News roundup #7 - The funeral and Project Heartbeat Phoenix Beta 4 now available

(Originally from the EIRTeam patreon page)

Hello friends, it's time for our monthly project heartbeat development update, I have spent this month working mostly on PH, so phoenix got many massive upgrades and is inching ever closer to being released.

I don't know why but I have spent the last few weeks working HARD on Phoenix, squashing many editor bugs and improving things here and there.

The funeral

As you may be aware, diva is all but dead, which is very sad, this has incidentally led to a massive amount of new sales for me, so it's a bittersweet moment. I hope I can carry the project diva torch as best as I can. Of course my budget will never be anywhere near diva, but PH also doesn't cost nearly as much ;)

(P.S: If you are the owner of some music-heavy IP, like a music-focused anime or similar I'm open to negotiations of making a game using the PH engine, similar to miracle girls festival. I have console and mobile versions of the engine too).

Phoenix Beta 3

I released Phoenix Beta 3 last week, I could pad this post by copying and pasting you all the changes (and there are a loooooot of them) but I think it would be better if you read it straight from the source here.

The important changes, besides the massive amounts of fixes are:

• UI is now true 3D, saving power and looking better, plus I added a frosted glass effect to transparent elements

• Modifiers are fixed, including hidden

• New console -> arcade conversion modifier, experimental

• Input map migration from old PH to Phoenix

• Disabled dx12 support (for now)

• Workshop now shows a gameplay type display

• Some changes to menus, specially pregame

Phoenix Beta 4

Today I'm also releasing beta 4, well, I've been releasing it as I worked during the week, but there's yet another shit ton of changes to the game and fixes to make it work better. Not much new stuff, but as I said before, phoenix is in a bit of a feature freeze until it's all sorted out and relatively bug free.

God I fear for the day Phoenix is released and I have to write the changelog for all cumulative changes... Anyways here they are:

The controller dilemma

I was thinking about non-standard controller support in PH, and I came to a dilemma, I am considering only officially supporting non-gamepad-style controllers (like the xbox controller) and letting people use steam input to remap it. What do you guys think? (specially considering phoenix supports steam input, unlike stable PH).

Multiplayer

I've worked hard on some phoenix multiplayer stuff, it's almost ready, most functionality is restored but I want to give it a good do-over. Either way, it should be made available soon.

Unfortunately phoenix MP uses a different, newer, Steamworks P2P API for communication, so you won't be able to do crossplay between stable and beta.

Results screen rework

I redesigned the result screen, thanks to input from NeoRash from the PH server, the new one looks way nicer adn shows more info!

3D UI improvements

(It totally looks like wallhacks lol)

Good news, I've revamped how the 3D UI system introduced last update works, it's simpler and does clipping properly, yay. I also managed to do away without dynamic canvas operations, unfortunately I've also managed to break DX12 and OpenGL whoops..

I may just drop OpenGL support entirely, but i could reimplement it