Ultrastar Deluxe 1.1 Final Released

[Alastor]

Karaoke game inspired by the Singstar™ game available on the Playstation®. It allows up to six players to sing along with music using microphones in order to score points, depending on the pitch of the voice and the rhythm of singing.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/ultrastardx/

Changes :
Many improvements were made since our previous versions:
Platform independent (Mac, Linux, Windows)
Visualisations with projectM
Mouse and unicode support
Video preview
Background videos and music in the GUI
Microphone configuration assistance
And many more other enhancements…

Ultrastar Deluxe 1.1
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platform
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upd: platform independent code base
upd: endianness independent code base
add: Linux and FreeBSD support (x86 and x86_64)
add: Mac OS X support (Intel 10.5/10.6)

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audio
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upd: reimplemented audio playback and input
upd: pluggable audio/video modules
- Bass input/playback/decoder (windows only)
- SDL audio playback (all platforms)
- Portaudio playback/input (all platforms)
- FFmpeg decoder (all platforms)
upd: video files enabled for the #MP3 tag (using the first audio stream of a video)
add: Microphone Passthrough (experimental)
fix: a start without a microphone plugged-in does not result in a crash
add: background music

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video
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upd: revised video decoder implementation
upd: windows: updated FFmpeg binary
upd: performance improvements
fix: updated ffmpeg dlls to fix black preview bug after seek

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interface
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upd: video backgrounds for themes
upd: Song Screen: performance improvements with many songs
upd: theme change w/o restarting Ultrastar Deluxe
upd: new score display in Sing Screen (animated)
upd: Score Screen redesigned (animations)
upd: Deluxe theme enhanced (ty mog)
upd: ability to select party modes before the game
upd: default skin and color are read from themes and skins
add: visualisations (due to projectM) as background while singing
upd: Truetype fonts (due to freetype6) instead of the old bitmap fonts
-> support for international character sets
-> smoother type face
upd: new lyrics effect: Shift
upd: more than one additional song path can be set in config.ini (SongDirX)
upd: microphone settings simplified
- vu-meter for incoming signals on the selected input
- display of input volume
- adjust input volume by using ´+´ and ´-´ keys
- threshold display (gray bar)
- adjust threshold with ´T´ key
upd: international keyboard layout (uniform shortcuts on QWERTZ, QWERTY, AZERTY, ...)
rem: removed confusing solmization option
add: text reflections in themes
add: note lines can be switched off in options
add: mouse support (hardware and software)
add: texture type "Colorized": Texture is colorized by adjusting the hue value (see HSB color model)
add: overlay when pause modus is activated in Sing Screen
fix: some "Screens=2" bugs
add: Unicode support: All "printable" characters should work with the input fields (e.g. players´ names)
add: resizable window
add: toggle between fullscreen and windowed mode with ALT+Return (Linux and FreeBSD only)
fix: mapped same function to Return and Enter (numpad)
add: video preview during song selection
add: toggle displayed time with ´T´ key between current position, remaining or total playback time
add: mic configuration assistance: error messages are displayed if multiple or no mics were assigned to a player.

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internal
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upd: synchronization of lyrics, video and audio
(timers were not synchronized until now)
you can be choose via config.ini ("SyncTo" option) between:
- synchronize lyrics and video to audio (default)
- synchronize audio and video to lyrics
- no synchronization
upd: DLL interface replaced by Lua plugin interface
upd: Select Object replaced by Select Slide
upd: improved stability and major code base cleanup
fix: solved some bugs/crashes in Midi/Kar converter
upd: Vista/Win7 conform: configuration files is saved in the user directory. Running USDX from CD/DVD should also be possible from now on.
upd: cover thumbnails are saved in an SQLite database
-> more reliable than the old solution; small performance loss on start
fix: cursor freeze after Alt-Tab fixed through change of SDL.dll
fix: better detection of ending at songs/videos while using FFmpeg
upd: windows: user data will be placed in installation directory if user has write permissions, else it will be stored in APPDATA

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song files
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upd: UTF8 support
upd: #Encoding tag
- CP1250: Central/Eastern european encoding (should not be used for new files)
- CP1252: Western european encoding; was used as default before 1.1 (should not be used for new files)
- Locale: uses system encoding (should not be used for new files!)
- UTF8: text file is encoded in UTF8 (recommended)
upd: select default encoding (if #Encoding tag is missing) via the "Encoding" option in config.ini.
- Possible values:
- "Auto" (Default), "UTF8",
- "CP1252" (USDX<1.1 default), "CP1250" (old US default), "Locale" (System encoding)
- IMPORTANT:
- "CP1252", "CP1250" and "Locale" are for backward compatibility only, new files should always be encoded in UTF-8 with BOM
upd: support for UTF8 BOM (new standard in Ultrastar Deluxe)
upd: #Year tag is read and saved
fix: does not crash any longer if there is no linebreak in lyrics file
fix: blank lyrics lines are ignored
fix: editor does not delete unknown tags any longer from song txt files