Wishful Thinking: A More Realistic Drum Experience

[italianstal1ion]

Hey everyone. I love playing drums and FoF is no better place to play some of my favorite songs, but I feel the experience could be vastly improved instead of limiting the player to so little pads. So I made a mock-up of how I think it should look;

This is a display of the more realistic additions. Below are more considerations that would be (I imagine) harder to implement.
Except for open/closed hi-hat, all additions could be supported by the RB2 drum kit with cymbal addons.

Features from left to right;
Teal: Crash - Placed on the left because that's where it belongs on a real drum set.
Red: Snare
Yellow: Hi-Hat
Blue: Tom 1/2
Green: Tom 3/4
Purple: Ride - placed on right because that is also where it belongs on a real drum set.
Orange (gold in the picture): Bass

Hi-hat and Open Hi-hat: Instead of charting on blue, players now must use the hi-hat control pedal. Normal colored hi-hat means the hi-hat is closed, pedal is down. Inverse colors means hi-hat is open and pedal must be up.

Other Ideas;
--A third tom would make a good addition, though that would complicate the screen and spread out the notes too much imo.
--Pedal Hi-hat is the drummer pressing down the pedal from open to closed hard enough to make the two hi-hat pieces hit each other to make an audible sound. This would have to be indicated a special way as well. Not sure how this could ever be implemented because if you hit an open note then had to hit a closed note, closing the hi-hat would make you hit the pedal hi-hat and you'd lose your streak.
--I wanted to display crash and ride above the fretboard, overlapping it a little bit but couldn't find an easy way to do this so what you see is what I came up with. The fretboard would look too large if the cymbals were laid flat imo.
--Double bass is easy, that's already implemented and charted.
--Velocity sensing for louder/softer parts of songs, this is in GHWT.
--Possible option to switch yellow and red placements - drummers who play hi-hat to the left of the snare might have an easier time interpreting the charts.

When playing rock band drum charts, the teal and purple would disappear. The button mapped to teal would hit on green and the button mapped for purple would hit on blue.

Anything else? Discuss!

[MopHead]

cool. :)

But I have a drum kit and it seems that should be arranged differently.

Hi-hit-Snare-Crash-Tom 1/4-Tom 3/4-Ride (if ride is meant to be a tom)

Some other drum kits have also 2-3 crashs.

[Electro Tomato]

Interesting. But how would the FeedBack fretters fret this? I'm sure it'll be implemented in EoF if it gets a large enough following, but what about us dbfags?

[italianstal1ion]

Well, everybody has their own kit setup, crash could be put between any frets really, I just put it at the very left because its usually above/left of tom 1 and it would look odd to put the snare all the way over to the side. Maybe an option to change the order of the frets to anything you like? I'm sure that'd be fun to code.

And some kits have more toms. And some kits have bongos. You can only go so far without looking ridiculous - besides it is just a game. Crash/splash on the same button, ride/china also on the same. It would get too complicated putting 4 cymbals and they wouldn't be used often enough.

That's the biggest problem - being able to fret it. I use Feedback too and I'm sure the creator won't update it for FoF. I don't know what to do about that besides just using EOF

[raynebc]

I don't know how anybody would convince the devs to add support for 7 buttons for drum tracks...

[dadudemandude]

I'm sure it'll be implemented in EoF if it gets a large enough following, but what about us dbfags?

There could still be a way out, if you press F9 in dB it brings you to an instrument called "Double drums". You would then both have to chart that and the normal drums, therefore two instruments, at once. It will require a special conversion program to bind it together in one track, but there is still hope for people using dB if something like that would be used.

Davey

[thePOWER]

Interesting. But how would the FeedBack fretters fret this? I'm sure it'll be implemented in EoF if it gets a large enough following, but what about us dbfags?

MIDI editors?

[death_au]

I dunno about adding extra notes and so forth, but I have to say that mockup looks cool. It kinda makes me wish you could set up guitar parts, etc to look like that (with 3 notes in the middle, as opposed to 4). And possibly rearrange them so if you play on Easy (with only 3 notes, G/R/Y) you only get the 3 notes in the middle. Then when you move up to Medium, you get the Blue note on the right (slanted), and when you go up to hard and expert they all get shifted left one spot to give you the full 5 notes, with green and orange slanted.

Incredibly off-topic, but I just wanted to mention that that picture gave me the idea.

[doomtron]

This would be cool but if you had the crash as only one cymbal you could only chart the crash as one pad and you would end up like GHWT with weird charts that don't chart different crash cymbals right. How about if the purple is crash/ride instead of just ride? I like the pedal idea. I hate not being able to chart hi-hat pedal or play it. Only thing is that my kit is acoustic so I couldn't use it. All I have for FoFiX is a RB1 stock kit with a custom pedal and official silencers. I guess I could buy a RB2 kit but they are like $80 still. Maybe the price will drop like RB1 stuff did when (if) RB3 comes out. Hopefully this will be implemented.

[aduro]

I like the idea the lanes are laid out, but it'd definitely too confusing to view in action just because of all the lanes

Doesn't make sense to have the ride to the right of the floor tom or to have the crash always on the left

[italianstal1ion]

@raynebc Which is why its aptly titled 'wishful thinking'

And to those saying the layout is odd - well obviously it is, but Rock Band puts the cymbal and tom 3/4 on the same fret as well as places the ride to the left of that(with tom 1/2), which makes much less sense. Just saying - this should be an improvement, I don't know if you could ever get the layout perfect, there would always be another placement issue.

People could chart cymbals like splash on the ride I suppose. The picture is just for guidance but fretters can chart however they like.

[Pk403]

that's exactly like DTXMania!

[italianstal1ion]

DTXmania Never heard of it before. Looks like I've got a new game to play at least

Yeah, it is pretty much the same way. Hi-hat is on the very left and I think rides/crashes are fretted on the same pad, not for sure though.

[dadudemandude]

I think a lot of people here see the fun of the idea, the only thing that remains now is the question of how many people would play it and of course want to fret it. EOF can be adjusted for it and a few posts ago I mentioned a way to get it possibly done with dB. Unless a good ammount of people would use it I don't think the coders would deem it worth the effort as it seems like quite a bit of work to get this one done (expending the fretboard, adding more fret buttons, adding the controls in the options etc.), but that's how I see it.

Davey

[aduro]

DTXmania Never heard of it before. Looks like I've got a new game to play at least

Yeah that's what I was comparing it too. DTX mania doesn't feel realistic at all, even if you are playing on the official drummania arcade machine with the cymbals and stuff. There's too much visual clutter to make any sense out of what's being charted as it comes at you