Status of the GHtoRB3 project?
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Anyone know what’s going on with the GHtoRB3 project? Their Google Doc hasn’t been updated since May. One would think other people could pick up where they left off, but I haven’t see any new converts in ages.
I haven’t see any new converts in ages.There’s been more than a few released through C3.
As far as the project, my understanding is that it’s like a big bear who has been hybernating, wants to wake up but when he makes an effort to, he says “bah too much effort” and goes back to sleep
But really, it’s anyone’s guess. I personally doubt they’ll continue the project any longer.
It’s pretty much dead by this point. Sucks they pulled the plug before they released more GH5 & BH charts.
Well, is there a possibility others could pick up where they left off?
My assumption is that converting from GH to RB3 isn’t too difficult since the charting is already done, so would that allow less-skilled conversion fans (like me) to help? I’m hesitant to attempt making customs of other tracks, but if there’s a solid starting point I might be able to put in some time.
Well, is there a possibility others could pick up where they left off?My assumption is that converting from GH to RB3 isn’t too difficult since the charting is already done, so would that allow less-skilled conversion fans (like me) to help? I’m hesitant to attempt making customs of other tracks, but if there’s a solid starting point I might be able to put in some time.
I think the only thing is finding the charts & audio that you’d need to worry about. Also cleaning up the charts to get rid of Neversoft’s Difficulty-Wet Dream-Charting. Don’t use that, I’m pretty sure that’s trademarked.
If you guys give me a few minjtes when i get home ill write up a whole thing about what the process is like. Its too annoying to do it on mobile.
I would be interested to know the process as well. I have thought about getting into charting songs but was a little overwhelmed. Perhaps having all instruments and difficulties already charted (albeit on an entirely different game) makes it a little easier to get into. Plus there are still plenty of songs from the more recent Guitar Hero games that I would love to have as custom songs on RB!
Well, is there a possibility others could pick up where they left off?My assumption is that converting from GH to RB3 isn’t too difficult since the charting is already done, so would that allow less-skilled conversion fans (like me) to help? I’m hesitant to attempt making customs of other tracks, but if there’s a solid starting point I might be able to put in some time.
I think the only thing is finding the charts & audio that you’d need to worry about. Also cleaning up the charts to get rid of Neversoft’s Difficulty-Wet Dream-Charting. Don’t use that, I’m pretty sure that’s trademarked.
Difficult to get the audio? It’s cake-easy to get them on Wii if that’s the concern. It’s better than nothing if it comes to that.
Ok, let’s try this.
How to get Audio / Charts
First up until GH WoR, all previous GH franchise games including BH have been decrypted, so we can get, and you can find it readily online, the xbox 360 audio stems and charts. Where? Frets on Fire forum. From whom? bluzer. Do a search there, he’s got the whole GH franchise with midi, audio stems and album art ready for download to be used in Phase Shift.
As StackOverflow0x, audio stems can be gotten from the Wii easily, and that’s the only known way to get access to the GH WoR stems. There’s some downsides: Xbox audio is 48,000hz whereas Wii audio is 32,000hz. Xbox audio has backing and vocals separated, whereas Wii audio has them combined into one track. Xbox audio has four stems for drums (kick, cymbals, snare, toms) whereas Wii audio has three stems (kick, snare + toms, cymbals). We can’t really use that configuration for Rock Band, so you have to mix the snare + toms with the cymbals, and you end up with kick + “kit” in Magma for RB3 purposes. With some post-processing the audio quality is not terrible. Have you tried any of the GH WoR songs released through C3? All of them I used Wii audio.
There are a very few songs that were released as GH WoR DLC exclusively on the Xbox. For those, we don’t have multitracks (see Na Na Na released when C3 launched), but you can still get the midi and not have to chart it from scratch.
Most of the above is unnecessary anyways, since bluzer has done the vast majority of this already. Just head over to FoF, get the songs you want and then get Magma: C3 and start working on it.
Let’s get something clear:
You absolutely need to know the RBN2.0 standards. You need to know how to use Magma, how to use REAPER, etc. Converting a song is a little bit less work than charting from scratch, but you still need to know how to chart, or you won’t get far. Refer to the RBN docs and the few tutorials online.
What do you need to get the song “playable” in RB3?
You’ll need to re-do the EVENTS track. GH uses “Section OMGWTFBBQSAUCE” (Fury of the Storm) and any other name they want. This also works in RB3, but Magma won’t allow you to compile, since you’re supposed to follow the RBN2.0 guidelines. Most of the times these will be “section intro” “section verse 1”, just change them to their RBN2.0 equivalents.
You’ll need to re-do vocal phrases and overdrive for all instruments, drum fills for the drums. You have to add animation markers. Depending on how you get the midi, the drums will either have no animations, or terribly incorrect animations, so you’ll need to do the drum animations from scratch.
In GH drums are very different than RB. Kicks and snares tend to follow RB3 standards, but you’ll have to pay close attention and re-do the toms and cymbals throughout the whole drum chart to make sense in RB3’s engine.
In GH you have open strum notes on bass, we obviously don’t. This translates into forced continuous green hopos. You need to remove those hopos and adjust the chart around it.
In both Guitar and Bass, you may find chords that don’t start at the same time (like we can do with keys). RB3’s engine doesn’t allow that. Magma will complain about it. Just adjust them to start at the same time as makes more sense (usually by pulling back all the early notes to coincide with the latest note of the chord).
I think you have to add the solo markers, don’t recall off the top of my head.
There’s also a series of blue and black markers in all instrument charts. We’re not sure what GH used them for, but you can safely remove them. Interestingly, Magma compiles with them on there. If anyone knows, let me know.
You can use the album art included in bluzer’s file or get one from the internet, along with the metadata.
Once you’ve done all the above, you can export and try to compile in Magma. Now you have a “playable” song in RB3.
What do you need to get the song up to C3 standards?
This is where it gets complicated. GH had completely different difficulty standards than RB3. So you’re likely to have to modify the lower difficulties and/or generally adjust the charts to be more RB3-oriented.
GH songs don’t come with harmonies, so harmonies must be added where applicable. Vocals in GH also don’t follow the strict RBN2.0 rules, so you have punctuation all over the place that RBN2.0 dictates must go. Some people have also found that the timing and/or pitches were sometimes off. I can’t speak to that, since i’ve never been that good with vocals, but putting it through playtesting would get good eyes looking at that.
If the song has keys, they’re not authored, obviously. For C3, you’d have to author them. This may be as simple as charting them, or, for songs like The Turtles – Happy Together (and this is the reason I haven’t done an FtV of it), GH felt that charting the sax to the guitar. So they moved the guitar audio to backing, moved the sax part to the guitar stem. You’d need to re-do the audio stems, remove the sax part from guitar, chart the missing guitar part, and then do the keys/sax part on keys. You see? Gets complicated :-p
With the first way to do it above, you have a fully autogenerated (and not desirable, but usable) venue. You’d need to at least do some basic changes to the venue for C3 purposes. Singalongs being one of the most important.
Guitar Hero also had this thing where they thought it was a good idea to do crazy tempo speed hikes rather than changing time signatures. That affects animation speeds and if it goes too high, won’t even compile in Magma. Let’s hope you don’t encounter this kind of song.
Since we intend C3 songs to look as close to DLC as possible, you would have to check if another song from the same album is available as official DLC, if so extract the png_xbox file and put it in the same folder as your project so magma can use it, and make sure all your metadata matches the official songs so everything groups and looks nice together in game.
If you’ve done the above, your song is most likely ready for playtesting and may be well on its way to be up to GHtoRB3 standards or even C3 standards (I still hold our new standards are much higher than anyone ever tried to live up to).
As you can see, it’s a lot of work. And that’s AFTER you know your way around Magma and REAPER. If you don’t, it’s a headache. That’s how I started. If you go over to Xbox360ISO and look at my old posts from late 2011, you’ll see my asking around, getting the basics. It took a while, but here I am. And it all started because I found GHtoRB3’s project and they didn’t want to do GH WoR songs and I HAD to have the Rocky Horror Picture Show. So I learned how, and I did!
TrojanNemo, dude, you’re my hero. Holy crap that’s a ton of work…
It’ was actually more than that, since at the time you couldn’t just go and get the songs from bluzer, so I had to learn to rip and decrypt things too
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_cheeky.001.gif” /> But the real heroes are the GHtoRB3 team.
They’re the ones who started doing this, did it for as long as they did, and did it as well as they did.
They helped me a lot to get started, and since then we’ve all been good e-friends. In exchange, I offered them reliable hosting for their files (were you around when all their stuff kept getting deleted on the free servers?).
It really sucks to come to the realization that they may be stopping or have already stopped unofficially, but it lasted longer than anyone expected. As you’ve noted, it’s a lot of work, and life moves on, motivations and energy levels change, etc etc.
There’s already a couple of guys doing the “playable” conversions. Hopefully they’ll get inspired to go up to C3 standards
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />Stumbling upon GHtoRB3 is what got me into customs too, so there (likely) would be no RB:HP and one less C3 admin/author (if I still can call myself that haha) if GHtoRB3 hadn’t shown me an assortment of high quality customs.
Didn’t realize that’s where all the stuff was, I might do some of the missing ones. They won’t be up to C3 standards, I’ll just put them on my own page, but good to know thanks for pointing out where they were, I found the thread
” src=”/wp-content/uploads/invision_emoticons/default_SA_smile.gif” />There’s a bunch of people who deserve credit way before we do, GHtoRB3 guys are one of those people.
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