Some gameplay considerations

[lahir2]

Hello !
First I want to express my gratitude to callisto for developing Guitar Zero 2, and also to Travis Baldree, who made the first Guitar hero clone for the PC. Very great job indeed !

I own Guitar Hero on PS2, and turned to the indie softwares because I wanted to play other songs that those that were available in the following Guitar Hero versions

I tried to compare how the same Guitar hero 1 songs was handled by the softwares, in terms of wether notes played were considered "in time" or not.

I took 2 songs, played in Hard mode, without using HOPOs :
Sharp-Dressed Man and Spanish Castle Magic
I used Guitar Zero, Guitar Zero 2 Beta 4 u4a, with video put on same TV used with the PS2

First, it seems that playing in full-screen generates some more time between strumming a fret and the softawre taking this into account - occasionning some errors because strums were checked as "too late" - I encountered this behaviour both with Guitar Zero and Guitar Zero 2 ; maybe this problem is mainly the fault of the way controllers are handled on PC ? Especially with PS2-USB converters ?

While playing in windowed mode, I found Guitar Zero to be more faithful to "PS2 Guitar Hero 1" than Guitar Zero 2, for the strums timing considerations.
Guitar Zero 2, even in windowed mode, seems to refused some notes as played "too late", as Guitar Zero 1 seems very faithful to the original
I played the 2 songs on the 3 configurations :
1) 2 times on PS2 Guitar Hero 1
2) 2 times on PC Guitar Zero 2
3) 2 times on PC Guitar Zero
Here are the percentages I got :
Spanish Castle Magic : 98% - 93% - 96%
Sharp Dressed Man : 97% - 93% - 97%

I think that 3 or 4 % difference is enough to think that there is truly a gameplay difference that deserves to be looked at

I can't do the same with the other console games which I don't own - maybe others could do this ?

It would be great for Guitar Zero 2 to be able to be tweaked to act more as Guitar Hero 1, 2 or 3 for the convenience of the players
A difference that comes to my mind is speed of scrolling, that seems more or less the same on Guitar Hero 1, and which accelerates with other versions - not speaking of the "hyperspeed" feature of GH3

And a last note about windowed mode : I could be convenient to handle screen savers, maybe disabling or delaying them while a song plays, to avoid a black screen during a song (quite disturbing !)

So, if anyone agrees or disagrees with my perception of this gameplay point, or wants to do the same with songs from other Guitar Hero versions, please tell it !

And many many greetings again to Callisto for doing such a great job - the shaders optimisation for instance was very nice to people with graphic cards quite old, and updates all bring something nice.

[crazy.neo]

That could simply be the adaptors fault, bad drivers, or poor configuration. However, what seems more likely to me is simply a heavy configuration, that may push ocasional visual lag, that may lead to a lag in note registering too. Maybe using a updated version or a 2D Mod?

[aduro]

If you have ever played Guitar Hero 2 or Rock Band you can tell right away that GZ2 is not even close to accurate with the note window. It's not your configuration or a visual lag's fault.

[lahir2]

I have wait to post until update 4a because I had visual lags (have a 9800Pro graphic Card ; now visual is smooth, and I checked CPU usage in windowed mode : it keeps on 40-50%

For me, there could be some improvements of the accuracy of GZ2, but this is a point that don't seem to concern many people - didn't read many post about this.

It is important to be sure that the notes.mid is used for a song, not song.dat : they can be the cause of many rythms glitches. I'm not sure of the file taken if they are both present (if you used the songs in GZ1 for instance) : just move or trash the .dat files
Window mode seems more faithful than full-screen too

Maybe that some notes close to others just have to be played as hopos, and if you don't do it, the game will consider you strummed one time too much ?

With auto-sync on (which is a great feature), I can't adjust the global sync of the song, else I would have tried some offsets ; I think that 1/10th of a second could be enough to solve the false "too late strums" problem

[callisto2002]

lahir2
If notes.mid AND song.ini are present, these files will be preferred. If any of them is missing, the game would fall back on the song.dat file.

[flipsk8r1409]

lahir2 said:

Maybe that some notes close to others just have to be played as hopos, and if you don't do it, the game will consider you strummed one time too much ?

thats the way its been for me i cant strum on hopos

[hulkhaugen]

i hear ppl crying about hitting hopo's, but i don't have any hitting them without loosing my notestreak. i think there's a driver related problem or virus in lahir2's machine..

[bob78h]

no its a bug that you can't strum hopos on time, you have to do it early, because gz2 has such a large timing window for each note.

[aduro]

Also the note window for the hammer ons is too big