MFH-Alarian Mod v2.900 - New releases here!

[ugo247548]

The problem with achievements is that you can't have any control over them. On a regular game the developpers know what song are Expert songs and so on, but on FoF anyone can have his own vision of what "Expert" looks like. Same thing for any song downloadable.

No need for controlling them.

If I'm getting the idea right, they won't be posted/uploaded anywhere and there are currently no FoF profiles (like XBLive / Steam / Xfire ones), so they will just visible to the gamer himself.

Most of the gamers (that's my assumption) use only Guitar Hero I, II (+ Xbox360 Bonuses), Encore, III (+ DLC), Aerosmith, Rock Band (+ DLC), four Frets on Fire Standard (1 is Downloadable from Official Site; five counting tutorial which isn't a song) and Puppetz_86 Songs (PH 1, 2, 3, Noob and lots of single songs and full albums).

They may also use compilations like Christian Hero / DeathEvil Hero / DelaHero / FoF Hero or various Scorehero conversions.

You can check your song library and find that 95%+ of your songs are from those song packs.

My point is that song difficulties in those packs are correct and if the song is Expert, than it's really Expert (opposed to most custom songs) and the notes are of excellent quality. So you can't really cheat your achievements using them.

Also there is a simple solution: achievements can only be gained in Career mode.

As for possible cheating. Yes, anyone can make an Expert song with 25 notes with 1 solo section then make a "career" for it and then play it 1 time to gain all of the achievements. But that would be a really sad and/or retarded person, I can't even imagine someone who will perform such an act.

The other solution is make Audiosurf-like achievements. They add +% to the played song score and thats it. No fancy profile showing shiny medals.

PS OMG, really long post. :p

[Anahkiasen]

Most of the gamers (that's my assumption) use only Guitar Hero I, II (+ Xbox360 Bonuses), Encore, III (+ DLC), Aerosmith, Rock Band (+ DLC), four Frets on Fire Standard (1 is Downloadable from Official Site; five counting tutorial which isn't a song) and Puppetz_86 Songs (PH 1, 2, 3, Noob and lots of single songs and full albums).
They may also use compilations like Christian Hero / DeathEvil Hero / DelaHero / FoF Hero or various Scorehero conversions.

You can check your song library and find that 95%+ of your songs are from those song packs.

Well... that's true. I was just pointing the fact that, even if nobody can see your achievements, it's always interesting to unlock them, it's a sort of goal.
But it's not funny anoymore if you unlock everything because the guy that fretted the song put "Expert" when it's just Medium or something.
Still I have to admit that we're far from what FoF used to look like when I was playing it one year ago. In my memories the fretting of the songs used to be really random. Now everyone seem to know what he's doing.

[ugo247548]

Well... that's true. I was just pointing the fact that, even if nobody can see your achievements, it's always interesting to unlock them, it's a sort of goal.
But it's not funny anoymore if you unlock everything because the guy that fretted the song put "Expert" when it's just Medium or something.
Still I have to admit that we're far from what FoF used to look like when I was playing it one year ago. In my memories the fretting of the songs used to be really random. Now everyone seem to know what he's doing.

1. You can make screenshots showing you achievements page and provide a link in your forum signature. So everyone sees.

2. Your real life buds and people you play co-op with can see it.

3. Yes, 2 years ago all players had was GH I, II packs and a gillion of custom songs (that only had 1 difficulty; most of them had Amazing) half of which had poor notes quality and/or were incomplete or unplayable. But that's over now and soon there will be even more official packs (fingers crossed for Rock Band 2 (+ DLC), Guitar Hero: World Tour/Metallica and Rock Revolution). So that's not a problem.

4. I strongly believe in self-control. One should know not to play poorly-made songs.

[lsapg09]

BUG: I pressed Enter and Shift at the same time in game (They were my Up and Down Strum) and the game crashed

[death_au]

BUG: I pressed Enter and Shift at the same time in game (They were my Up and Down Strum) and the game crashed

Alt+Enter also crashes mine...


As for achievements... I'm not sure if it's really such a good idea. One way of doing it though would be unlocking achievements for completing all songs in a career on amazing or something. Creators of careers can provide some sort of graphic that will attach to the achievements page when collected.
I think we're getting ahead of ourselves a little though.

[iamnoob]

Achievements belong in the clone project... surely?

No. Achievements belong to Xbox. I already have most of em and am not looking forward to doing them again. I dont think we need to waist all that effort and time.

[Happ E Nose]

Here are a few ideas (taken from RB2 actual ahievements list) that make sense in FoF:

* "Solid Gold, Baby!" - Gold star any song. - 25 points
* "Flawless Fretwork" - 100% a song on Expert guitar. - 25 points
* "Flawless Drumming" - 100% a song on Expert drums. - 25 points
* "Flawless Groove" - 100% in a song on Expert Bass. - 25 points
* "Flawless Guitar Solo" - 100% guitar solo on Expert. - 20 points
* "The Bachman-Turner Award" - Maintain deployed Overdrive for 90 seconds. - 25 points

Of course those are only Expert versions. We may have similar Medium/Hard achievements.

Not that I will get any of those any time soon even if they were implemented (my playing skills are too lousy). But it would be totally great to have them. A nice thing to brag about with fellow players.

Yeah, I've been thinking about this for a while.

* "Solid Gold, Baby!" - Gold star any song. - 25 points
* "Flawless Fretwork" - 100% a song on Expert guitar. - 25 points


* "Flawless Drumming" - 100% a song on Expert drums. - 25 points


* "Flawless Groove" - 100% in a song on Expert Bass. - 25 points
* "Flawless Guitar Solo" - 100% guitar solo on Expert. - 20 points
* "The Bachman-Turner Award" - Maintain deployed Overdrive for 90 seconds. - 25 points

Here's another to add.

* "Killer Performance" - Five Star a song on Easy, Medium, Hard or Expert. - 10 points

[iamnoob]

If we are going to have achievements, (dumb)

then It should be an option.

[Anahkiasen]

Yeah but there are no points in FoF.

[Happ E Nose]

Then we put points in FoF...

[Anahkiasen]

Then we put points in FoF...

Yeah but I mean, what's the aim of it ? We can have achievements without points, just for challenge and satisfaction. :p

[myfingershurt]

as the career unlock code is dependant on the high scores, at least partially--- i think

In early code versions, it was, but I wanted you to be able to get high scores in quick play without interfering with career mode, so I took out all the highscore dependencies and used the "unlock_completed" setting.

Ah - ok great, thanks for clearing that up.

I've been spending most of my time going through the new posts and adding tasks to the To Do list and such... the list is just getting longer, not shorter...

I'm not coding achievements... if someone else does it I will look into adding the code but really I'm not looking for new features to debug at the moment. Getting quite overwhelming with all I'm trying to do.

[baseballplayinty]

I dont see why we just dont put it into the charts instead of putting it ingame. Theres enough in the list as it is why not change the sources of the charts instead of the game?

[evilynux]

Full releases and patches with binaries for GNU/Linux
=======================================
*** MS Windows users, see section "Applying one of my patches under MS Windows" below. ***
*** Be careful, there are both 32bit and 64bit packages, pick the right one! ***
*** Don't know what to do with all this? Please refer to this excellent HowTo by Lysdestic. ***

2.995 MFH-Alarian Patches
(64bit: [Mediafire], 32bit: [Mediafire])
+ All changes from MFH's 2.995
+ Includes full worldrave GH3 hotfix 9
++ This makes this release bigger than usual (64MB vs 6MB), might be the last time i include it
+ Fixed GH3 fail/pause menu position values in theme.ini

2.990 MFH-Alarian Patches
(64bit: [Direct download or Mediafire], 32bit: [Direct download or Mediafire])
+ All changes from MFH's 2.990

2.986 MFH-Alarian Patches
(64bit: [Direct download or Mediafire], 32bit: [Direct download or Mediafire])
+ All changes from MFH's 2.986

2.985 MFH-Alarian Patches
(64bit: [Direct download or Mediafire], 32bit: [Direct download or Mediafire])
+ All changes from MFH's 2.985

2.981 MFH-Alarian Patch (64bit) [Direct download or Mediafire]
+ Code merge with unofficial releases
+ All changes from MFH's 2.980 and 2.981

2.981 MFH-Alarian Patch (32bit) [Direct download or Mediafire]
+ Same as 2.981 (64bit) above.

[...]

2.956.1 unofficial MFH-Alarian Full Release (64bit) [Download: USAupload or Mediafire 1 2]
+ Fixes GMatrix33 import error.
++ Thanks to Oxydius for testing this before release.

2.956.1 unofficial MFH-Alarian Patch (32bit) [Direct download or Mediafire]
+ Fixes audio mixing issue at sampling frequencies >= 44kHz.
++ Thanks to Oxydius and truptrup for testing this before release.
++ Requires Full Release 2.955.

2.956 MFH-Alarian Patch (32bit) [Direct download or Mediafire]
+ Brings changes from 2.956 (see MFH thread).
++ Requires Full Release 2.955.
++ Included data/international.ttf as the one included in Full Release had a wrong capital "I".

2.955 MFH-Alarian Full Release (32bit) [Download: Rapidshare or Mediafire 1 2]
+ Brings all the goodness from 2.955 (see MFH thread).

Acknowledgement:
- truptrup: firsts Mediafire uploads and GNU/Linux testing
- Oxydius: GNU/Linux testing

Additional Notes:
- To 64bit CPU owners, I haven't notice much of a difference between 32bit binary with psyco and 64bit binary w/o psyco. Thus, you might want to also try the 32bit binaries.
- I try to keep this post clean, old releases are removed but still can be found on my mfh-alarian wiki page.

Known Issues:
- 32bit 2.955 and 2.956, audio mixing issue (only song.ogg plays). Fixed in 2.956.1 .
- 64bit 2.956, GMatrix33 import error. Fixed in 2.956.1.
- 2.971 to 2.975, game crashes with "division by zero" error if notesTotal = 0. Fixed in 2.976.
- All versions, GH3 complex tails do not work i usually disable them but if i forgot, simply move away your data/Themes/Gh3/Trails folder. Cause is unknown, investigation has stalled. Any help appreciated.

Applying one of my patches under MS Windows:
Use 7-zip to open the tar.gz file (whichever 32bit or 64bit will do), go inside and extract only the src folder. Then take the content of the src folder and copy it into your library.zip. (thanks to blazingamer for instructions).
Optionally changes imply touching to files in data/, you can also extract the data folder to update the graphics, themes, necks and other non-code related stuff.

Random song(s) starter
=================
Based on a user request, i've decided to give it a shot for the fun of it.
From that was born this very perl script: fofrnd.pl.
It allows you to play one to many random songs. You can specify songs directory, instrument and difficulty.
Call `./fofrnd.pl --help` for details.

[kane2882]

=======================================================================
======================= Guitar Solo Markings ==========================
=======================================================================
To add Guitar Solos to a custom song, you can use either of two methods:

1: Rock Band Method) Add a "Section" marker (this is the most common way, RB uses this method)
Name this section marker "gtr_solo" or "gtr_solo_a" or something like that.
You may have several "gtr_solo_xxx" sections in a row for one single solo

The very next "Section" marker that does not say "gtr_solo" marks the end of the solo.


2: Guitar Hero Method) Add a regular MIDI text event "solo_on" to mark beginning.
Add another regular MIDI text event "solo_off" to mark ending.


Please note, if your solo markers contain any of the following words they might be filtered:
"Drum"
"Hand"
"Map"
"Organ"
"Verse"

What program do I need to use to add in solo sections to songs, I'm not really clear on how to do it.