Piano Odyssey / News: Recent posts

Version 0.9.4 saw the addition of nearly half a dozen gameplay features. A partial list:

-Pressing the wrong note now has audio feedback, via a random dissonant chord.

-You can still hear the song playing softly in the background even if you're screwing up, which helps you get back into the rhythm.

-In practice mode, you have more options. New additions:
-Hand isolation. You can now practice one hand at a time.
-Draw note names. If enabled, the name of each note (A, B, C#, etc.) is drawn under each circle. This should help you memorize the staff.
-Toggle hand positions. Lets you enable/disable the drawing of the hand position indicators.
-Note rendering method. In 'traditional' mode, the notes are drawn as black circles, with a sharp or flat icon in the middle. Combined with no hand positions drawn, and staff rotation set to always, you can simulate sheet music.

It was discovered that 0.9.1 did not work properly on Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex. I did some debugging, and uncovered an issue which has now been resolved. So, I'm happy to report that everything now works as it should on that OS.

This release incorporates a few changes that came about through user feedback on the Ubuntu forums:

--The codebase is now known to compile on 64-bit Ubuntu.
--The user's choice of artwork file is automatically saved from session to session.

In addition, there were a few other minor changes:
--The fonts are now loaded at run-time though config file parameters, instead of being hard-coded.
--The location of the artwork file has changed. It has been moved to the "art" subfolder.

There was a big issue in the previous release with adjusting the file paths for the artwork, in order to get it to load properly. In this version, the appropriate paths are automatically detected.

Also, previous linux versions tried to save hiscores to a directory that did not have ordinary-user permissions. This has been tweaked to allow ordinary users to properly save their scores (this is done in the background, without user intervention).

First, the most important announcement:
After unzipping, you should edit the file called "keyimages.cfg" and set the [base folder] property to point to the place where you're going to keep the files. This will allow the programs to not care what working directory they are executed from. More details are located in the README file.
[Note that this behavior is different from previous versions]... read more

In this release, I've brought my game and related executables into the autotools fold. Everything can be built with a simple ./configure && make, no longer are you required to have Eclipse to build the game.

Piano Odyssey GL is a MIDI arcade game that allows you to play real songs even if you aren't good at piano.

In this release, the name of the game has been changed to avoid any possible trademark issues.

Dust off that MIDI keyboard in the corner and use it to play Piano Hero GL! The game now has 4 songs playable at all difficulty levels:

-"La Candeur" by J. Friedrich Burgmuller
-"Fur Elise" by Beethoven
-Underwater Theme from Super Mario 1
-Dungeon Theme from Zelda

Piano Hero GL now comes with 2 full songs (La Candeur and Fur Elise), a high score system, and statistics after you finish a song.