Performous: the continuation of UltraStar-NG

[jstump91]

Since they were kind enough to link to the FoF and FoFiX projects (among others) in their list of other rhythm games, I figured I would return the favor.

It's not just vocals anymore - guitar and drum support have been added, as well as support for playing FoF(iX)-format songs.

Website: http://performous.org/

License: GNU GPL v2 or later
Primarily developed for GNU/Linux and Mac OS X; for Windows, see below.

(Note for Windows users: Support for Windows is new and still rough around the edges. It should be cleaned up soon, but for now there will probably be issues. Think of it as analogous to using FoFiX svn - be prepared for things to be broken or otherwise not quite right.)


(Disclosure: I have been given push access to Performous, which is the git equivalent of having commit access to an svn repository. Don't think I've defected - while I am going to be working on both FoFiX and Performous in the future, my primary focus will remain FoFiX.)

[wolferacing]

Looks cool!

[death_au]

It's kinda the opposite to what FoFiX is: Guitar game, with drums, adding vocals. They're a vocals game that added drums and guitar.
With stump helping out with both, it should be a mutually beneficial relationship. He can help them with the guitar / drums and OS portability, and hopefully we can get some tips on vocals (although didn't part of our vocals code come from ultraStar in the first place?)

[jstump91]

Hehe... yes, FoFiX vocals did indeed start with a cut-and-paste of Performous's pitch analyzer and the construction of a Python module wrapping around it (said analyzer is written in C++). We called it "pypitch." Not since pitchbend (ugh...) has line #4 of my signature rung so true.

(As most of you know, we then took a wrong turn somewhere along the way when we constructed vocal gameplay on top of the analyzer - it works wonderfully in Performous, though, which is unsurprising since vocals were USNG's main focus and remain Performous's main focus.)

GPL ftw for allowing said code reuse.

[fatdog]

im quite interested in this project, i've been keeping an eye on it since it was mentioned on lifehacker a couple of weeks back, windows version crashes constantly for me so can't do much with it at the moment but looking forward to future releases

going by the videos i've seen looks like it has a nice way of dealing with multiple necks, and i like the idea of a c based open source music game

probably have a go at converting some of the 3d stuff if it can support it, not sure if it supports textures yet

[raynebc]

Very interesting. I remember way back when it was still just supported on Linux.

[aave000]

probably have a go at converting some of the 3d stuff if it can support it, not sure if it supports textures yet

Hello, if by 3d stuff you mean fret objects, i can say (as a guy who added them :) ) that the code supports texturing (done some testing...), but its not enabled because there is not yet any nice textures (and sadly I am no artist...), so contributions would be appreciated :P . The objects are Wavefront Obj (mtl not supported, texturing would be done by loading an image specified in code).

In general, what I miss from FoFiX are nicer visuals (in some themes), more gameplay features (drum fills!) and better configuration (although I like how Performous autodetects and autoconfigures instruments). (And FoFiX really should have a nicer default menu theme...)

[fatdog]

probably have a go at converting some of the 3d stuff if it can support it, not sure if it supports textures yet

Hello, if by 3d stuff you mean fret objects, i can say (as a guy who added them :) ) that the code supports texturing (done some testing...), but its not enabled because there is not yet any nice textures (and sadly I am no artist...), so contributions would be appreciated :P . The objects are Wavefront Obj (mtl not supported, texturing would be done by loading an image specified in code).

In general, what I miss from FoFiX are nicer visuals (in some themes), more gameplay features (drum fills!) and better configuration (although I like how Performous autodetects and autoconfigures instruments). (And FoFiX really should have a nicer default menu theme...)

Well objs are max friendly so thats good, just saving out the notes as objs should be fairly easy, or if your looking to extend the 3d feature set and need something new to experiment with then let me know

[Electro Tomato]

Ah, it's heartwarming to see two would-be competitors working together.

It's like if we started selling our nuclear secrets in exchange for a small lift on economic debt.

hint

[aave000]

Performous 0.5.0 Released

A new major release is out. Most notable addition is a dance game component, but there is many other new features and changes, like our version of starpower - GodMode (guitars only for now) and new effects.
See the full change log below.

Dance mode

StepMania .sm format
4-8 panels on each dancepad
Multiplayer (but not together with band yet)
Mines, hold and regular notes in various different game modes
Keyboard and USB dancepad support
Crappy graphics, no ITG colors and no customization (for now)

Band mode improvements

God Mode for guitars (similar to StarPower)
More graphical effects (glow, fire, ...)
Joining during game & dead coming back to life
Whammy bar gameplay
Streak counter popup
Guitar Hero X0 guitar support (not tested)

Star when singing a note well
Main menu completely reworked
Localizations: Finnish, French, German, Italian and Spanish
New song folder [Performous data]/songs

The data folders depend on the OS the game is running on, including:
On UNIX ~/.local/share/games/performous
On Windows [Application data]/performous
On all systems the data installation path (relative to executable)
Old ~/.ultrastar/songs and other such folders continue to function.

Usability

Confirmation for song quitting
Better usb controller navigation (e.g. drum/dancepads can be used)
Instrumental part skipping for singing with FoF songs
Previews start from further of the song
In-game volume control
Keyboard key repeat disabled (preparing for generic controller repeat)

Internal

Use libpng/libjpeg directly, instead of Magick++
Navigation abstraction
Windows fixes

Also note worthy is that we now have Windows and OSX binaries. As this is new and shiny, there are problems - various issues has been reported with the Windows version and OSX seems to take a long time to start, at least the first time. However, we would really appreciate testing and reporting the problems, so that they can be ironed out (we are a bit lacking in the numbers of testers on other platforms than Linux).

Read the announcement @ http://performous.org/ or head straight to the download page: http://performous.org/install.html
We also have a brand new wiki! - http://wiki.performous.org

[fatdog]

well it certainly seems improved from the last release as far as windows stability goes, wasn't able to use the last version but so far this has been crash free