the wording of the PPD importer, since we now support all PPD chart types.
- Changed the clear bar to match our new CLEAR percentage (75%)
- You can now set the SFX volume 0%

Future plans and updates on other stuff

[h2]New leaderboard system[/h2]

Over the last month I've taken the challenge of learning the Rust programming language, my objective is to write a new leaderboard system so that non-official songs get leaderboards too.

This will also allow leaderboard entries with modifiers (and to filter them too).

[h2]New FAQ[/h2]

A new Frequently Asked Questions article has been published, let me know if there's anything you'd like to have added.

[h2]Practice mode[/h2]

The plans for practice mode involve reusing code from the editor, which is why I've decided to push it back yet again to see if the new editor architecture changes are stable.

[h2]Homebrew Nintendo Switch port[/h2]

For a long time I've been building versions of the game for the Switch, however these have mostly been unplayable due to various circumstances.

It's now playable, however stuff such as graphics fail to load, video decoding doesn't work (yet) and user songs also are not loadable, but I think it will be viable to release a port for homebrew switches in the future.

You might recall a few months ago I published an FAQ on Project Heartbeat responding some commonly asked questions about the game and it's future, I'd like to revisit this and make a new one with how much the game has changed.

What engine does Project Heartbeat run on?

Project Heartbeat runs on a custom build of Godot Engine 3.2

What programming languages is Project Heartbeat written in?

Project Heartbeat is written mainly in GDScript and C++ (used for the video decoder and Steamworks modules), for 0.5.0 we are shipping our first module written in Rust, used for the Discord Rich Presence.

I would like to study writing my own video decoding module in the future, the current one is fine but it would be nice to have our own made in Rust.

Who makes Project Heartbeat?

Project Heartbeat is a solo project, I Alex (or EIREXE) a 20 year old guy from Spain am the sole developer of the game, even if the EIRTeam publisher name would suggest there's a team.

There is however a charting group which makes the official charts (and provide input on some mechanics sometimes) and I regularly seek artists to make our background artworks, but when it comes to the game itself without counting content it was built by a single person.

What's the development history of it?

Project Heartbeat was started on September 21, 2019, which makes almost a year old as of this article. Development initially was slow but it has ramped up massively in part due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

I used to have a job at a French manufacturer making high-level racing simulators, but we got sacked because of the pandemic.

I really love doing this, so I hope I can continue working on PH for a while, I'd love to eventually start working on a new game, but PH takes priority.

Can we use macros?

Macros are already a part of the game, you can assign more than one action to the same button.

Any plans to make a console version?

I have access to a Development Kit for a modern desktop console that I can't disclose at this time, and I have made a homebrew port for the Nintendo Switch.

The Nintendo Switch port, if it's ever released won't be supported, but it will be interesting to see at least. This port would somehow be delivered to PH players through Steam, you would then need to copy it to your Switch.

The only reason why I am studying a console port is because the console I am targeting supports User Generated Content which to me is a core aspect of the game.

How many songs are currently planned?[/h2]

Back when we launched the game we announced 5 songs, however this has changed.

We will have:

• 10 songs in total from SuganoMusic
  
• 1 song from PKAkatora (connected)
  
• An unannounced number of songs from Impedance Eurobeat
  

This update is smaller than the recent ones, a lot of under the hood work has been done in preparation for the future, to make it easier for me to continue working on the game, however some nice goodies made it in too. We will hopefully have two more songs to add to the game soon.

Most of the internal changes have been massive cleanups and modularization of the code, so this update is a bit short on the features side.

[h2]Scroll list direction holding for scroll list and options[/h2]

You can now scroll through most menus and change values in options more quickly by holding directions.

[h2]Hold and slide nerfs[/h2]

Holds and slide chains have been nerfed percentage wise, they now can only amount for 1.5% of the maximum score each. They used to be 7.5% which was too big, this doesn't affect scores and is a purely cosmetic change.

[h2]Tabbed controls section[/h2]



The controls section is now divided in tabs, depending on what they are used for

[h2]Major input handling changes (including hold cheese prevention)[/h2]

New input handling changes include fixes for diagonally hitting slide notes.

Previously you used to be able to cheese holds by holding all actions with one button and keeping that button held, this has been changed and now it cannot be done anymore, instead you must press the action at least once after you hit the hold note to be able to release the other button.

As another note, the editor's running instance of the game doesn't register game inputs anymore.

[h2]Editor test play restart button[/h2]

You can now restart a test play session from a button located next to the quit button.

[h2]Background dimming option[/h2]



There's now an option to darken the background of songs, this includes video too.

[h2]Sound effect changes[/h2]

Sound effects for double notes have been added, alongside with some changes to the slide note SFX to make them sound better and not have abrupt cutoffs.

[h2]Expression editor[/h2]

The editor now has an option to execute expressions, they can be incorporated in advanced editor workflows.

[h2]Performance improvements[/h2]

GLES2 now attempts to batch drawcalls for improved speed, I also moved note icons to atlases so they should use less memory and help batching (hopefully).

Multi lasers have also been changed and have a different look that allows for better performance.

[h2]Yet another trail code rewrite[/h2]



Okay I promise, this will be the last time I rewrite trails.

The new trail code should be twice as fast while looking much better and not having any separation issues anymore.

Bug fixes

• Fix editor offset tool not taking sustain end time into account
  
• Fix some issues related to song restarts
  
• Fix PPD charts not loading slide chains
  
• Fix some issues with the clear bar
  
• Fix issues with hitting some notes using analog inputs (particularly hearts)
  
• Fix an issue that would cause the editor to slowdown when selecting many notes
  
• Fix an amusing issue with steam workshop uploads
  
• Fix modifier menu focus issues
  

Project Heartbeat is available with a 15% discount for the Steam Summer Sale, get it while you can!!

https://store.steampowered.com/app/1216230/Project_Heartbeat/

[previewyoutube=zgqRHT5yvPc;leftthumb]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zgqRHT5yvPc[/previewyoutube]

Connected is a song created by PKAkatora, this song is our first deviation from the Eurobeat genre in the game, this song features a synthetic voice and it's fairly happy.

The song's artwork, featuring our mascot Aiko was masterfully created by the Spanish artist Mariale.

The song was also charted by our resident charting master Twoncity.

I hope you enjoy this new song.

Project Hearbteat 0.3.0 is now available for all to enjoy, this new update took longer than expected due to me suffering a thumb tendon injury.

NEW CONTENT

[h2]New artwork for Imademo 2012...[/h2]



Due to external reasons the artwork for Imademo 2012 was left unfinished and is the oldest (and most unfinished) artwork in the game, Emmilly has been hard at work doing new art, this is probably one of her best works yet, and it shows.

NEW FEATURES

[h2]Extended notes[/h2]

New note types are landing in PH, these are called extended notes. They create a different type of gameplay and in theory you shouldn't mix them with multi notes or holds, but I know you will so I made sure that they all worked together nicely.

No official charts use them (yet) but we will be releasing new songs with the new notes in the future.

[h3]Heart notes[/h3]



Heart notes are like slides except they don't care about direction, you can even flick your stick up and down.

[h3]Double notes[/h3]



Double notes require you to press the same direction on two buttons, if you are playing on a controller you would press d-pad left and Y or Triangle at the same time.

Heart notes can also be doubles, so you would have to flick two sticks in the same direction.

[h3]Sustain notes[/h3]



Sustain notes require you to press the note on time and hold it, after that you will need to release the sustain on time.

[h2]How to play section[/h2]



A new how to play section has been added to the main menu, this will give new users a rundown of what's in store for them.

[h2]New slide chain mechanics[/h2]



Slide chains have changed, they now progressively turn blue when you hit them, so you can let go when all all blue and it will clear the slide automatically.

You can also hold the slide before the time to hit it comes to hit it automatically.

[h2]Favorites tab[/h2]



Due to growing song libraries we've added the ability to add songs to a personal favorites tab.

[h2]New trails[/h2]



Trails have been updated, they are now drawn in a hybrid fashion, the game creates a mesh for them and fills them incrementally using a shader, this new approach has not been implemented in multi-note lasers yet, but will eventually be used to improve performance of those as well.

The new trails also include anti-aliasing, working around a previous engine limitation, this makes the borders of the notes be much smoother.

We originally launched them shortly after 0.2.8 was released as a fully GPU solution, but it didn't work well, so I spent 4 days working on them for hours (which led to my injury) but I made it in the end.

[h2]Massive performance optimizations[/h2]

A lot of changes have been made under the hood to make PH not only faster but also less prone to errors (specially around slide holds) and more consistent, I hope this upgrade is enough to allow people with the more modest computers to play the game.

I hit around 60 fps playing back 720p 30 fps video backgrounds on my dual-core Intel HD 3000 machine for reference.

[h2]New accessibility-friendly default keyboard settings[/h2]



Accessibility is a recurring theme in Project Heartbeat lately, with the new note leading line features and the new timing circles replacing the clock arms.

This time we are shipping new saner keyboard defaults allow everyone to play the game one-handed, thanks in part to my wrist injury for the inspiration.

[h2]VP9 video decoding[/h2]

PH now ships with statically linked FFMPEG to use VP9 video decoding, VP9 is one of the many modern open formats that are widely used in the web, YouTube for examples makes use of it together with AVC1, although it appears it will be superseded by AV1 eventually.

The reason to move to VP9 is the same as why most of the web moved to vp9 webms, H264 is a proprietary format, there was one point when Theora video and Vorbis audio inside Ogg containers were considered to be included in the web standard but were ultimately dropped after lobbying from proprietary format supporting companies.

This monumental stupidity on the W3C's part eventually led to the inclusion of Encrypted Media Extensions on the web standard, something that Netflix and co have used for evil.

This won't change how you use videos in the game, but it will require you to download them again, it is possible that it will make playback less CPU intensive and will make the videos take up less space, performance-wise VP9 is said to be tied with h265, but this is debatable.

[h2]Project Heartbeat metadata in PPD charts[/h2]

In order to allow authors of PPD charts to release songs for both games you can now bundle Project Heartbeat metadata in your PPD charts, the game will pick this up automatically, in order to add them, simply add new entries to your data.ini file starting with project_heartbeat_ followed by the property name, so for the title it would be project_heartbeat_title

The following properties are allowed at this time: "title", "author", "preview_image", "background_image", "youtube_url"

EDITOR IMPROVEMENTS
There have been many changes to the editor, most are invisible, such as performance improvements, others are more visible, like the changes we will discuss now.

[h2]Chart offset tool[/h2]



You can now move all notes and events in the timeline through the new offset tool in the tools tab.

[h2]Note copying/cutting and pasting[/h2]
Last update we added the ability to copy note parameters from one note to other using the inspector, this has now been extended and it's possible to copy notes in the timeline using the shortcuts you are familiar with.

[h2]Custom content directory and song reloading[/h2]



It is now possible to select where your custom content is gonna be saved and loaded from, this includes videos and manually installed songs.

You can also reload all songs by selecting the "Reload all songs" option.

[h2]Editor contextual menu[/h2]



The editor now features a contextual right-click menu, this can be used to access some of the new features.

[h2]Note interpolation[/h2]




This feature allows you to place notes in a straight line, with their separation being based on their hit time.

Simple place your earliest and latest note and select them together with the ones in between, when you apply the interpolate option to them they will be placed in a straight line, separated and ordered by their time.

Minor changes

• Add extreme to song metadata editor.
  
• Allow decimal steps for stars in metadata editor.
  
• Add Control+F shortcut to show FPS and video playback data.
  
• Add hold to scroll to song list.
  
• Add ability to disable video per-song.
  

• Fix youtube-dl sometimes not finding ffprobe on windows.
  
• Fix linux video download regression.
  
• Make some changes to how game starts are done to hopefully prevent startup bugs.
  
• Make sorting use lowercase.
  
• Fix instancing bugs causing score overwrites.
  
• Fix chart editor settings not loading properly under some cirucmstances.
  
• Fix BPM changes not working properly.
  
• Fix inputs breaking when restarting a song with them held.
  
• Fix and issue that cause holds to be dropped instantly under some circumstances.
  
• Do a hidden fire of the slide particles when the game is starting so that shader compile doesn't happen during gameplay.
  
• Add error message when attempting to join lobby with a song you don't have.
  
• Fix linux video download regression.
  
• Fix editor title pushing controls out of the screen
  

NEW CONTENT

[h2]Aiko is here![/h2]



Illustrated by the great Chilean artist Izayoi Aiko is here! she is the new official face of the game and she can now be seen in background of the official song "Cloud Sky 2019".

Aiko is a futuristic gothic-styled girl that will serve as Project Heartbeat's main "protagonist" with potential for more characters to come in the future.

She's 18 years old, 1,62 meters in height, 45 kg and ready for the big stage!

[h2]A new, easier difficulty for official songs[/h2]

Some users had issues with the official songs being too hard, the built-in songs are usually the introductory songs for new users, so them being too hard was an issue, as it created frustation.

In order to solve this we have added a new difficulty called Extreme, moved everything up one step and created a new easier chart, this means that the chart that previously was considered of "hard" difficulty is now normal, and the old normal one is now hard and so on.

NEW FEATURES

[h2]Accessibility features[/h2]

[h3]New timing and note path indicators[/h3]



A week ago we silently launched two new features to make the game slightly easier to play for new users, these two changes are replacing the existing timing arms for circles around the notes and the addition of lines that tell you what path the note is going to follow.

[h3]Multi-note indicator[/h3]



We have added a feature that shows the direction of the buttons you have to press when multi notes are on screen, this should help read them, particularly for triple notes.

These options are enabled by default, but you can change them in the settings.

[h2]Audio volume settings[/h2]

Yeah idk either why we didn't have this before...

[h2]Song start fade in[/h2]

Songs will now freeze on start while a white overlay fades in, this should help for songs that start immediately.

[h2]Per-song settings[/h2]



This was a heavily requested one, due to a number of hardware circumstances charts might have slight timing differences on your machine than they do on the charter's machine, to counter this you are now able to change the timing on the new song settings option in the pre-game screen, these settings are saved per-song.

You can also change the audio volume per-song to prevent some user-made tracks from being too loud.

[h2]Modifiers[/h2]



One long requested feature was the ability to spice things up by changing how songs played through modifiers, in this update we have included three modifiers.

Do note that playing songs with modifiers means your scores won't count towards the leaderboard.

• Nightcore : This modifier will make your songs faster or slower.
  
• Randomizer: This modifier will cause the buttons to change each time you play the song (it doesn't randomize every note, but rather replaces all instances of say, up notes with down notes).
  
• Chaos: This modifier randomizes all properties of all notes, this means that they will appear from all angles and be of many different types, not really a serious modifier but can provide some laughs.
  

• Fix a bug that would cause the song list to send you to the wrong song
  
• Ensure only legal scores are entered to local leaderboard
  
• Fix issue with reselecting stored song lists that had under 3 items
  
• Fix main menu not hiding PPD song list when there are no PPD songs present
  
• Fix youtube-dl invalid cache state breaking some downloads.
  
• Fix some strange song list issues
  
• Fix crash related to dropping loooong slides
  
• Ensure all notes don't exist anymore when restarting a song
  
• Fix hold prompt not scaling properly sometimes
  

Laid out in this post are the future updates for Project Heartbeat and how the game will progress through the next few months.

These things are planned, but external factors might change them (with the current world state you never know). Also I usually add some new features as people request them, so even if it seems barebones it is likely updates will be bigger (and obviously contain bugfixes).

Update 0.2.8 (coming this week!)

• Easier difficulties for included songs
  
• Song Modifiers
  
• New deadzone settings
  
• Per song latency settings
  
• Song start and finish time settings
  

• Project Heartbeat-tan debut
  
• New synthv song
  

• New note type: Hearts
  
• Switch to vp9 as the only video codec
  
• New eurobeat song
  

• New note type: Double notes
  
• New eurobeat song
  

• New note type: Sustain notes
  
• New eurobeat song
  

Before we start
I am aware that this update is probably going to be underwhelming in relation to the last few, this is because of life-related setbacks that haven't allowed me to focus on the game as much as I'd liked, but I still have managed to cram some features into it that I hope you will enjoy.

NEW CONTENT
[h2]New song: Hyperspeed out of Control[/h2]
[previewyoutube=eBDBbaz_aso;full][/previewyoutube]
With this update we are including hyperspeed out of control, a song produced by SuganoMusic, sung by Anthony McBazooka, based on a song from Touhou Project called Love Colored Master Spark.

Hyperspeed out of control comes with an illustration from David Revoy's Pepper & Carrot open source project.

The song has been charted by Henttus in record time and it has some relatively hard sections, I hope you will all enjoy it!.

NEW FEATURES
[h2]New Song List[/h2]


The song list has been completely changed, it now has a sleeker design and accomodates better for custom difficulties, with this patch we are also adding sorting and grouping capabilities to the song list.

The new design also allows for star counts with decimal points and longer titles.

MISC CHANGES

• Adjust work in progress label to a new location
  
• Merge pause and play buttons in the editor
  

• EDITOR: Make editor layer doubleclick only happen when the left click button is pressed
  
• The game now disallows you from pausing while the song is ending
  
• An issue that would cause some notes to disappear on restart and potentially crash the game has been resolved.
  
• Fixed the song meta editor not saving the original title
  

Project Heartbeat v0.2.6 is here, this update isn't as big as the previous ones due to me taking a break for a day, but it should still affect some of you.

NEW CONTENT
[h2]Background image for music play in the floor[/h2]

This new background comes from the open source webcomic Pepper & Carrot, I recommend you go check it out, it's quite amusing.

Something else that is quite amusing is that a Pepper & Carrot JRPG was one of my first attempts at making a game ever, oh how tables have turned!

[h2]New song: Cloud Sky 2019[/h2]

Finally, new content, Cloud Sky is the next song to hit the hands of players, this song is slightly slower than the rest but it's quite catchy, currently an illustration is being made for it, and from what I've heard it's going to look very nice.

As always, this song has been masterfully charted by our charting backroom, in this case the whole song was charted by Twoncity.

FEATURES

• EDITOR: add playtest
  
• EDITOR: you can now move multiple notes at the same time
  
• EDITOR: clicking on the timeline will cause everything to be deselected
  
• EDITOR: timeline will now jump to make the playhead visible when playing a song in the editor
  
• Remove heart power
  
  I think I have to explain this one: PH doesn't really need a fever system, and user feedback towards heart power has generally been negative, so we've decided to remove it, when the life mechanic is implemented the former heart power meter will be used for it.
  
  
• New slide graphics (thanks Twon)
  
• Readability improvements for notes and judgement

• EDITOR: You can no longer set BPM changes to 0
  
• EDITOR: Fix hold indicator not showing the correct icons
  
• EDITOR: Fix slide chain pieces sometimes remaining visible while editing
  
• Minor game position calculation optimizations
  
• Switch to a less crash-prone NoteDrawer architecture
  
• Slide note sfx is now quieter
  
• Note outline thickness are now consistent
  
• Removed UWUs
  
• Removed Herobrine

FEATURES

Steam Workshop

This is the big one, possibly the most anticipated feature for Project Heartbeat, it allows you to download charts from the Steam Workshop with a single click (even when your game is running!).

If you are a charter, you can upload your charts using the "upload to workshop" option in the song editor's song selection menu.

In order to make it easier for you to enjoy charting, we have published an official guide.

After you finish playing a song from the Workshop the game you will be asked to give an opinion on it (although it is not mandatory to do so).


Chart verification

Songs are now verified when trying to edit them, there are different severities, depending on how bad it is the editor may require you to fix issues before letting you edit the chart.

There are also some workshop specific errors, these are checked when you click "upload to workshop".

More changes to how video download behaves

Video downloads now happen in the background, which means you can enjoy playing your songs while other files are being downloaded, you do not even have to worry about download notifications getting the way, as if you are playing a song the notifications are stored and only shown to you after you are done with it.

Imademo 2012 easy and normal charts

Long overdue, but the easy and normal charts for Imademo... 2012 are now available.

PPD Audio verification

The game now includes code to check if the audio file selected when selecting a file for PPD is actually an audio file and if it's of the correct format and using the correct codec (OGG Vorbis in our case).


FIXES & MINOR NEW FEATURES
- Fix editor not properly loading hidden layers
- All audio from video download is now automatically converted to stereo
- Fix multi-notes breaking under some extreme circumstances
- Fix EditorPlugins not showing errors
- Fix BPM hanges
- Fix timeline items scaling when zooming in
- Fix an issue that caused timeline lines to disappear when using offset
- Add area select to editor
- Fix moving notes snapping differently from when they were created
- Add option to automatically set the value of multi-notes in the editor
- Added kojima

This version is dedicated to my friend Jose Luis, who died from COVID-19 early last week, may he rest in peace.

Project Heartbeat 0.2.0 is here, with new fixes and some interesting new features.

NEW FEATURES

[h2]Video playback[/h2]
Project Heartbeat now supports using videos as backgrounds for your songs, with this come a new plethora of options to make life easier and adjust it to your likings, and some video download improvements make this easy to manage.

The new options allow you to disable video entirely, only for PPD songs, disable the visualizer when a video is playing or even set the resolution and FPS of the video downloads.

Currently only h264/av1 is supported.

[h2]Video download changes[/h2]
The very smart people looking at the game's internals might have realized that Project Heartbeat downloads videos together with songs, this was originally due to the simplistic way in how the video download worked.

Among some of the changes, the download code will now check if the files exist and ask you to download them if they aren't, this means that if you disable video downloading, download a song (which will only download audio) you can then enable video again and it will ask you to download the video. Same goes for missing video/audio files.

All this means that you will have to download your videos again (but you won't have to enter the URL again for PPD songs).

[h2]Work in progress features[/h2]
One of the things I am currently working on is Steam workshop integration, this should be interesting to see.

[h3]Other fixes[/h3]
- The editor now runs in windowed mode automatically
- Make closing the editor chart open popup on startup send you back to the main menu
- Ensure you can only enter youtube URLs in the PPD URL entry
- Fix circle target size discrepancy
- Rewrite the hold indicator to not work sloppily
- The game now writes the version string to the logs
- Fix simultaneous multi-slides (why tho)
- Fix main menu right being cut under some circumstances
- Fix the results screen ignoring wrong notes when calculating full note count
- Fix editor midi importing

Project Heartbeat is now available to purchase on Steam as an Early Access title!

Some time ago we asked on twitter and on our discord to throw any question you had about the game at us, here are such questions, and the answers to them.

[h2]How many songs are included in the base game?[/h2]

Regarding the song list, there will be five songs by SuganoMusic, two of them are Touhou Eurobeat arrangements and the rest are traditional Eurobeat.

[h2]Can you use the PlayStation buttons?[/h2]

Project Heartbeat infringes no patents, no copyright and no trademarks. Clone games are generally legal (see StrikeLine, RockBand, Heroes of the Storm, HoN, League of Legends, Candy Crush, commercial uses of StepMania, AutoChess and its clones etc...)

Regarding the DualShock4's buttons:

While the letter X is not copy protected, the specific cross used on the controller, along with the other shapes, are trademarked. Using your own art to represent the buttons, is OK under fair use, specifically nominative fair use. Where the qualifications for nominative fair use are one of the following situations:

• The product or service cannot be readily identified without using the trademark (e.g. trademark is descriptive of a person, place, or product attribute).
  
• The user only uses as much of the mark as is necessary for the identification (e.g. the words but not the font or symbol).
  
• The user does nothing to suggest sponsorship or endorsement by the trademark holder. This applies even if the nominative use is commercial, and the same test applies for metatags.
  

Mark your calendars, because Project Heartbeat is coming to Steam Early Access on March 27!!!