v0.9.0

Been a while, huh? This release adds in mainly high-scores and other useful meta-data info like level play counts, which have just kinda been sitting around waiting to be released in a proper release build for some time. Most of the other changes since then have been internal; things like Github Actions and cleaning up the wiki to look nicer.

I've mostly been occupied with other projects as of recently, so hopefully this release will get me back into working on Open Manifold. Until then, have a good week!

Changelog

Background Effects

• Added new background effect: kefrens

Gameplay

• Level play data is now recorded in hiscores.json and displayed, including:
  • High scores
  • Level play count
  • Whether or not a level has been cleared

Options

• Fixed Toggle HUD accidentally applying to the Toggle Grid option when loading settings

Misc.

• Added new lines to motd.txt

v0.8.1

Aside from a single small addition, this is a minor release that fixes some issues with v0.8.
Unless you've ran into one of the following issues below, you can most likely skip this version.

Changelog

• Added a quit confirmation dialog box to Sandbox mode
• Fixed a crash when loading the level select menu after quitting a level loaded with the -i argument
• Fixed the confirm sound playing twice when selecting "Exit" in options

v0.8.0

Not too much new stuff is in this release, but there's been quite a few changes I wanted to get out there since it's been quite a while. The big new thing with this release is the addition of playlists! You can finally organize your levels in an order other than just alphabetical; details on how to make playlists will be added to the wiki shortly after this release. The options menu has also been reworked to be much nicer to use.

The Github page(s) have also seen some mild improvements; we now have those oh-so-trendy badges courtesy of , and proper issue templates when filing bug reports. Small stuff, but still nice to have!

Changelog

Tutorial

• QoL improvement: You can now use any of the face buttons to advance text, not just Cross.

Gameplay

• The console will now warn you if a level's sequence does not match the shape it's supposed to create.
• Playlists have been added.
  • They are JSON files in the assets/levels folder with any filename.
  • Playlist levels are displayed in verbatim order, and then any non-playlist-indexed levels are appended in alphabetical order.
  • Playlist names are displayed in the bottom of the level select screen alongside other metadata.

Options

• The options menu now has submenus instead of one giant list.
• You can now reset both controller and keyboard bindings.
• New gameplay modifier settings:
  • Blindfold Mode: Makes all placed and player-controlled shapes invisible. Identical to fukuwarai mode in RnF.
  • Display HUD: On by default. Turn this off if you don't want to see your health or score.
• A back sound has been added (back.ogg)
• Fixed Frame Cap not being applied on game startup.

Sandbox

• Added new toolbar option: Lock Shape
• Changed sound used when exporting as JSON

Misc.

• Fixed typo in the motd.txt message "performing in front of a live studio audience"
• Added several new lines to motd.txt
• QoL improvement: You can press F11 to toggle between fullscreen and windowed at any time.

v0.7.0

A summary, in the form of a haiku:

A tutorial,
Characters are scaled anew,
A new level too

Changelog

Tutorial

• Tutorial mode has been implemented.

Background Effects

• Added new background effect: bigbang

Gameplay

• Character scaling has been overhauled, should make much better use of space especially at lower game resolutions
• Characters scaled with scale_mode set to nearest will now use integer scaling
• SDL2 timestamps are now used for checking timing windows

Options

• Toggling audio channels will now play a test sound
• Fixed "Controller Index" showing -1 if no controllers are plugged in

Sandbox

• Added new toolbar option: Lock Shape
• Changed sound used when exporting as JSON

Misc.

• Added included level: "Expired Uranium"
• Default sound effects have been re-rendered
• Changed the FPS frame time display to be more intuitive

v0.6.0

🎵 It's gonna be May 🎵

This release was mostly focused on configuration and customization. tile recieved some new parameters that makes it much easier to make levels look how you'd want them to look, character.json now has a header for adjusting settings, and perhaps most importantly: you can finally rebind both keyboard and controllers from within the options menu, no more messing around with a text editor!

Changelog

Controls

• Controllers can now be rebinded in addition to keyboard keys. The bindings are saved to config.json under "button_map".
• The options menu now has "Rebind Keyboard" and "Rebind Controller", for rebinding inputs in-game.

Background Effects

• Added parameters to tile.json:
  • speed: sets the rate at which the tile animation should run at in milliseconds; if set to 0, this will be equal to one beat as specified by the level; defaults to 120
  • scale_mode: sets what scaling algorithim to use; values are linear and nearest.
  • fill_screen: when set to true, fills the entire screen with a single tile.

Gameplay

• You can now attempt to reload a level or the levels folder if Open Manifold throws up an error screen by pressing Cross.
• character.json now requires a header. Prior character.json files will likely work, but future characters should have a header.
  • scale_mode: works similarly to tile.json. (see above)

Misc.

• Fixed grammar when only 1 level has been found in the levels folder.
• Added new messages to motd.txt

v0.5.0

It's been a little while since the last release, but for good reason: this one brings quite a lot to the table!

A new level has been introduced in this release: Cubic Waltz, a chiptune level meant to show off some of the things Open Manifold can do, such as unusual time signatures and custom color palettes. There's also some quality-of-life improvements to how the game is controlled: you can now toggle controller rumble in the options menu, and the sandbox toolbar recieved a bit of additional love with the ability to delete previously-placed shapes.

For level creators, the tile effect has recieved a major overhaul and can now accept a tile.json file to specify frame order and size, and a new (very cool) background effect called lasers has been added. Not only that, @SalsaGal has implemented something very useful: you can now launch levels directly using the command line! This can be very useful for rapid-testing changes to your levels without having to go through the menu and find it manually.

Quite a bit has changed internally as well; most notably, the options menu has been largely rewritten, so adding new options should be much easier now (you might notice the options are in a slightly different order; this rewrite is partly why), and the JSON library Open Manifold uses has been upgraded to the latest version.

Changelog

Controls

• New option: Controller Rumble: toggles whether or not the controller should rumble (assuming the controller supports it).
• You can now use all four face buttons to select something in the Sandbox toolbar.

Background Effects

• Added new background effect: lasers
• Added support for a tile.json file for the tile background effect; specifies frame data similar to character.json
• Fixed starfield running too fast on higher framerates

Gameplay

• Fixed the combo display briefly appearing if the player exits a level while it's on-screen
• Character poses will now hold for one beat of a song instead of 400ms

Sandbox

• Added new toolbar option: Undo Last Shape
• Fixed "Export to JSON" corrupting the last entry in the file

Misc.

• Added included level: "Cubic Waltz"
• New command line argument: -i [folder path]; loads directly into a level
• The console will now tell you if a level's given sequences are the wrong length, and by how much.
• A version number is now displayed on the title screen of the game.

v0.4.1

This is a quick patch release to fix, among some other minor things, an issue involving Nvidia graphics cards and the DirectX backend on certain background effects, such as starfield.

Changelog

Gameplay

• Character pose holding is now based on the current BPM of the level.

Misc.

• The console will now inform you if level-defined sequences are too long or too short.
• OpenGL is now set as the default backend.

v0.4.0

It's that time again! It may seem a bit soon after the rapid-fire patches for Windows we saw in 0.3, but things have already changed enough to warrant a new release!

The big focus with this version was giving an overhaul to to the Sandbox mode; adding tons of features on the brand-new toolbar! This new toolbar brings a lot of potential for cool new tools in Sandbox mode, and this update should give you plenty of time to get accustomed to it.

Changelog

Sandbox

• A toolbar has been added:
  • Pressing Start will open and close the toolbar.
  • The toolbar currently includes:
    • Change Color (Press Up/Down/X to cycle the current shape color)
    • Shape Morph (Press X to cycle all the shapes' types)
    • Color Morph (Press X to cycle all the shapes' colors)
    • Export to JSON (Press X to export a creation to a JSON file)
• Pressing Cross will now place shapes instead of cycling the current shape color.
• Pressing Start will open and close the toolbar (see above).
• Fixed the game crashing when trying to load Sandbox from debug mode without going to the level select screen first.

Gameplay

• A combo indicator will now appear on combo multiples of 5
• New sound added for levels: combo.ogg
• Characters will now hold on a given pose for a fixed amount of time, instead of indefinitely

Misc.

• New command line argument: -sb / -sandbox; starts the game directly in Sandbox mode
• The D in the Open Manifold logo no longer has tiny gaps between the line and curve segments

v0.3.2

Second patch, same as the... last? Well, nothing rhymes with patch, but you get the gist.

Just like 0.3.1, another required Windows dependency slipped by me in testing (this one wasn't even reported on by objdump!): zlib1.dll is used by the PNG library we're using, libpng, to load images. The missing DLL meant that images would not load unless you supplied this DLL yourself.

Thanks to xen for bringing this to my attention, as well! This should the last DLL dependency issue for now. (at least, I hope so!)

No other changes have been made aside from this; non-Windows builds are effectively identical to 0.3.0 and 0.3.1 aside from the version number.

Changelog

• Fixed Windows x64 builds not loading external images due to a missing DLL.

v0.3.1

Wasn't expecting to have to release a new version this quickly, but it turns out that Windows builds didn't work out of the box this entire time due to missing DLLs. This should hopefully be fixed now; thank you to xen for bringing this to my attention!

No other changes have been made aside from this; non-Windows builds are effectively identical to 0.3.0 aside from the version number.

Changelog

• Fixed Windows x64 builds not running due to missing DLLs.