Clone Hero (And in the future StrikeLine)

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weirdpeople
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Clone Hero (And in the future StrikeLine)

Postby weirdpeople » Wed May 06, 2020 12:12 pm

Hey everyone, it's been a while since i've been active around these parts. So this will be a bit of a where I've been the last few years and a general post about Clone Hero for those of you who aren't familiar with it . So figured I might as well post this here.

History
As many may have figured out by now, I no longer work on FoFiX. To be honest the code is a mess, and python is too slow for the scope of things i wanted to accomplish. And in general as advice for people in the future looking to create a GH/RB like game, please don't look at FoFiX as a good example of how to do things... just don't(unless the core problems with it actually get fixed over time). Linkid has taken over maintenance of the codebase as many may have likely figured out so far.

Back in 2014 I started work on a new project in C++ that was open source https://github.com/OpenRhythm/OpenRhythm but not having other active contributors was demotivating at best. This was as far as that project got: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F_83mJR-Zbg

Now back to clone hero, in April 2017 around the first pre-alpha public releases of clone hero, i started helping out Srylain, the creator of clone hero with mainly just advice on things about midi and various other things about gameplay and all sorts of things. Then after a year after the release of clone hero v.19 i finally convinced him to help him setup git for the project so that we could get more developers helping with the project, which we did within a few months we had 4 developers on the project. v.20 was the first release developed with the help of multiple actual developers, everything before that was all srylain's doing. For v.23 srylain implemented the online networking support, and ARPP3 has implemented the new menu designs.

I wanted to help out more than i was though, but i didn't know C# or Unity at the time so i had to learn it. It was around June or July of 2018 before i was fully comfortable with C#, Unity, and the codebase. Then v.21 was done by me, and another developer Oscar, and v.22 was mostly done by me as well. v.23 was a whole other beast though (We managed to get a song officially licensed from DragonForce?!)
Ever since then I've been like mostly the lead developer of clone hero, but that's more just basically because I'm one of the more active people on the team, not really a set title or anything.

So now some history about Clone Hero. Clone Hero itself goes back a long time. Srylain was originally working on the project all the way back to 2012, but in XNA instead of unity. At first it was just a 2d game and it was called GuitarRPG: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mOj3VPZuzX0 but it eventually made it's way to 3d: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mQcESdfrpXI

After a couple of years with XNA being no longer developed srylain switched over to unity, and so you had this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y74BvWLZ8Oo

After this he restarted the project somewhat https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LckfDYZxVcA and the current version of clone hero is descended from this version. Which is why internally the project is still called 2guitargame (including our git repo haha)

So clone hero is currently the largest in terms of player base of these sorts of projects that I'm aware of. With around 144K monthly average players at the time of writing.

Clone Hero

The current features of the game are(mainly geared vs fofix):
  • Online 4-player Multiplayer
  • Local 4-player multiplayer
  • 5-fret classic Guitar/Bass
  • GH:L style 6-fret Guitar/Bass
  • Fully featured practice mode
  • Song Speedup support
  • Equal support for charts in both .chart and .mid formats
  • Open notes
  • Forced HOPOs
  • Proper time signature handling
  • Proper HOPO marking
  • Significantly better performance
  • Streamer oriented features
  • Saveable Playlists
  • Easy song browser searching and sorting
  • Much faster song loading/scanning performance. +Song cache for speeding this up even more.
  • Score saving
  • Nice ui

Here is the latest release video(video embeds seem broken atm):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OCsLYR2GIDU

Our website is located here for downloads and news/blog posts: https://clonehero.net/ or you can join our discord server which is where most things actually happen: https://discord.gg/Hsn4Cgu

Now for the next release v.24, we are working on drums support both Pro and X+ will be supported, and we have a PTB currently in progress. The game moving forward also has a desktop launcher that helps with updating the game, and managing log files, or changing your game settings outside of the game.

The StrikeLine Future
Now for the future after v.24 we will be working on re-doing a lot of the core of the game. As certain parts of the project are getting a bit of a mess/antiquated or just not extensible for what we want to do in the future. We will be getting rid of the Guitar Hero 5/WOR graphics under this period as well. Then when we come out on the otherside we will be releasing the game under the new name StrikeLine. We want to start carving our own path here, we've set our eyes not on just making a clone but to make the best rhythm game period and part of that means shedding the "Clone" association. The core gameplay we are all familiar with is going to be sticking around though that's for certain.

Some of the main things we have planned for StrikeLine:
  • New menu system
  • New framerate independent hit detection system
  • New custom audio system
  • New game assets
  • Lots of core refactoring for better maintainability, testing, and extensibility
Developer of clone hero, and Former FoFiX developer
ONAONEMEU
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Re: Clone Hero (And in the future StrikeLine)

Postby ONAONEMEU » Thu May 07, 2020 8:43 pm

weirdpeople wrote:So clone hero is currently the largest in terms of player base of these sorts of projects that I'm aware of. With around 144K monthly average players at the time of writing.
Do you have data on how many are playing with gamepad mode? It's something that I'm curious about,since it's the first (proper) clone to have that mode,and was something that was often requested in the FoF/PS era. If only that was a thing in FoF/PS,i'd easily have 1000+ hours of playtime

[*]Equal support for charts in both .chart and .mid formats
Also the first Clone to do this. Never thought I'd the see the day when the GH and FoF/PS community would be "united",even tho some people have a irrational fear of anything that comes from FoF.

[*]New framerate independent hit detection system
Now that'll be interesting,no more setting the fps to crazy amounts. From what i got,is Strikeline going to made from the ground up?
Song Reupload Thread (Will be deleted by MEGA on 2022-01-26. "Thanks" again fortumo)
weirdpeople
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Re: Clone Hero (And in the future StrikeLine)

Postby weirdpeople » Fri May 22, 2020 6:04 pm

ONAONEMEU wrote:
weirdpeople wrote:So clone hero is currently the largest in terms of player base of these sorts of projects that I'm aware of. With around 144K monthly average players at the time of writing.
Do you have data on how many are playing with gamepad mode? It's something that I'm curious about,since it's the first (proper) clone to have that mode,and was something that was often requested in the FoF/PS era. If only that was a thing in FoF/PS,i'd easily have 1000+ hours of playtime

Don't have any specific data about gamepad mode sorry. I do know that not that many people use it though in general. I do want to keep this and maybe evolve it and improve on it in the future though. I have some interesting ideas that i think could improve the experience.

ONAONEMEU wrote:[*]Equal support for charts in both .chart and .mid formats
Also the first Clone to do this. Never thought I'd the see the day when the GH and FoF/PS community would be "united",even tho some people have a irrational fear of anything that comes from FoF.

Yeah we've even been continuing to expand the format making sure that both .chart and midi charts are generally at feature parity. We usually work with exilelord, raynbc, firefox(Moonscraper), and other people in the community to make sure that these additions are widely supported in tools.

ONAONEMEU wrote:[*]New framerate independent hit detection system
Now that'll be interesting,no more setting the fps to crazy amounts. From what i got,is Strikeline going to made from the ground up?

Yeah, it's not going to be a 100% rewrite but we are going to be rewriting significant portions of the code yes. We want to re-use as much as possible so we don't take too long with this revamp of the project. We don't need a FoFiX 4.0 situation on our hands lmao. (Though the code for clone hero is 99% better than fofix ever was so not really even the same sort of thing)
Last edited by weirdpeople on Fri May 22, 2020 6:05 pm, edited 3 times in total.
Developer of clone hero, and Former FoFiX developer
ONAONEMEU
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Re: Clone Hero (And in the future StrikeLine)

Postby ONAONEMEU » Sat Jul 18, 2020 8:59 am

weirdpeople wrote:...

Something else I wanted to say in regards of gameplay,is that at least in gamepad mode,the timing to hit strum notes (and strum open notes) seems weird,behaving differently from when you hit a HOPO. It doesn't happen every time,but I can definitely "feel" that there's something weird about that when compared to other games and clones (mostly coming from GH3 and Phase Shift)

I'm not that good in standard (strum) mode to test it myself,but I've seen in the past some people who play with a guitar having a similar issue (FrostedGH).
Song Reupload Thread (Will be deleted by MEGA on 2022-01-26. "Thanks" again fortumo)
maojolly
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Re: Clone Hero (And in the future StrikeLine)

Postby maojolly » Tue Jan 12, 2021 10:41 pm

Looking great so far!

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