Project Heartbeat News

[previewyoutube]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.



[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.



[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"


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.

• 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
  

[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.



[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.
  

[h2]Intro skip[/h2]



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.

[h2]Tap deadzone[/h2]

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

[h2]Add song info to pause menu[/h2]



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

[h2]Editor manual[/h2]



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.

[h2]Editor optimizations[/h2]

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.

[h2]Editor optimizations[/h2]

[h2]Editor copy and paste[/h2]



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

• 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!

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).

• Easier difficulties for included songs
  
• Song Modifiers
  
• New deadzone settings
  
• Per song latency settings
  
• Song start and finish time settings
  
• Project Heartbeat-tan debut
  

• Achievments
  
• 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
  

(Here end the confirmed songs, hopefully we'll be able to confirm more).

Artwork for this article:
"User manual" by David Revoy, licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0. https://www.peppercarrot.com/en/static6/sources&page=artworks

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.


[h2]New song: Hyperspeed out of Control[/h2]
[previewyoutube][/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!.


[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.

• 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