Over the weekend, our family played way too m...

January 21, 2008 by Adam in NWN2

Over the weekend, our family played way too much Guitar Hero (look here for the video - I'm at the very end). It inspired me to revamp the Lute Hero game I've been fiddling with lately.

There's now a working GUI with numbers that float down from the top and a background that smoothly scrolls. The hardest part was getting it to synchronize properly with the music. The DelayCommand wasn't accurate enough, so I ended up calculating the number of centiseconds from the start of the song (that's hundredths of a second). If something took up some extra processing power, I might have to adjust the position of the background and frets a few extra pixels.

The other hard part is getting the music working properly in the game. I'm using songs from Frets on Fire, which conveniently breaks each song into a guitar track and the other music. Each song is a placed object, allowing me to adjust the volume level accordingly. The plan is to have the guitar music stop if you play the wrong note.

There's still tons of work to do. The hardest will likely be making a program to read midi files to generate a notes file that NWN2 will read. I need a specially crafted dialog box that stays hidden while letting the player press number keys to play notes. Some things won't be possible, such as pressing multiple keys or seeing of a key is held down. The game engine just isn't that flexible. Still, with the lighting, effects, and camera work, hopefully it'll be fun. I'm already thinking of some over-the-top dialog that could be quite funny.

In terms of a beta release, I had a few bugs come in over the weekend, so it won't be a perfect install, but hopefully all the major bugs are fixed. You can find links on the Downloads page. There are new versions of both DarkWaters 1 and DarkWaters 2. If you want to replay DW1, there should be new fixes and features (such as achievements), or you can jump straight to DW2 from the first dialog.

As always, feel free to send me an e-mail if you run into problems. I'll be working on a new build this week to fix the bugs that have been reported. It might be fun to put together some PR material such as movies and photos for the Vault. It's weird getting so close to release.