A Few Words About Beat Saber v0.12.0 Update

Dear Beat Saber players, we released version 0.12.0 and some of you were not very satisfied with some of the changes we made. This blog post should explain our reasons for some of them.

This situation happened mainly because we were under big time pressure and didn’t have enough time to test everything as much as we would love to. We believe that new great things can happen only if we keep trying, so it is possible that this will happen again while we are still in early access. But don’t worry. We listen to the community carefully and evaluate every single change.

PS VR vs PC

Some players think that some changes were made because of performance or other reasons related to PS VR. That’s not true. All the decisions are made just because we are trying to make the game as good as possible. None of the platforms is our priority. The game is our priority. We don’t do any compromises in the PC version because of PS VR or other way around.

Note Cut Sounds

Several things happened to the sound effects. First of all we are still trying to make them sound as good as possible and we will probably break this few more times in the future.

• Timing Bug — When making audio for VR there are nice ways how to process it in a way that it sounds more 3D. On PC we use MS HRTF Spatializer to do this. Unfortunately, it is not available on PS VR so we had to come up with different audio settings in order to port the game to PlayStation. When we got back to PC version we just turned the spatializer back on, but we didn’t realize that it actually adds a small delay (or at least we think it does and we will investigate this more).
• Muting sounds before they finish — Our goal is to make music and sound FX sound as clear as possible. In order to do so we use some techniques from audio mixing. One of them is to get rid of sounds which are not needed any more, because they are too quiet or another similar sound started playing. Our algorithm for detecting when to fade out a sound was built on next note position. Unfortunately, it looks like many more things need to be taken into account. For now, we are just reverting everything back to how it was and will work on this a little bit more.
• Slightly different sounds — This is also connected to PS VR version. We had to EQ the sound FX a little bit differently when not using a spatializer and we forgot to change that back.

Sabers’ Length

This wasn’t changed. We just moved the relative position of the handle in order to match controllers more precisely. This will be tweaked even more to match the original feel as much as possible.

Different Scoring Algorithm

There was a small scoring algorithm bug in previous versions. When you cut the note we compute the trajectory of your saber and use that to give you some points. Unfortunately by mistake the algorithm doesn’t use the last position before the cut into account. The result of this is that faster you are cutting, bigger the angles needs to be to get the same score. We have fixed this, but it looks like now the game is too easy for most of the pros. We will probably roll back this “fix” or will try to find a way how to implement the “bug” in more predictable way.

Different Colliders

Beat Saber detects collision by overlapping box created from saber positions and two box colliders which are connected to cube note. The first collider is much bigger than the actual note and detects only the good cuts. Second one is a little bit smaller than note and can detect both bad and good cuts. This combination allows us to compensate any tracking problems and make the game feel more awesome. :) When the note approaches the the player it rotates a little bit towards the players head. In the previous version both of the colliders rotated with the note, but we realized this is not a very good approach and we removed the rotation from the bigger collider. The result is that the game became a little bit harder (especially in expert+ levels) and it’s easier to get a better cut score (by approximately 2%). In the end we will roll back this change and will use the old system which everyone loved and new system with different collider sizes will be used for pro mode which should come out very soon.

New Lighting System

This will be a little bit technical. Lights in Beat Saber are made using very uncommon technique. They are actually not lights, they just generate something we call bloom pre pass fog texture. This fog is then applied on all the geometry in forward rendering. Originally we used additive blending for rendering light lines. This caused a problem where many lights behind each other combined their strength. New system uses max blending operation which makes solo lights to shine more and multiple lights are not blown as much as before. We truly think that this new system is much better, but we are thinking about supporting both new and old system so each level can use a different one.

Cubes Shading

We have changed the shader on the cubes for two reasons.

• We wanted to make the game more enjoyable by color blind people and old dark cubes were quite hard to distinguish. Jan, our lead designer, is color blind too by the way.
• New colors match the environment a little bit better.

We haven’t decided yet if this is the final look and we will experiment a little bit more in the future. We might even try to use the old look but with small enhancements.

Obstacle Walls

We think that there’s some space for improvements here and the walls shader parameters will be tweaked more in the future.

TLDR

We know about all the issues and they will be fixed as soon as possible! ;)

Jan “Split” Ilavsky & The Beat Saber Team