NEW CONTENT

Aiko is here!

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!

A new, easier difficulty for official songs

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

Accessibility features

New timing and note path indicators

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.

Multi-note indicator

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.

Audio volume settings

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

Song start fade in

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

Per-song settings

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.

Modifiers

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.

Intro skip

We have added the ability to enable skipping the intros of songs, this is disabled by default and must be enabled by the chart's creator, the chart's creator can also specify a minimum note time to allow skipping, so that easier charts that start much later get the intro skip but harder charts that start earlier don't.

Tap deadzone

Tap actions (so, slides) now have deadzones on them, this should prevent accidental presses, this deadzone can be changed in the settings

Add song info to pause menu

Now a song preview with song information will show when you are in the pause menu.

Editor manual

There is now a manual explaining how the editor works in the Steam guides section, this has also been added to the editor. You can also read the guide here.

Editor optimizations

Not exactly a feature but big enough to warrant a spot here: The editor has received some major optimizations to run on older machines, it should work much better now.

Editor optimizations

Editor copy and paste

You can now copy and paste note properties in the editor.

BUG FIXES

• 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

Have fun!

[ 2020-05-04 19:58:40 CET ] [ Original post ]