Giving away my PS2 and Guitar Hero is one of the only things I regret by the way. If someone created a Guitar Hero that ran on Linux I would gladly pay.
Netplay, multi format support. Etc. All previous game charts are available in formats compatible with Phase Shift.
Phase Shift also unfortunately plays like complete ass, especially on guitar.
The entire Guitar Hero community has pretty much shifted to Clone Hero, with a few diehard fans who still mod GH2/RB
His channel has skyrockted from a few thousand subs less than a year ago to a few million now, and growing VERY fast.
Was that a limitation of the AI software or was that by design to keep the strumming part easier to make?
Maybe I missed it, but it looks like there are 3d printed parts.
They aren’t what makes jbj’s brain work, but they might be worth going over the models (even if crude) as part of a follow up video.
If you posted that to /r/3dprinting it would be another audience to pull in.
Anyway it looks awesome!
Some of the songs on Beat Saber, on Expert Plus, are effectively impossible for any existing 7 axis serial robot arms to actuate fast enough to equal the best human players if you strapped VR controllers to where the end effectors are. Maybe some sort of parallel robot (like a SCARA) robot could do it.
Two robot arms with 7 degrees of freedom (the extra degree to allow them to avoid colliding with each other), plus the camera has to also move to avoid obstacles. It'd be really tough to beat the best human players, from a mechanical point of view. You'd need custom robots.
I looked into building a robot arm which could cook breakfast. It's almost ludicrous just speccing out the torque requirements to pick up a skillet.
You end up having to pick harmonic drives and less speed but more stiffness, or hydraulics, which are lighter, but messy, less stiff (can be both good and bad) and less reproducible.
Either the game is slow enough to reason about in real time (certainly, a sweep like 4-3-2-1-2-3-4 as seen in the video wouldn't trip up any seasoned player) or the player resorts to memorizing finger positions (2+3 [2nd button held down at the same time as 3rd], 3+4, 1+4, etc) as well as sequences (1,1,1, 2+3, 1,1,1, 2+3). Hopefully one can pause at a certain segment and redo it as much as needed (like with real instruments), instead of starting from the beginning of the song each time.
That 30fps is interlaced though, so there is 60Hz motion. All of the PS2 GH/RB games I know run at 60fps internally.
The video explains some of the technical details but I'll highlight a few other key points.
- My first attempt at note recognition was looking for specific pixels on the screen. The thought was that I would be able to detect if a pixel changed color and, depending on the color, it would know which note it was. The game outputs at 30 fps and on faster songs, it would miss nearly 30% of notes.
- The note recognition was eventually built using computer vision from OpenCV and specifically blob detection. It took a fair amount of effort to hone in the perfect filtering to make note recognition was highly accurate.
- Implementing the solenoids threw me for a loop. I ended up burning through a lot of them since I'm new to robotics and didn't understand the relationship between power, volts, and current. At one point I was giving these solenoids 4x the power it was expecting. Needless to say, they burnt out quickly. I eventually talked with a robotics guy and he gave me a 30 min crash course which straightened me out.
- The whole project, from idea to the YouTube video I linked in the post, took 2 months. It probably cost nearly $1,000 for everything (raspberry pi, pvc, solenoids, AC/DC power converter, relay modules, paint, stickers, etc). That might seem high, but like I said, I was learning about volts/current and part of that learning process was destroying many solenoids (oops).