Tag Archives: update

After 5 years of gaming on a laptop, I finally decided to go all out this Black Friday and build myself a powerful gaming desktop. After some researching around (aka poking around Logical Increments and Tom’s Hardware) and getting some advice/assistance from friends, I put together my first desktop, a pretty mean machine too. And of course, this called for many pictures as well as an obligatory FRAPS test. Blade & Soul (CN) at max settings, killing a random world boss. YouTube compression completely killed the video quality unfortunately :( See the higher quality version here

A day late but oh well. Happy New Years from Keripo! Since the last update quite a bit has happened but here’s the rough plan for 2012. There will be two projects: Beats2: Prototypes and Beats2. In a nutshell, I decided to make Beats2 development a part of my senior design project for university (think “undergraduate thesis”), the result of which will be a paper entitled “Designing Rhythm Game Interfaces for Touchscreen Devices”. Prototypes will be a demo app that will be used for conducting a study comparing various rhythm game interfaces (i.e. think DDR vs Beatmania IIDX vs DJMAX …

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)

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 …

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

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 …

The new website and forums are now finally up! Aside from a bunch more info copy-pasting, you’ll be noticing some graphical improvements over the next few days as we have a small but talented graphics/web team helping out here on UPenn’s campus. Beats 1.4b’s progress is progressing smoothly as you can see via the latest Changelog and the To-Do List. As of the moment, on-the-go song installation is pretty much ready to go, a few nice graphical upgrades have been made, and the scoring system has (started to) become stabilized in preparation for Scoreloop integration (e.g. future scoreboards, achievements, etc.). …