The future of rythm games?

[RyanAbrams77]

The next step in music gaming is the ability to format and upload songs of your own. I doubt this will happen until the industry gets a handle on the whole piracy thing.

But, one day, the amount of songs you can play will only be limited by the hard drive space on your system. It would take a MAJOR software breakthrough to be able to isolate and map tracks automatically, but I see it happening.

If anything, bands will release their music in both formats as part of the recording process. These games are here to stay, and its only a matter of time before the entire industry sees it as the future of the medium. People will pay more for interactivity, and it may serve as the way to get around the piracy problem.

Any thoughts?

[shadebug]

it would require the record companies releasing the masters of their songs, but it's not impossible

that said, a charting script can't QA

[snwns26]

I could see generic songs possible in game first. By that I mean like Amplitude style. Basically create-a-song. Bunch of generic sounds for all the instruments, maybe vocal recording support if it's not too impossible. The ability to go back and play songs that your friends have made in quickplay or even have it pop up in a random setlist in BWT would be awesome. Maybe online sharing also and the Harmonix bands might allow some of their songs to be remixed or something.

I'd say that's far more likely than using someone else's work and uploading it.

[jrinck]

Here is another future of rhythm based games...

YOU WILL USE REAL INSTRUMENTS! :)

For drums, this is easy, but will require some standardization. Drum-kit manufacturers will need to standardize on how their signals are processed by their central processing units. This will allow ANY drum kit to work with ANY processor, be it a dedicated processor for the drum kit OR something like a PS3 or 360.

For guitars, it's much trickier, and maybe even the PS3 and 360 aren't up to the task, but you'd need a machine that can not only detect individual notes (to know what string was hit and on what fret) but ALSO to detect chords. Detecting one note is easy, but detecting chords is much more involved, and for it to work in a game environment it would have to be done FAST.

For vocals, the Rock Band approach works fine, but one thing that would be nice is to be able to subjectively judge the voice QUALITY. It may be on pitch, and in time, but does it sound good? That's much tougher to determine since we all have our own standards as to what sounds good.

All of these obstacles can be overcome, but it will require extreme amounts of collaboration and hardware power that simply does not exist at this time in any remotely affordable way.