EA ignores Rock Band listings News

Yeah will probably cost more with all the instruments!

The prices are probably correct.

Incidentally, do you need to play this witha whole band? Or can you just buy and play it like Guitar Hero?

Probably defeats the purpose of it, but I just wondered.

The game is listed on play-asia as region-free. Costs £30. I hope I can buy the accessories from there too, as they will undoubtedly cost a fortune in the UK.

@crazyhorse174

You can just buy the game and one of the instruments and just play it like Guitar Hero, yes. I think you can also play with other folk over Live/PSN and 'form a band,' but I haven't actually seen that working yet!

Anybody got confirmation for that feature?

I would have liked to comment on this article, but I don't comment on rumors and speculation.

"I honestly don't see how its possible"

Why not ?

@ beano

Any kind of lag in a rhythm game would ruin the expreience completely, so they have to be 100% confident they can do it lag free, which on a system like Live can never really be guaranteed, as (he says not really knowng what he's talking about) there are no dedicated servers, so you're banking on the host having a good connection/not using their bandwidth elsewhere (downloading stuff on thier PC or whatever).

It'll be great if they can do it, but I'm kinda dubious given I'm pretty sure they haven't shown a demo of it yet...

I preordered the bundle from Amazon for £70.

Doubt I'll get it, but fingers crossed

@Paukl:

True - but the network-timing in a game like GH is nessesary not as critical as in a game like VF since the game can "assume" that player A plays a chord correcty and only "send" a error chord afterwards to player B. A bit hard to explain, but basicly the two players (or more) doesn't nessesary have to be relying on each others networkwise when compared to beat'em'ups and it's easier to compensate for network lag.
With a bit of creative coding, I can see no reason why this can't work fine.

"With a bit of creative coding, I can see no reason why this can't work fine."

Creative coding? This is EA we're talking about here.

No.. it's Harmonix we are talking about - masters of music games :)

Good man, Beano. Good post. The timing needs to be accurate on your own console. The rest are probably just synched up together I assume.

when you look at games like forza 2, you are still able to play fine online even on a really laggy connection, thats because all the handling for your car is handled locally (on your own machine) the only thing that appears 'wrong' is the other drivers cars. Rock Band could work quite well, what i can see happening is that if someone in the band makes misyakes you will not hear them instantly, you will hear the mistakes around a seccond later (depending on quality of connection).

Fighting games on the other hand (online versus) rely on both players moves to happen instantly, fighting games are the most likely to fail online, thats why i dont have high hopes for 360 VF5, but I think Rock Band can probably do great.

I...
Want...
This...
Game...
NOW!

Price dosn't matter!

@Paukl

A game like Resistance or Gears of War also needs a pretty good response time to allow accurrate gameplay.

When you think about how many individual messages need to be sent for a multiplayer FPS to work well, and then you think about how many messages would be needed for a music game that supports 4 or 5 players, the task is not quite as daunting as it seems.

That said, the suggestions on here about effectively applying quantising to the incoming signals don't hold water if you consider what is actually taking place.

TuftyMcTavish said "The timing needs to be accurate on your own console. The rest are probably just synched up together I assume."

If you were just playing along with a pre-made stream of music then the synching you mention could be applied, but in this case you are sending time dependant signals to other players who are simultaneously sending signals back to you. You can't synchronise retrospectively, or the music coming out of your speakers would not match up with the actions you were taking on your own instrument.

Example. I strum a chord dead on the start of a bar, and in your house you hit a crash cymbal at exactly the start of the same bar. I don't know you have hit the crash until the data reaches me down the network, but I can't synchronise "back in time", so the best my game can do is crash the cymbal as soon as it gets the data. If the lag is too great, I will notice the crash came a bit late, and possibly assume your timing sucked :)

Now if my game client was going to sync things up as you suggest, it would need to introduce a delay in order to do this (synching basically works by cacheing past data from several sources, lining them up along the same time line, and then bunging them out the speakers all in unison). The problem here is that if such a system was applied, I would strum my chord bang on time, but there would be a delay before I heard either my chord or your cymbal crash. They can cache things to a certain extent, but only to a point where my brain can't detect the delay. But I'm not sure that actually gives you any advantage over just bunging each instrument out of the speaker asap. I mean, if you brain can't sense the delay, synchronisation is not necessary.

The way I see it, some things are simply not avoidable. They can try and keep their packet size as dinky as possible, but really bad lag will screw up the game unavoidably.

@Perjoss

"if someone in the band makes misyakes you will not hear them instantly, you will hear the mistakes around a seccond later"

That still doesn't work. How would you know if someone has made a mistake or not until the data turns up? If you heard the mistakes a second later, would you not also hear the good notes a second later too (which would make them sounds like mistakes to your easr). Plus, a second is aons in music terms. A handful of milliseconds is more than enough to know something is up if your sense of timing is good.

the game already knows how to play the tunes correctly it does not need the user across the ocean to tell it how to play a certain song, so until a mistake is received it could play the song as normal, and then the mistake would happen with a delay, not perfect no, but I think there is still a chance it could work. I agree it does ruin the experience if you cant hear exactly how well your band members are playing at the same time as you, but until we get 'next gen' internet what can we do? :(

@Perjoss

I see what you mean, but I think the feeling of "playing along" is quite a contributor to the experience. If all you heard was the tune being played back, with the occasional seemingly random squeak when someone else stuffed up, I'm not sure that quite meet the brief.

I'm not saying it won't all work. I'm sure they have worked something out.

the game already knows how to play the tunes correctly it does not need the user across the ocean to tell it how to play a certain song, so until a mistake is received it could play the song as normal, and then the mistake would happen with a delay, not perfect no, but I think there is still a chance it could work.

That is exactly what Guitar Hero II is doing as well and what Rockband will probably do too. Try it; Miss notes on purpose. You'll notice that you will hear the song continuing to play for a short moment until it counts as a failure. It's not really noticeable when you hit the wrong note but since you can play a note a little bit too late the music keeps playing until that short time is over. If it wasn't like that you would hear the guitar stutter as you don't always hit it at the right moment or too early - all the game does is mute the guitar if you are making a mistake, nothing more. It will work online just fine, the only difference is that you will hear someone making a mistake just a tiny bit later due to lag if the other player actually did miss a note or struck the wrong chord. I don't think it will really make much of a difference - if the other players play fine, you won't notice a thing, the game keeps on playing the correct notes if no mistake is made so the problem with lag is automatically eliminated. The only time when the game has to mute a sound channel is when someone makes a mistake and frankly if that happens 100ms later due to lag it really won't matter.

edit: kangarootoo: Of course it would not be much fun if the song played along and during notes you hear that the guitar player made a mistake. To really notice that there has to be a lot of lag. The game does not have to send huge amounts of data and 100ms won't make a difference probably. 100ms is an average ping, if you play with friends in the same country it will very likely be less. The biggest advantage is that this game is not dependent on the data of other players beacuse how other people play has absolutely no influence on how the game runs on your machine. So at least there will be no stuttering, warping players and the likes. In the worst case it will sound awful but I think it'll be fine.

ive played music games online with 4 other people at the same time all in different countries and it worked fine the game was dj max also harmonix did multiplayer online in amplitude back on the ps2 this worked fine as well