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

New song: Reprisal

[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

Skin editor

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

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.

New UI elements

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

Controls editor rework

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.

Sorting system

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!

[Wrong note cross

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.

Bugfixes

• 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.