From Performous

[edit] Questions

I see you have a new release of Performous. We're looking for projects to highlight in our Community Blog (https://sourceforge.net/blog/). Want to answer a few questions about your software so we can write about your project?

First, what's your name, and where are you from? Can you briefly explain what Performous is and what you can do with it? How does it differ from other similar applications, both commercial and open source? What makes it unique?

What motivated you to create the software? How long have you been working on it? What tools did you use to built the application, and why did you choose those particular tools? How do you manage the contributions of everyone who helps out with the project?

Why did you decide to put it up on SourceForge.net? How have you let people know about it?

Is there any especially useful capability users might overlook? What's a cool tip for people who use the software?

What's coming up in future versions? How frequently do you expect to make releases? At what point will it be ready for 1.0 release? Do you need help on the project? With what? And what's the best way for people who want to help to get in touch?

Finally, is there anything you'd like our SourceForge.net developers to know, that we could do to improve the site?

Thanks for your help! -- Lee Schlesinger

[edit] Answers

TODO: Incomplete

Performous is an open-source cross-platform music and rhythm game that was previously known as UltraStar-NG. It has a rock-solid singing part, evolving instrument support (guitars, drums...) and a brand new dance component. It's hard, if not impossible, to find another game that does this all.

The basic idea behind every game component is to hit notes (that are based on the music) as precisely as possible. The singing part differs from many competitors in that it has scrolling notes (many use screen-by-screen approach), accurate fast-fourier-transform pitch analysis and waveform display. We have differentiated ourselves also on other areas, e.g. the scoring in all game modes is custom - max 10000 points.

The guitar and drum gameplay still lacks a few features found in some of the competitors, but the core is all there and out of all the free music games out there, our band experience (includes singing) is top-notch. We also auto-detect and auto-configure great many instruments and theoretically you can have as many players as you have instruments (in practice, the screen area limits this).

The dancing part is still quite new, originally done as a school project, but you can already do multiplayer and several different game modes. The song format is the same as in the popular open-source dance game StepMania. USB dance pads are also supported.

We advertise modestly on webpages such as Freshmeat and also on some forums. In addition, Performous can be found from software repositories of many Linux distributions, such as Ubuntu and Debian.

Performous is coded in C++, using many libraries such as OpenGL, Boost and SDL. Most of our graphics are in SVG vector format to get the best quality on all resolutions. For building, we use CMake and for version control Git. SVN was used in the history, but Git replaced it as it is faster, allows offline working and better local hacking. We give push access pretty easily as fiddling around with patches is clumsy and we can always revert the changes and revoke the access if there are problems.

Future will bring a better configuration menu (the current is very bad), an improved song browser, better graphics and many more improvements. We try to release often so that new features get as much testing as possible. We also welcome all help, including theming, testing, translating, packaging and of course coding. The best way to get in touch is through IRC, irc://irc.freenode.net/performous .