[Performous-devel] Performous 0.4.0 released

[Vincent Le L. <lel...@en...>]

A major new release that not only contains improvements to the singing
game you all love but more importantly extends the game into a
full-fledged band game. Since the pre-release at Assembly Summer 2009
<http://assembly.org/> demo party, a large amount of improvements have
been done, improving both the gameplay and the graphics. It is not
perfect yet, but this certainly is a good time to make a release.
Changes since 0.3.2 include:

    * Guitar, bass and drums
          o Uses songs in Frets on Fire
            <http://fretsonfire.sourceforge.net/> / FoFiX
            <http://code.google.com/p/fofix/> format
          o All tracks (including vocals) are supported
          o Autodetection of any connected Guitar Hero and Rock Band
            instruments
          o Support for using a keyboard as guitar controller (FoF style)
          o Whammy bar support
          o Better hammer-on/pull-off support than in other games
          o Engine tries to figure out player's intention instead of
            picking the nearest chord
          o Multiplayer for as many players as you have instruments for
          o Full 3D note visualization
    * Initial hiscore support (press End in song browser)
    * Textual feedback for singers after each line
    * Guessing background/cover images and videos by filenames (if not
      specified in song files)
    * SVG graphics and fail samples from Frets on Fire (GPL for the win!)
    * Major changes in the internals, including a completely new audio
      mixer
    * Configuration system improvements, now properly supports system
      and user conf
    * Always use desktop resolution for full screen mode (instead of
      mode switching)
    * Many minor bugs fixed
    * Build/install changes and cleanup
          o Installs only minimal amount of cruft
          o Support libraries built into the executable (static linkage)
          o Increased version requirements for Boost, CMake, etc.
          o Various small bugs fixed

Special thanks to all the new developers who participated in this
release (see a list of contributors and their activity at Ohloh.net
<http://www.ohloh.net/projects/performous>). Without you it would not
be possible to develop the game at a rate greater than ever before :)