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Frets on Fire - Guitar Hero for Linux/Windows
abyssi writes "Frets on Fire, for Linux and Windows, play with your keyboard-alternative to the ever-so-popular Guitar Hero, has been released at ASSEMBLY '06 demo party's Game Development competition together with 13 other experimental, indie games including a new game from the creators of the popular Dismount series. ASSEMBLY '06 runs from 3rd to 6th of August in Helsinki, Finland and enjoys over 5000 persons in attendance. A 24h/day webcast is available at AssemblyTV.net starting Thursday 3.8.2006 at 14:00."
The charm in games like Guitar Hero and DDR is in the novel way that the player interacts with the game. If you take that out, you're literally left with hitting keys in time to music. What's the attraction? I've never understood games like this or Stepmania or the various other clones.
There are MIDI pickups available for regular guitars which will transform what you play into MIDI input for a computer. Maybe someone should make a game like this which can be fun like Guitar Hero, but actually use a real guitar!
Just grap a USB adapter from a vendor like Lik Sang and you can use your Guitar Hero Guitar or DDR dancepad on the PC, making it more like the original that they're cloned from.
(From the Laws of Japanese Animation) Law of Inherent Combustibility -- Everything explodes. Everything.
If you are an indie, make something new and interesting...don't rehash what already is out there and done better. Most of fun of Guitar Hero comes from using the controller. For awhile, my guitar wasn't working...after messing around a bit I found that I could play the game with a regular controller. It was interesting to figure out the controls...but it would make a horrible game. Taking this and putting it on the keyboard is pointless. It would be like taking a game that is designed for the Wii and its controller and putting it on the PC with a keyboard. Sure, it can be done. Should it...I don't think so.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
The real question is, "How do I do windmills with my keyboard?"
Perhaps it wold work if you picked your keyboard up and held it like a guitar. (Warning: This may get you strange looks.)
If this signature is witty enough, maybe somebody will like me.
Pure trolling/flamebait, but he's right. In fact, this is the first game I've seen that released with both a Windows and a Linux binary. But then again, I don't play that many games on my PC.
Ambrosia Software and Freeverse have both been doing "Mac stuff" for years and are still going strong.
My brother is quite a talented guitarist but I don't think this would automatically mean that he would "pwn" at guitar heroes (At least that's my theory; feel free to correct me if I'm wrong). I did read that earlier article ( Guitar Hero Hacks) but I still think the mechanics are too different to the actual thing. However I believe that people who are proficient drummers would "pwn" at DrumMania because the mechanics are pretty much the same. Of course Guitar Heroes is made to be a game but I think it would be interesting to see a Guitar Heroes clone that is "backwards compatible" with people who are already musicians.
I hear there is this small shop nobody has ever heard of that makes some kind of chat client with dragons in it. But what would I know, I'm a Windows guy.
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
My prayers have been answered, finally Guitar Hero without having to throw money Sony's way!
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
If half the people commenting actually tried the game first then they'd stop making stupid comments about this just being a matter of hitting the right keys like some sort of musical typing tutor (a la Typing of the Dead, though actually I thought that was quite amusing, too). Holding the keyboard upside down and using the F keys as frets may not be as good as a special guitar controller, but it still rocks.
If you had actually bothered to play it before complaining about how the keyboard is crap, you'd have discovered that whilst you use the keyboard, you use it LIKE A GUITAR. You hold it guitar-style with the fingers of one hand on the F1-F4 keys, and use the thumb of the other hand on Enter to pick. A little bit tricky to get used to, but it does a fairly good job of "emulating" the guitar hero controller.
So... what was your point again?
All the UT games have been dual win/lin binaries on the disc. Mac version usually follows later...
I could see big problems with trying to get MIDI notes out of a real guitar's (or really any instrument's) output due to the aforementioned issues with polyphonics, vibrato, and other massive amounts of combinations/differentials.
However, what if you had a program where you could take a guitar, and tune it to the application rather than the other way around, with possibly a bit of back-tuning to compensate for guitar/string differences. After all, all the app needs to know is if the input, with a variation for error, matches the expected result.
It would take some serious CPU power to determine from the thousands to millions of possible combinations what the actual input was, but if you're just saying "does the input match this expected (correct for the game) result, within a particular deviation", it should be a fair bit more doabl.
I downloaded this game and was amazed at the polished quality of it. That and it was an immense amount of fun.
I do find it rather discouraging, though, that a demo hacked up at a conference can be better than 90% of other linux games, most of which have been in development for months or years.
Perhaps we need to start sponsoring more promising coders to go to these kind of events.
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
Funnily enough, the chat client with dragons runs while this linux game gives me problems similar to these, and i am not surprisingly also on a gma900 type chipset.
Fanmade songs for the game may be found here