Beats 1.3b

An update based on some user suggestions. And before you ask, no .dwi support isn’t here yet, but its being worked on and definitely will appear soon. And no reverse play, leaders board, or any of those other major things on my To-Do list. Good news though is I figured out what was causing all those crashes with certain .sm files and have put up a preliminary warning about them. When .dwi support is added, the .sm parser will also be rewritten, so hopefully Beats will be able to support 90%+ of those StepMania/Dance With Intensity stepfiles out there! I’ve also figured out whats causing those lags that prevent you from doing trills/rapidly-alternating-arrows and am working on hacking a way around it.

Anyway, for this update, a few added features and tweaks. To start off, I’ve heard all your complaints about hard songs and music taste. I initially assumed that only the hardcore rhythm-game players would use this, but with almost 10 000 downloads now, I guess this isn’t the case ; P I’ve changed the sample song lineup to include some pad-friendly anime songs from “Otaku’s Dream Mix (Pad)” that is more DDR-like and will probably flow a lot better with most people (than the clique-y Touhou remixes I initially used). I’ve also separated the changelog from the new user notes on startup. Also, people tend to want to delete songs that they download and try out, but don’t end up liking. I’ve added a “File Deletion” mode that can be accessed by pressing your phone’s MENU button while in file browser. A bunch more error catching stuff has been added as well, so many situations where things would crash will instead be caught and give you an error notification – please email me with the details of those error messages so I can debug them!

The most important change in this update, however, is for song installation. For one, working install progress bars, yay! (working song loading bars too, but spinners are boring) Just like how StepMania takes .smzip files, we want to distinguish between a normal StepMania song pack and a Beats-friendly song pack (aka a song pack that has been stripped down and is download-friendly). So I added a new “Beats-Pack” file extension: “.bpzip”. Its just a normal zip file, but renamed to indicate that it was intended for Beats. Any converted song packs released on BeatsIIDX should end with that file extension to avoid confusion within the community (I, for one, will soon be releasing converted Otaku’s Dream packs that are slimmed for file size, thus being easier to download via phone, and contain stepfiles that aren’t impossible for touch screens/non-keyboard use). Installing “.bpzip” files is the same as “.zip” and “.smzip”s – through the file browser via “INSTALL SONGS”. By the way, if you do install single song packs of any sort, they’ll now be conveniently installed to “Beats/Songs/Singles/”. Another fun note – I’ve added a “Shorten Folder Names” setting that will remove the initial “(…)” or “[…]” headers of folders so browsing for stepfiles will be easier.

We’re still looking into the convenient downloads idea, so please check it out and reply with your thoughts here. As always, make sure to read over the items listed on my neat and tidy To-Do list (which also includes the changelog and development progress).

Thank you for downloading Beats, Advance Rhythm Game! Make sure to check out the Downloads section of the website and check out our new forums. If you encounter any bugs, have any issues, or just want to leave comments/suggestions on the forums!

Download: Google Play (Mirror 1 / Mirror 2)

Enjoy!

~Keripo

BeatsPortable: http://beatsportable.com/2010/10/beats-1-3b/
BeatsPortable Forums: http://beatsportable.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=5