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Projects

Beats 1.7b FINAL

Summer ends and university starts again. With the change comes the release of Beats 1.7b FINAL, the last version of Beats, Advanced Rhythm Game. This also marks the open sourcing of Beats and the starting point of the Beats2 project! Beats 1.7b FINAL is almost the same as Beats 1.7a-r570 (Beats 1.7b FINAL is r575). For those who haven’t been keeping up with the Google group, here are the changes since 1.6.2b: tablet support!!! improved screen updating and scaling modified sliders and guidelines for osu! Mod smarter osu difficulty selection custom loadable graphics new SM-based default noteskin updated with Immersion …

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Beats 1.7a Preview and 250k Downloads

To start off, it seems that sometime earlier this month, Beats hit 250k downloads on the Android Market! (this doesn’t include downloads from the Downloads page and other locations of course). So here’s the obligatory thank-you picture! While I’ve been quite busy over the summer with work, I did manage to get my hands on a new Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1 running Honeycomb (3.1). Which means, yes, the next release of Beats will support tablets! Beats, Advanced Rhythm Game – 1.7a Tablet Demo [Android] (Direct download)

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Beats 1.6b

After many weeks of inactivity, I finally got a chance to sit down and crank out code for a while. As a result, there have been tons of MAJOR changes/features added in Beats 1.6b. Here’s just half of the changes: full .dwi support experimental .osu support save local high scores use Immersion’s Universal Haptic Layer (UHL) for vibration control translation project public at http://crowdin.net/project/beats added Screenshot Mode setting see the changelog for more The long promised .dwi support is finally here and complete (as far as my testing has gone at least). SM->osu! Mod has been done back in 1.5b, …

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Dance With Your Hands

For my ESE 350 ”Microcontrollers and Embedded Systems” (University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2011) final project, I worked with my friend Eric Chen on modifying Beats so it would take input from an XBOX Kinect. The result is a Kinect hooked up to a Beagleboard-xM running Android and playing Beats. It was all proof-of-concept of course as everything ran with extreme lag, but it was pretty cool nevertheless and fun! (Direct download) Proof-of-concept gameplay demo of Beats 1.5.5b with Microsoft XBOX Kinect support. The song used in this demo is “Chaoz Impact” by ParagonX9, stepfile by Lisek with permission for distribution …

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Looking for translators

To deal with managing the various translations/localizations of Beats, I have uploaded the strings to crowdin, a collaborative translation tool that supports Android. http://crowdin.net/project/beats If you are interested in helping out with the translations, please visit that site and start translating! In particular, I am strongly looking for someone to help out with Japanese translations. Once translations are complete, I will release a quick Beats 1.5.5b update which will include some of the updates on the Changelog page (particularly a setting allowing you to explicitly change the game language). As always, make sure to join the Google group to keep …

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A Free Digital Society – Speech by Richard Stallman

On April 20, 2011, Richard Stallman was invited by STWing and Dining Philosophers to the University of Pennsylvania to deliver a speech, titled “A Free Digital Society” . Below is a video recording of the speech, recorded by myself (Philip Peng): Your browser does not support the video tag. I apologize ahead of time for the shaky first few minutes (I was trying to securely attach my cellphone camera on my laptop using masking tape) as well as the few sections where video were accidentally cut out (due to either the phone falling off my laptop or my cell phone’s …

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Beats 100k Downloads!

Yay, the new version of “Beats, Advanced Rhythm Game” has reached over 100,000 downloads (with over 1000 ratings averaging 4.5/5 stars) \o/ Technically this happened months ago under the old package name but I just didn’t notice back then xD (the current cumulative total downloads so far is actually well over 250k at the moment ^_^) Due to heavy school work, I haven’t had much free time to work on Beats apart a few random things listed on the Changelog page. Rest assure, however, that all your feedback and support has not been forgotten! Depending on the amount of free …

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Beats 1.5.4b

Due to a busy school and job-finding schedule, I haven’t had much time to work on any of the stuff in my huge To-Do List. The Beats user-base, however, has proven to be very eager in seeing the progress of this project and many individuals have actually helped me with translating Beats into other languages. Turns out, for example, the top four countries in terms of user base are USA (34%), South Korea (22%), China (21%), and Japan (6%) despite having no official Android Market in either China or Korea and no translations for any of the latter three. In …

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BulletsForever

For my CIS 350 ”Software Design/Engineering” (University of Pennsylvania, Spring 2011) final project, we were to work together as teams to create a mobile app as a hands-on exercise with the software development cycle. And so, Team MAGi (consisting of Art Young, Austin Woodlin, Jessica Ouyang, Yash Kandoi and myself) decided to make a game, specifically one inspired by the free 2D fixed shooter game, Warning Forever. The WF clone more or less was a bullet hell (danmaku) with a simple “evolving” AI boss after each level but with no level cap (after lvl 10, it repeats), so we called …

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Beats 1.5.2b

Due to some Google policies, Beats has been re-released under a new package name (now ‘com.beatsportable.beats‘ – its the same app, just a different Market download). (or manually download the .apk from the Release page) Please uninstall previous versions of Beats (aka 1.5b or earlier) and install the new package (just search for “keripo”, “advanced rhythm game”, “stepmania”, “ddr”, or “osu”). The donate version has also been removed – please use the Donate page if you wish to express thanks and help keep development rolling! Because the Android Market will treat 1.5.2b as a new app, all previous ratings and …

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