0.8.9

This release expands song selection, skinning, audio, and IR integration features while improving memory usage and stability. Experimental features may change in future releases.

Song Selection & Library Management

• Expanded the functionality of random selection folders.
• Added experimental support for loading songs directly from ZIP and some RAR archives, including playback without temporary extraction. Archive detection is disabled by default.
• Moved tags and favorites to a per-player songreview.db.
• Added progress indicators for song database and difficulty table updates, and improved exception handling during updates.
• Added experimental difficulty filters and filters for charts featuring scratches, long notes, and speed changes.

Skins, JSON & Lua

• Added support for referencing various properties by name.
• Added named conditions and negated conditions for op and draw.
• Added editable text input to SkinText and applied it to the search field on the song selection screen.
• Added experimental skin previews in the skin configuration screen and the skin.skinpreview definition.
• Added skin definitions for the Practice settings screen, along with related properties and events.
• Added clipping support using clip_x, clip_y, clip_w, and clip_h.
• Added support for Unicode characters, emoji, and fallback fonts.
• Fixed an issue where the space setting for numeric displays did not scale with resolution.
• Added experimental support for WebP and animated WebP.
• Expanded the Lua APIs for properties, timers, events, files, HTTP, and audio.

Audio & Video

• Added PortAudio/CoreAudio output on macOS and PortAudio/ALSA direct output on Linux.
• Improved PortAudio device selection fallback and shutdown handling.
• Fixed 8-bit PCM playback and reduced memory usage during PCM conversion when loading audio.
• Fixed long-note handling in Guide SE.
• Added pitch-preserving time stretching for playback speed changes in Practice mode.
• Fixed noise along the right edge of videos and buffer exceptions during fast-forwarding and seeking.
• Improved video looping, initial frame display, audio track compatibility, and resource cleanup on shutdown.
• Added experimental GDX AudioDevice output.

Gameplay, Scores & IR

• Added longnoteMargin to Custom Judge.
• Added support for #SPEED. It is ignored when Constant is enabled.
• Fixed score log overwriting and added avgjudge and oldavgjudge.
• Added skin properties for the last play time, IR rankings, player scores, usernames, and more.
• Changed rival score retrieval to sequential background updates.

Performance & Stability

• Reduced memory usage and garbage collection pressure in rendering, fonts, audio, and database operations.
• Fixed resource leaks involving font textures, shared resource pools, and unused skin resources.
• Added safeguards against crashes caused by invalid settings, JSON, replay data, and other malformed input.

Compatibility Notes

• Restricted Lua access to Java, files, and some os functionality. Existing skins may require changes. A limited luajava compatibility API is also available.
• The previous mechanism allowing IR plugins to access the application directly is no longer supported. Some plugins may require updates.
• Symbolic links are no longer followed when scanning skin and system sound folders.
• Back up your configuration files and player data before updating.