XML Data

Well, i had no idea people actually read these... but thanks! I just hope this doesn't clog up all of the resources with junk... Can't say I'm a big fan of these being considered resources.

While alt-tabbing back and forth through BWL last night I was able to flesh out the XML data section a little more. After making some modifications to the XML Console Parser I was able to read in the XML data completely. The XML data looks something like this:


After an arbitrary loading/starting time (of 5 seconds) I am scheduling the notes based on their time in the XML data. I've got a function I'm calling with schedule() that just outputs the notes to the console window at realtime.

Example output in console:




For my sample song (Metallica - Nothing Else Matters) it seemed to look pretty accurate. Of course it is only going to be as accurate as the user who edited it can make it. My next step will be to get the mp3 playing in accordance with the song and sync both of them up. When I'm finished I should be able to see the notes being displayed in the console log as the song is playing.

One issue is from what I understand, TGE works in 32 ms ticks. Hopefully this isn't enough to throw off the timing, but I won't know until I test it!

What to Do?
Since people are reading this I've got a few unanswered items that will need to be addressed in the future. If you have any ideas feel free to drop some comments.

- Note Display - I haven't thought of a good way to mimic the note display in the PS2 Guitar Hero. An implementation for the scrolling fretboard just isn't coming to me. The notes I can spawn as objects and just move them towards the camera in time with the music, but the fretboard I don't know about right now. Any ideas? Some sort of GUI? Searching hasn't given me any leads yet. I'm very interested in doing it with a 3d approach but at the minimum I can always create some 2d GUI control to handle it.

- Background Display - Going along with the above, I want the foreground to contain the 3d notes and the fretboard, but at the same time I want something going on in the background. My first thought was to include the Music Video (if one exists) and have it playing in the background (I'm sure T2D is a better engine to do this entire project on, but i'm poor and don't want to purchase it at this time). The other idea is to use TGE to create an animated scene like they do in the game and then have the camera move around and change views within the scene. However, all the time the foreground items must be present which leads me to believe I need to create a GUI to contain my gameplay display. I'm not sure where to start when it comes to manipulating 3d objects on the gui.