Tag Archives: beats

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

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 …

After tons of work into adding new features and optimizing to reduce/remove lag and increase framerate, Beats 1.5b is finally ready! Beats 1.5b has TONS of new features, as described in the Changelog. Some of the most important features include: osu! Mod and scroll up game modes various new tapbox layouts much, MUCH faster now and with less lag (even faster than 1.3b!) lots of nifty shortcut buttons on the main menu Russian, Dutch, and Italian translations (looking for translators, see here) Not sure what this new “osu! Mod” game mode is all about? Check it out in the new …

One thing I’ve noticed many of my users requesting/mentioning is support for osu! files or a separate osu! port/clone all together. I’m a big fan of rhythm-based music games (mostly StepMania, Beatmania IIDX, and DJ Max) but I actually haven’t tried much osu! style games (I tried Elite Beat Agents a few times on a friends’ DS but thats the extent of things). After downloading the latest version of osu! and trying out a few beatmaps, I convinced myself that modifying Beats some bit could definitely lead to a new Ouendan-style gameplay. Eventually, I could make a proper, full-fledged osu! …

One of the most requested features for Beats is different tapbox layouts (aka the area where you tap to hit falling notes). Ever since Beats 1.0a, notes always fall down from the top of the screen to the arrows at the bottom, with the tapboxes being invisible rectangles on top of the arrows. This is akin to the Beatmania/DJ Max “reverse” scroll where notes fall down and the same setup I’ve always used when I play StepMania (for which I usually play with 3.0x, Reverse, Notes+ and Dark modifiers). The majority of new users, however, are only familiar with DDR-style …

Warning! Long, random, technical rant ahead! Read at your own risk! I may also misuse a few words incorrectly here and there – I apologize in advance for any incoherence within my rant

Small update with a fix for the rotate-reset issue as well as a link to the new gameplay video: Beats 1.4.2b – Changeset [237] – fixed a rotation-restart issue – gameplay video link in Info settings category And here’s the new gameplay video! (The Demo page now links to this video while the Tutorial page links to the old tutorial video.) (Direct download) As always, if you find any other pressing/immediate bugs or would like to help out with testing (particularly the lag and touch-screen issues some users are reporting), please PLEASE contact me (Keripo) via IRC or MSN (see …