On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 10:43:24 UTC, Manu wrote:
> So, I'm a massive fan of music games. I'll shamefully admit that I was
> tragically addicted to Dance Dance Revolution about 10 years ago. Recently,
> it's Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
>
> I quite like the band ensemble games, they're good party games, and great
> rhythm practise that's actually applicable to real instrument skills too.
>
> The problem is though, that Neversoft and Harmonix completely fucked up the
> GH and RB franchises. Licensing problems, fragmented tracklists. It's
> annoying that all the songs you want to play are spread across literally 10
> or so different games, and you need to constantly change disc's if you want
> to play the songs you like.
>
> I've been meaning to kick off a guitar hero clone since GH2 came out. I
> started one years ago as a fork of my Guitar Hero song editor for PS2, and
> I added support for drums before GH4 or RB were conceived, but then when
> they announced those games they stole my thunder and it went into
> hibernation.
>
> I'm very keen to resurrect the project (well, start a new one, with clean
> code, in D).
> Are there any music game nerds hanging around here who would be interested
> in joining a side project like this? It's a lot more motivating, and much
> more fun to work in a small team.
>
> It's an interesting union of skills; rendering, audio processing,
> super-low-latency synchronisation, mini and communications processing,
> animation, UI and presentation.
>
> I have done all this stuff commercially, so I can act as a sort of project
> lead of people are interested, but haven't tried to write that sort of
> software before.
>
> It also seems like a good excuse to kick off a fairly large scale and
> performance intensive D project, which I like to do from time to time.

Have you considered Step mania and Fret on fire ? (Huge fan of musical games here too)

On 13/12/13 22:44, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> On 12/13/13 12:17 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>> On 2013-12-13 21:03, Marco Leise wrote:
>>
>>> Hey, I keep drumming on everything I find. Tables, stools and
>>> especially my cheap keyboard. That keyboard has a certain
>>> crunch to it. I'm worried about my notebook though. I hope the
>>> hard disk can handle the shocks. :) I just can't keep calm to a
>>> good rock song.
>>> But whenever a real drummer sees me drumming on a bar table,
>>> they gotta show me that there is more to it and I wonder how
>>> one can ever learn to coordinate two hands and the feet to play
>>> different rhythms and above that hit the correct drum.
>>
>> I've been drumming so much on my desk that the finish (or what it's
>> called) has been wear done.
>
> I'll just leave this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNn3pJKaV2s

How many drummers is the DConf band going to have? :-D

On Dec 14, 2013 8:15 AM, "Joseph Rushton Wakeling" < joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> wrote:
>
> On 13/12/13 22:44, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>
>> On 12/13/13 12:17 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
>>>
>>> On 2013-12-13 21:03, Marco Leise wrote:
>>>
>>>> Hey, I keep drumming on everything I find. Tables, stools and
>>>> especially my cheap keyboard. That keyboard has a certain
>>>> crunch to it. I'm worried about my notebook though. I hope the
>>>> hard disk can handle the shocks. :) I just can't keep calm to a
>>>> good rock song.
>>>> But whenever a real drummer sees me drumming on a bar table,
>>>> they gotta show me that there is more to it and I wonder how
>>>> one can ever learn to coordinate two hands and the feet to play
>>>> different rhythms and above that hit the correct drum.
>>>
>>>
>>> I've been drumming so much on my desk that the finish (or what it's
>>> called) has been wear done.
>>
>>
>> I'll just leave this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNn3pJKaV2s
>
>
> How many drummers is the DConf band going to have? :-D
>

Well we need at least two if we want to do a King Crimson cover.  ;)

Regards
-- 
Iain Buclaw

*(p < e ? p++ : p) = (c & 0x0f) + '0';

On Dec 14, 2013 10:26 AM, "Iain Buclaw" <ibuclaw@gdcproject.org> wrote:
>
>
> On Dec 14, 2013 8:15 AM, "Joseph Rushton Wakeling" <
joseph.wakeling@webdrake.net> wrote:
> >
> > On 13/12/13 22:44, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
> >>
> >> On 12/13/13 12:17 PM, Jacob Carlborg wrote:
> >>>
> >>> On 2013-12-13 21:03, Marco Leise wrote:
> >>>
> >>>> Hey, I keep drumming on everything I find. Tables, stools and
> >>>> especially my cheap keyboard. That keyboard has a certain
> >>>> crunch to it. I'm worried about my notebook though. I hope the
> >>>> hard disk can handle the shocks. :) I just can't keep calm to a
> >>>> good rock song.
> >>>> But whenever a real drummer sees me drumming on a bar table,
> >>>> they gotta show me that there is more to it and I wonder how
> >>>> one can ever learn to coordinate two hands and the feet to play
> >>>> different rhythms and above that hit the correct drum.
> >>>
> >>>
> >>> I've been drumming so much on my desk that the finish (or what it's
> >>> called) has been wear done.
> >>
> >>
> >> I'll just leave this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNn3pJKaV2s
> >
> >
> > How many drummers is the DConf band going to have? :-D
> >
>
> Well we need at least two if we want to do a King Crimson cover.  ;)
>

And as well as a drum kit, we could have people on specific percussive instruments - djembe, anyone?  :)

Yeah, both have come up earlier in this thread.

I used to contribute to step mania 10-12 years ago. I did the Xbox port, among other details. It's a project for a different time. It's not as extensible as it could be.

FoF... well... it's written in python. I'll leave it at that ;)
I'd say fof is pretty terrible...
On 14 Dec 2013 17:45, "deadalnix" <deadalnix@gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 10:43:24 UTC, Manu wrote:
>
>> So, I'm a massive fan of music games. I'll shamefully admit that I was
>> tragically addicted to Dance Dance Revolution about 10 years ago.
>> Recently,
>> it's Guitar Hero and Rock Band.
>>
>> I quite like the band ensemble games, they're good party games, and great rhythm practise that's actually applicable to real instrument skills too.
>>
>> The problem is though, that Neversoft and Harmonix completely fucked up
>> the
>> GH and RB franchises. Licensing problems, fragmented tracklists. It's
>> annoying that all the songs you want to play are spread across literally
>> 10
>> or so different games, and you need to constantly change disc's if you
>> want
>> to play the songs you like.
>>
>> I've been meaning to kick off a guitar hero clone since GH2 came out. I started one years ago as a fork of my Guitar Hero song editor for PS2, and I added support for drums before GH4 or RB were conceived, but then when they announced those games they stole my thunder and it went into hibernation.
>>
>> I'm very keen to resurrect the project (well, start a new one, with clean
>> code, in D).
>> Are there any music game nerds hanging around here who would be interested
>> in joining a side project like this? It's a lot more motivating, and much
>> more fun to work in a small team.
>>
>> It's an interesting union of skills; rendering, audio processing, super-low-latency synchronisation, mini and communications processing, animation, UI and presentation.
>>
>> I have done all this stuff commercially, so I can act as a sort of project lead of people are interested, but haven't tried to write that sort of software before.
>>
>> It also seems like a good excuse to kick off a fairly large scale and performance intensive D project, which I like to do from time to time.
>>
>
> Have you considered Step mania and Fret on fire ? (Huge fan of musical
> games here too)
>

On 2013-12-13 22:44, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> I'll just leave this here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TNn3pJKaV2s

Hehe, nice. Although I can basically only hear the drums.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2013-12-14 01:37, Marco Leise wrote:

> Take Jacob Carlborg for example. I thought he is a dead
> serious guy who writes a serialization library and would not
> be drumming on his desk till the paint is gone, because he's
> just too serious to be moved by music. Keep telling stories
> guys!

Haha, far from. If that were the case I would probably be done by now :). I'm listening to music all the time. Unfortunately they don't like that at work, neither the drumming on the desk :(

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

On 2013-12-14 11:26, Iain Buclaw wrote:

> Well we need at least two if we want to do a King Crimson cover.  ;)

It's always fun with more than one drum kit on the stage.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg

Am Fri, 13 Dec 2013 21:25:13 +0100
schrieb Jacob Carlborg <doob@me.com>:

> Unfortunately most games suck on Mac OS X. I don't know if they're just badly coded, if it's the drivers or the OpenGL implementation. Many games that work perfectly fine at highest resolution and detail level on Windows is barley playable on low settings on Mac OS X. Only a few games are good on Mac OS X.

Read about Valve's port of Left 4 Dead 2 here: http://blogs.valvesoftware.com/linux/faster-zombies/

They say their Linux port ran at 6 FPS before they started optimizing. But it was also in part due to a bad OpenGL implementation. (I remember even Doom 3 running at 2 FPS on my previous PC until the drivers were updated. -.-)

Anyways here is an excerpt:

"[…] Running Left 4 Dead 2 on Windows 7 with Direct3D drivers, we get 270.6 FPS as a baseline. The data is generated from an internal test case.

When we started with Linux, the initial version we got up and
running was at 6 FPS. This is typical of an initial successful
port to a new platform.
Performance improvements fall into several categories:

* Modifying our game to work better with the kernel
* Modifying our game to work better with OpenGL
* Optimizing the graphics driver

An example of the first category would be changing our memory
allocator to use more appropriate Linux functions. This was
achieved by implementing the Source engine small block heap
to work under Linux. The second category would include reducing
overhead in calling OpenGL, and extending our renderer with new
interfaces for better encapsulation of OpenGL and Direct3D. […]"

-- 
Marco

On 2013-12-14 03:48, Manu wrote:

> I've done mac ports before. In terms of scheduling though, it always
> gets barely any time or attention.
> Bare minimum to get it running, and doesn't help that it's usually being
> written by a windows programmer working against his will :)

Yeah, I guess that's one of the biggest problems, it's always ports. Mac is rarely part of the main platforms. And we shouldn't even start talking about Cider (commercial version of Wine).

BTW, I read on a forum that for Bioshock Infinity they deliberately remove the highest resolutions and visual details on the Mac version because Mac OS X only supports OpenGL 3.x. But now with the latest Mac OS X Mavericks which supports OpenGL 4.x they have released patches to enable the highest resolutions and visual details. I'm wondering how much of an issue this is, too old OpenGL implementation.

I'm not so experienced with game development but I would think that it's fairly easy to build cross-platform games, at least for computers. For other applications it seems like the biggest issue is the GUI. But since most games use a completely custom GUI anyway that wouldn't be a so much of a problem.

-- 
/Jacob Carlborg