Thursday 2 May 2013

Project Bombs and Eternity - Update 2 - It works!

On Monday I successfully got my computer to play drums using Reaper. So far it works with a MIDI pro adapter but I have not had any success with a Guitar Hero drum set yet. I have made usable charts for a few Guitar Hero Van Halen songs, Brain Stew/Jaded, Raining Blood, and Tre's Greatest Hits. All of them are able to hit 100% of notes in a song, except for Tre's Greatest Hits, assuming I hit play at the right time in Reaper. It seems that each fill is played back in the game at a different speed than the MIDI file plays back in Reaper so it will take some experimenting to get the right playback speeds, however, it is definitely doable. In my experiments I was able to hit 99% of Cool Solo Pt. 2 on more than one occasion and it was more than likely my timing that prevented it from hitting 100%.

Although Reaper playing back the MIDI files I converted will hit 100% of notes 100% of the time it does not make the achievements as easy as I thought it would. Because of the way Rock Band and Guitar Hero work sometimes notes in fast sections of songs will be missed if the start time of the Reaper playback is not perfectly synced with Rock Band. For some reason it will play the slow part of the song perfectly but as soon as it speeds up it will begin missing entire sections of notes (a similar problem can occur when auto kick is turned on in Guitar Hero in a fast double bass section). Even though this happens when the timing is slightly off, as long as it is synced near perfectly it will hit 100% of the song and unlock the desired achievement.

I had a much more difficult time with Rock Band than I did with Guitar Hero because of the smaller timing window. It took me about an hour to unlock "Louder Than Bombs and Eternity" but I usually unlocked the Guitar Hero achievements on my third or fourth try. I would expect to put 30-90 minutes into each achievement because timing can be quite annoying.

I'm going to try make charts for most or all of the miscellaneous Guitar Hero and Rock Band drum achievements some time this week as well as make a video walkthrough of how to set up and use Reaper to play the MIDI files. For anyone who wants to prepare in advance you will need a MIDI to USB cable, a PC or Mac computer with a free USB port and enough hard drive space to download a free trial of Reaper, and a MIDI pro adapter. I hope to add support for Guitar Hero drums in the future as well. I will make another blog post with instructions when I complete my guide and create some more charts.

7 comments:

  1. That's awesome dude, looking forward to your walkthrough! - zzUrbanSpaceman/22tma

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  2. Hi, Im from Brazil and I loved your job of creating these midi reaper charts. I tested on Jaded and got 100% FC, so awesome. Have you dony any "Tre Greatest Hits" charts ? I have 50/74 done and I think i will never get some LOL. I am a completionist too and i really apreciate your job, please continue. Thank you very much

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  3. I have the charts for Tre's Greatest Hits but they are not working yet. I plan on making a post soon about my progress on Tre's Greatest Hits and hope to have them working in the near future.

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  4. First of all - great work! :D

    I have actually used similar methods to unlock a couple of achievements but never got around to chart all these songs you have prepared. Very nice.

    Just a quick question: I am curious about why the Guitar Hero drum sets don't work? My drum kit (Band Hero bundle) has a midi in-port and I have used it successfully. Timing problems? Are the pads mapped to different notes compared to the Midi Pro-adapter?
    I am going to try your files on my drum kits and see what happens. :)

    Many many thanks for all the hard work you have put in so far! :)
    //Johan

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  5. just to be sure, is it still only the Rock band drum set this will work on? i only have the GH4 world tour drum set, so that would be a problem for me :(

    any answer is appreciated.

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    1. It does work with a GH4 drum set but you need to download files from the Guitar Hero section of the directory. There are not many songs there yet because they use a different format of file. I hope to get around to catching up the Guitar Hero files eventually though.

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    2. okay thanks for you reply, i hope you manage to do some more songs for GH drum set then ;D

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