Gunnar Hero version 0.20

[teamsushi]

Nickname: hardhat, Team Sushi
Projet name : Gunnar Hero
Division: PSP Game
Original enter : YES
In last NEO Compo this project won in the top 10 : NO
Project description: 

 

A guitar hero rhythm game.  It is compatible with songs from freetar.net   This is the first stable release, supporting keyboard remapping, highscores, points multipliers and support for multiple plays per session.



You will need at least one song.  This bundle does not include any songs, so I've taken some songs from the freetar site and bundled them into 4 bundles.  They are available from my Team Sushi website: http://www.teamsushi.org/gh.htm
 

A vid of the new version (without sound) is at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7jIJ6qtZho8

 

[Sektor]

Was this submitted on time? 

It got stuck on the score screen when I pushed triangle to save my name (I tested on 3.52 M33-2 in the game folder).  I didn't try game150 folder.

[gambiting]

Was this submitted on time? 

It got stuck on the score screen when I pushed triangle to save my name.

It was submitted on 21august 02:35:23 AM so
I think it's too late - rules are rules for everyone.But final decision is up to Dr.Neo

[teamsushi]

It was still very much the 20th in Hawaii.  I seems to me that that was considered acceptable last year.

Gunnar Hero and memory corruption 

It's enough to make me swear off of C++.

[Dr.neo]

yes,the deadline is their local time, not GTM.

[gambiting]

yes,the deadline is their local time, not GTM.

Ok,no problem then,I thought that we have to keep with the forum time.

[Mistabeen]

I have been waiting for a game like this on the psp, only bad problem is the controlls.

Maybe it would be better for the overall gameplay if you created a game for the PSP only, and instead of using 5 tracks for pc and consoles, use 4 tracks, that way you could use the shape buttons for input.

if you then render the image rotated 180° you can hold the psp like on portable island
http://www.gamespot.com/psp/action/portableresort/index.html (watch the video)

if you don't feel like doing that, could you look into supporting frets on fire tracks then?

[teamsushi]

Well, I planed to make a game for PSP only.  The natural is to use the 4 controls and then you get "Banjo Hero" or something (with only 4 strings).   Really for 4 controls, I thought that PSP Revolution (which uses Step Mania files) did it better than I could. 

You can always encode easier music.  But a library of 500-1000 songs for freetar hero was just too tempting to me, especially since I couldn't convince any beta testers at the time to make some custom tracks for the new game. 

Someone on the forums suggested L-trigger, triangle, circle, cross, start as the 5 colour buttons, and then you really can handle it more like a guitar, with one finger on each button. 

You are the second person to request a 180° rotation.  It probably wouldn't be that hard to add that as an option.  I'll make a note.  In the video, how did the player know what was going on on screen?  He didn't seem to be looking down. 

I realize that Frets on Fire is what everyone wants support for.  It is on my todo list (even in the Readme).  If I had tried FoF before I decided to support Freetar it would have been my first choice.  I'll probably add it on my next major revision. 

[Mistabeen]

you could always  make it possible so people can choose their own controls, that way people could customise them if they rather play 4 string songs right
there still is a difference between DDR and guitar hero, even in gameplay, so it wouldn't be the same.

and sure the player wasn't looking down in the video, but that's becaus it was a promitional video and also he wasmostlikely freestyling with it, so no need to look on the screen then.

the good thing about FoF is that it has difficulty settings for each song, that way people can play easy songs if they prefer 3 or 4 string songs

[Mistabeen]

and a second post today, I took the liberty of editing some textures, if you are interested to use them just contact me. They where some old Illustrations I had laying around I never realy used for anything.




just a few remarcks tho, some of them you are most likely aware of just adding it here, trying to help out

- if possible, use a bigger sky texture, this one was rather low res, so I couldn't add any details to it like clouds
- if possible add crowd in front of the podium, for all I care these would be long strips of images place liked this
_________
  _________
_________
  _________
and make them wave (or even with a texture like the guitar player) from side to side, alternating betwene lines tho (first line moves left, second right, 3rd left, 4th right,...) But this would add so much more atmopshere to the game, right now it seems a bit empty the backdrop.
- the top of the skybox shows black becaus there is no texture sometimes, the same with the grass in front of the podium, just another graphic glitch that has nothing to do  with gameplay, but it adds to the atmoshpere ingame.
- use other camera angles, the ones you have now aren't bad, but it would be nice to see a camera closeup on one of the figures on stage sometimes, or maybe the camera that flies by the heads of the crowd (in case a crowd would be used :p)

anyway, hope you like my skins, keep on going with this project

[teamsushi]

I have a plug in architecture for the camera angles.  It accepts camera line paths and camera overall angles from an ASE file which can be exported by 3DStudio Max.  If you are interested in making some new ones, I should be able to set you up with what you need to position the camera.  I would enthusiastically accept new camera paths.

The sky texture is so tiny to up the frame rate.  I think that you could enlarge the sky texture a bit bigger without issue, but currently it is put in vram, and I think vram is full.  The next major thing I plan to add support for is paletted textures (currently I only do 32 bit textures), then the same varm could support a texture twice as tall and twice as wide, in the same space.  Also if I move the MP3 decoding away from libmad, but use the new code from Cooleyes that used the VME hardware decoder, I'll have plenty of cpu to spare on rendering.

The missing floor and sky tiles are a result of an annoying hardware limitation of the PSP, that any triangle that has even one corner outside of the 4096x4096 virtual screen is not drawn.  This mostly affects ground and sky tiles, since they are distorted near the viewer.  To solve this problems there are really only 4 strategies that work:
 
 - choose very careful camera angles (but it wasn't very artisically satisfying)
 - move the camera farther away from the ground or sky (because then the projected triangle is less likely to be distorted, and so it stays within the "guard-band" of the virtual screen).
 - subdivide the tiles of the ground and sky (which is a trade off of performance and the missing tiles)
 - clip the border tiles to the screen or guardband.

For Gunnar Hero, I mainly had Meyitzo the artist do subdivision of the ground a sky tiles.  I did have a clipper working, but the Gunnar Hero version is too slow.   For the subway scene in Last Call I made an automated subdivider and clipper and both work quite well.  I will be using these new things for my upcoming skateboard game.  I expect I will eventually port them back to Gunnar Hero's code base too.

A crowd is planned for, and I think that there is even a loader set up for it.  I've just never made the crowd I guess.  It could certainly be animated.  Maybe in the next major version I'll add that in.

But you probably didn't want to know all of that technical discussion.