Rock Star Preview
Posted January 16th, 2004 @ 09:45am by Erik J. Barzeski
If you'd like to download an in-progress copy of Rock Star, you may do so here. There are quite a few things left to be done:
- Multiplayer game
- High Score Implementation (local and Web-based)
- A bug regarding the score at the end of the game
- Weeding out of some more file types (.aa, "Spoken Word" genre, etc.)
- Some UI enhancements
- Complete directions
- Registration setup
- Preferences
If you've got any feedback, leave it below in the comments. Please police duplicates yourself and refrain from saying "me too" unless you have more to offer on a particular item. I believe that this version (no high scores, no multiplayer) will eventually end up as the demo version, so here you go! Play around, have fun.
P.S. Some quick notes: Requires 10.3.x. Caps Lock pauses. Cmd-Opt-A toggles full-screen or windowed mode.
Donate Life
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 9:31am #
Wow, this is really cool. I can't wait until there is multiplayer!
Secondly, it didn't seem to have all of my iTunes playlists available.
Thirdly, you should write a tableview replacement so that part looks better =]
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 9:51am #
Just like the game on my iPod!
This will be free when it's finished, correct?
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 9:55am #
Rock Star will not be free, no. We've gotta recoup the cost of icon design and hosting, foo! 🙂
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 9:57am #
Eric, I think you forgot to compress the discimage...
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 10:52am #
When I launch the app it displays an alert telling me it couldn't locate my iTunes music library XML file. (My iTunes folder as in ~/Documents. Moving it to ~/Music fixed the problem. But I didn't put it in ~/Documents. Some old version of iTunes must have put it there - iTunes otherwise works fine.
There seem to be some performance problems because of the size of my music library. Dual 1.25GHz G4, 84GB of music - my "iTunes Music Library.xml" is 25MB.
The app takes about 40 seconds to launch. Starting a game by song takes about another 40 seconds in the gathering playlist info stage.
Those issues aside, I like the game.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 10:58am #
Some sort of volume control would be nice...
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 11:08am #
You have volume controls. They're on your keyboard. Regardless, we'll also be implementing cmd-1 through cmd-7 to control volume.
Performance is optimized fairly well in build 11, and RS will prompt for the location of the file if it's not in ~/Music.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 11:25am #
Oh my. I feel excited and disappointed at the same time. Why? I've been trying to code such a game during my free time and pretty much succeeded to come up with a good start. I'm not an experienced Cocoa programmer but I'm learning. The guts of the app are working but a lot of stuff is still missing. I was happy to see that nobody came up with the same idea yet. Well, not anymore.
Some comments about RockStar. Absolutely gorgeous icon, a perfect fit. Congrats to the artist. The star on the neck is missing in the icon version, though. It looks better with the star like on this entry. I don't like the Flash-like interface but it's only my personal feeling. I tried the game (single player, mixed mode), selected a playlist (called "Noir Désir" with about 40 items in it) and boom, spinning beachball of death. I'll give it another try later.
Now I don't know what to do with my project, trashing it altogether or continue to develop it and publish it as a "competing" product. My implementation looks very different from yours but I will not be the first on the market. Oh my.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 11:37am #
The "Flash-like" interface is necessary, we feel, as "Party Mode" is intended to be played on a television screen at, well, a party. 😉
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 11:41am #
Two bugs:
In a game of 25 questions, I missed maybe five or six. My score was increasing past 3000, definitely. But somewhere near the end of the game, my score reset, and I ended with "2/25 correct, total 1516". It happened twice in a row.
If one of the answers is longer than the window is wide, it will wrap, but get cut off after two pixels or so.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 11:48am #
I realize I have master volume controls (even though not all keyboards do), but if I drop the master volume then system alert beeps become to low 🙂 iTunes has volume controls for similar reasons...
I'll give the next build a try. Thanks.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 11:51am #
Avi, from my initial entry:
The other one is also a known bug I forgot to list. It will be addressed in a later build (perhaps 11, perhaps not).
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 12:39pm #
I would suggest allowing a choice of connected iPods as music source, for people like me who have very little in their regular 'Library'.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 1:10pm #
I'd just like to be able to click on the answer rather than typing the number on the keyboard, Awesome game...
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 1:20pm #
Arnaud, this has been added in build 11. You can also type "SPIH" at the main screen and "1234" at the mode selection screen.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 2:03pm #
I just gave it a quick spin, and so far it looks really nice and is progressing to something that I will happily be shelling out money for.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 4:08pm #
Rock Star
Freshly Squeezed Software is working on a new music guessing game called Rock Star, and they just released a preview...
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 4:31pm #
The multi-monitor support could be a *bit* better (don't flash them, just make them black or leave 'em alone), otherwise it's fine.
Posted 16 Jan 2004 at 4:39pm #
Andy, that's a problem with the new display fade APIs that Apple added in 10.2. They provide a convenient interface to do fading yet they also left out a way to specify which displayID is to be faded, so it just fades all of them. I'll add this to issue to our list, though, and it will be fixed/reverted in a later version.
Posted 17 Jan 2004 at 1:52am #
Yes, we just released build 10, but here is Rock Star build 11. Grab it from the same location as before. This time the file...
Posted 17 Jan 2004 at 7:05pm #
Fun! This was bound to happen... What's your high score? I've managed to get a hair over 17,000. Answer a few more questions right and I'll be over 20,000 hopefully.
Posted 19 Jan 2004 at 12:20am #
Great game! Looking forward to the full version! Especially party mode, since I hosted a game manually on New Years that would have completely rocked if I'd had something like that then!
Scores: On my top 100 song playlist, I hit around 15k with one wrong. My reaction time sucks!