The bug is that in some themes (GH2, GH3, probably GH 80s and GH Aerosmith, but I haven't tested these) the "tail" of long notes is invisible. Ok, it is hard to believe and hard to explain, so here goes a screenshot (GH2 theme):
This yellow note is a long note. If you look carefully, you can see the end of its tail at the middle of this screenshot (at the bird's wing).
So, yeah, the tail is invisible except for its tip.
As I said, it also happens on GH3 theme:
But it does not happen on GH1 theme, nor in RB1 theme.
It took me a while to find out why this happens.
On such themes, the tail image (be it tail1.png or btail1.png, or any other number) has height = 1 pixel. On themes that don't trigger this bug, such image has around 30 pixels or more.
So, I did a quick resize of these images just to test:
Code: Select all
cd "data/themes/Guitar Hero III/tails/"
mkdir bak
mv tail?.png btail?.png bak
cd bak
for a in *; do convert $a -resize 100%x3200%! ../$a; doneThe code above was just a quick way to strech those 1-pixel-high images to 32 pixels.
The result is right here:
I did some testing. I tried images with 2, 4, 8 and 16 pixels, but only with 32 pixels the images were rendered as they should. With smaller heights, they were somewhat transparent (2 and 4 pixels were barely visible, 16 pixels was about half-transparent).
So, my conclusion is that my system does not like to have textures smaller than 32 pixels. (this was a completely empirical conclusion, I would love to be able to extract such information using OpenGL)
By the way, if you watch closely the image above, you will find that the tail is a bit darker at the end. This is hard to notice at the screenshot, but while playing it is very noticeable (specially when you hit the note and the tail lights up - sorry, but I couldn't get a screenshot of this).
I think this happens because the end-of-tail image (btaile1.png or taile1.png) is smaller than 32 pixels.
Although my conclusions were based on trial-and-error, I think they are pretty reasonable.
Proposed solutions:
* Change all graphics to have at least 32 pixels (on both dimensions).
* Fix this bug by fixing the code (e.g. maybe FoF could resize the images/textures when they are loaded).
* In case of "advanced tails" (GH3 theme), different tail colors could be joined into only one image file, just like how the frets and notes are stored now.
Oh, and note that I've only tested GH1/2/3 and RB1 themes. I don't know if other themes suffer from the same bug.
My system:
Gentoo/Linux amd64 (also known as x86_64)
Nvidia 9500M GS, using nvidia-drivers version 169.12
I also have Windows Vista on dual-boot, but I haven't tried to reproduce this bug there.
