Holiday Updates

Just another update in case you were curious.

Winter break! That means free time to work on Beats. I’ve responded to the flood of emails that you’ve all been sending me as well the handful of questions posted on the forums. Beats 1.4b progress is nicely coming along, but expect it to be a big one since much of the internal code structure is being revamped (that mess that we cranked out during those 48hrs of PennApps is finally being cleaned up). At the least, the next version should run a lot smoother, be less buggy, and a with a few more nice features. The ToDo and Changelog pages are being kept up to date, so make sure to see whats been done so far.

For the lazy, the rough expected updates for 1.4b are as following:
– improved UI (new main menu and icons everywhere!)
– direct song downloading and installing via web browser
– added .dwi support and improved .sm support
– more settings!
– standardized point system (prep for Scoreloop scoreboard integration)
– generally smoother and less buggy gameplay
– phone-dependent data storage location
– targeted for Android OS 2.3 (Gingerbread)

Possible updates:
– support for holds and mines?
– customizable skins/themes
– scrapper-based song download list (for the forums, not in-game)

On a side note, still trying to decide which image to use as the default background image. I’m tempted to choose an anime ones but I know that the vector art one is more “standard”. Either way, here’s a sneak peak of the new main menu that will be used for 1.4b with the current background images (“Select Song” is being “pressed” in the examples):

Look forward to the next release, coming sometime in January (hopefully!). Also expect for this website and forums to get a nice makeover right before 1.4b is ready for release. If you’re willing to help out with testing, don’t hesitate to drop by #stepmania-devs and ping me.
To all of you out there, Happy Holidays and an early Happy New Year! \o/

~Keripo

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