(originally posted to the EIRTeam patreon) Hello people, long time no see! I have been working a lot on PH recently, fixing up stuff and finally adding new features, I hope you guys like what I've been cooking. Most things are bug fixes, a detailed changelog of which will come when I release the next stable patch!

Song list changes

I pushed some experimental song list changes, after a lot of iteration and input from the discord I finally came up with a design I like, there are some minor bugs here and there still, but I think i'll be able to solve those. The new design features difficulty lists that are easier to read at a glance, this will also be used for score based filtering (the individual difficulties that don't match the filter will be greyed out). Currently the difficulty colors are either hardcoded (for the 5 canonical difficulties) or generated from a hash function, you will be able to set your own difficulty colors in the future though.
On another note, when scrolling through the song list (specially when wrapping around) you will now see some placeholders, these are there to prevent having empty spaces and to give you something to look at while the short scroll finishes, this prevents having to load all the song UI elements. These will be updated to the new song list item design when it is finalized.

OOB system

This is something i've wanted to do for a while, basically, I want to have an out of the box system that lets you configure basic PH features right on first start, such as the note skin or the health system. You can also just skip it and use the defaults like before!

New judgement graphics

Judgement graphics have always sucked in PH, they were nothing more than labels, i finally got around to designing new ones, I also made the combo count use some new number graphics as well, might use them for the score counter on the top right too, who knows.

Replay work

While they aren't ready yet, I've been working on replays, I laid some of the ground work for them, most of the stuff involved making the holds and other parts of the game more deterministic. Unfortunately, this also means the removal of the venerable rollback on unpause functionality, I hope this doesn't bother you guys too much, but it was going to be extremely hard (or impossible) to get it to work otherwise.

Stats tab

The results screen now has a new fancy stats tab, I hope you guys like it! It was made with help from the PH discord and specifically from Steven, I still plan to make some cosmetic improvements. On another note, the stats and the graph tab now do their math using a multi threaded task system, so they should no longer stall the game.

Pulsating buttons

I did some workaround to allow having animated buttons, the animation is rudimentary but works pretty well I think.

Future

We are well on our way to going out of early access, I will do a small update to stable with the new features and bugfixes soon (tm), then I'll finally work on rush notes and then we might be ready for release, I hope. It's really been a terrible month for me, at least I'm glad phoenix ended up coming out as good as it did, my motivation is on the ground but at least I get stuff done on a daily basis.
I am once again at a complicated crossroad, I feel very demotivated and things aren't getting better, I fear for my future. I've been trying to learn some 3d sculpting too, let's hope that comes out good. I didn't work much on Swansong, I've actually spent a lot of time playing Ghost of Tsushima (great game btw). I feel sad when I play games because I feel like I should be working, but when I look at the real amount of time I spent playing vs working I actually should probably work less and play more, but I don't enjoy it as much. Life may be hard, but I'll figure it out. See you soon, lads!