Phase Shift vs. FoFiX...not much of a contest

[Fej]

Alright, so I have a bit of a story to share. I apologize if I get a bit long-winded.

So today, I was making a solid attempt to get FoFiX to run correctly. (I have been using FoFiX for a while.) I had charted a song for guitar in EoF, and then had started on the vocals. Once I started charting the vocals, FoFiX crashed every time I tried playing the song (even on guitar). So, in the futile hope that I could get the song to work, I downloaded the newest version of EoF (hopefully to fix a corrupted song). Well, it didn't do anything, but there were a bunch of new options for something called Phase Shift. Also, the creator of EoF mentioned PS. So I clicked the link, and I figured, "sure, why not"?

Right off the bat, things just clicked. I figured my wireless RB2 guitar (X360) was going to require a lot of configuration. Nope. And hey, when you push up on the strum bar, the cursor goes up, not down! (Longstanding bug I've experienced in FoFiX: no matter what I do, pushing the strum bar down moves the cursor up, and vice versa.) Alright, so I go into settings to change it to fullscreen and max the graphics. Rather simple. Wasn't expecting that either. I set up the songs folder and went into Quickplay. The way it displays the folder tree is nice - lets me divide my songs easily, and hey, it uses icons!

So I picked the song that crashed FoFiX. No crash, real simple startup. Fun to play! No convoluted setup!

Then I noticed exactly how much PS supports. Video backgrounds, pro guitar/bass, pro drums, dance mode, etc. It's just insane. And most importantly, it works right out of the box.

As of right now? Compared to FoFiX, Phase Shift isn't good. It's not great. It's not even awesome. It completely blows FoFiX out of the water.

Almost.

There are three gripes I currently have with PS, two of which you aren't likely to do anything about.

1. It's not open source. This isn't changing anytime soon (at least as far as I know). And it doesn't really matter right now either.

2. There really aren't any mainstream songs to download here. Again, this probably isn't changing anytime soon. I'm all for the total and complete legality of PS (and FoFiX, for that matter) but there's just one problem: no matter what you do, as long as this forum doesn't host charted song downloads, we will all have to go back to fretsonfire.net to get songs. What's the big difference between Frets on Fire and PS so that they can host charted songs but you guys can't? (Seriously, that's not rhetorical. I'd love to hear the answer, I'm sure there's a good reason why you guys don't host songs.)

3. Customization. Relative to FoFiX, there is a dearth of themes to change stuff like notes, menus, etc...(of course, the community's small too. I'm like member #215) But it seems you can't change certain things, like the bottom of the neck, or how the info there is displayed. Why is that not changeable?

Also, I'm going to throw in a couple other random things.

I'm still having problems with the vocals for that song - EoF doesn't produce any different notes.mid, or really any other files at all. Anyone have a clue why?

Also, why do separate tracks in songs seem to matter here so much? Last I checked you can only get separate tracks in a song from the masters...which is only really useful if you own the music or if you have music from GH/RB. Can anyone explain please?

Thanks guys! I can't believe more people don't play PS!

EDIT: I should note that I do realize that sites like mediafire are the ones that actually host the songs - I just want to know why you guys don't link to them, as I said.

[raynebc]

Jun 20, 2011 3:06:25 GMT Fej said:

I'm still having problems with the vocals for that song - EoF doesn't produce any different notes.mid, or really any other files at all. Anyone have a clue why?

Vocals on FoFiX are so buggy that the crashing doesn't surprise me anymore. Its developers still have a way to go before it can be considered usable. As for producing files, I'm not sure what you mean. EOF will only ensure that the necessary songs for the chart (guitar.ogg, song.ini, notes.mid are created on save). All the lyrics and pitches are contained in the MIDI file.

EDIT: I should note that I do realize that sites like mediafire are the ones that actually host the songs - I just want to know why you guys don't link to them, as I said.

More than anything else, I think it's to keep this site away from any problems that could be associated with posting copy righted content.

[knapman [FD]]

we don't link to songs as we are not looking to be an underground project, we want to create a legitimate game, when it comes to songs our focus is on finding legit songs for the project so we can take off as a proper game, this should also benefit online play when people can have a set of core songs that everyone has access to

customisation in this game is pretty flexible, even things outside of the theme system can be replaced but the situation like any modern game, the more complex it is the higher the knowledge requirement for people to be able to customise the content, very few people from the fofix community have the required knowledge to edit anything other than the 2d content,

additional to this we dont need to go crazy on the theme system as we aren't setting out to clone gh / rb, the theme system is there simply for fun and allow people to have a level of customisation so the game suits them better, it is not so people can pretend the game is another game

there is common ground between fofix and ps due to them being the same type of games, but the goals and approaches behind the projects are completely different, we are making our own game, in spirit we are far more comparable to fof than fofix, the original fof had its own identity and was released as a proper game, fofix stripped all that out to create a raw rhythm game engine, and put its focus into replicating the gh and rb experience as closely as possible, visually and feature wise, this has never been our goal, it was simply to make our own game much like they did with the original fof

We keep ideas we like, drop the ones we don't, and offer a specific ps gameplay experience from all our choices we have put together, we don't want people missunderstanding our intentions as many people come from fofix assuming we have set out to do what fofix does, people who want rb should stick with fofix, people who are open to new things will enjoy this project