GuitarHero/RockBand fans... side project anyone?

[Rikki Cattermole]

On Thursday, 12 December 2013 at 12:17:22 UTC, Manu wrote:
> On 12 December 2013 21:14, Rikki Cattermole 
> <alphaglosined at 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.
>>>
>>
>> I would be happy to help with the gui side of thing just to 
>> get DOOGLE
>> more inline with what is required from it. Assuming DOOGLE is 
>> ok for it.
>> It is designed to work on top of games so it is perfect for 
>> this type of
>> thing I'm just worried of its state and being ready.
>>
>
> It would be a good test for any UI framework. Hooking it up to
> project-specific input api, and producing project specific 
> outputs (in the
> way of rendering backend).
> The biggest challenge for any UI system though, is tooling. You 
> can't be
> expected to lay out rich and natural UI's by typing magic 
> numbers in text
> files... are there's open-source tools you use for construction 
> and layout?

Currently its all hard coded. At some point I want to build a 
WYSIWYG editor for it. However there is a lot of infrastructure 
that would go into that unfortunately so not really short term 
goal.
Its unfortunately really does need I need to do x for reason y 
please provide it type of thing. You can only do so much 
theoretical planning of the library without getting bored.