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| http://www.unrealvoodoo.org |
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| 1. Introduction |
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| 2. Requirements |
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| 3. Playing the game |
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| 4. Editing and Importing songs |
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| 5. Importing Guitar Hero(tm) songs |
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| 6. Troubleshooting |
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| 1. Introduction |
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Frets on Fire is a game of musical skill and fast fingers. The
aim of the game is to play guitar with the keyboard as accurately
as possible.
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| 2. Requirements |
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Windows:
>> 128 MB of RAM
>> a fairly fast OpenGL graphics card (shader support not necessary,
antialiasing support recommended)
>> Direct X compatible sound card
Linux:
>> 128 MB of RAM
>> a fairly fast OpenGL graphics card (shader support not necessary,
antialiasing support recommended)
>> SDL compatible sound card
Mac OS X:
>> Mac OS X 10.5 or later
>> OpenGL accelerated video card
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| 3. Playing the game |
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First of all, these are the keys you'll need to navigate the menus:
Arrow keys - Change menu selection
Enter - Accept
Escape - Cancel
These keys are used in the game itself:
F1-F5 - Frets one through five
Enter - Pick
Note that these keys are default keys and they can be changed
from the game settings menu.
The easiest way to learn to play the game is to watch the tutorial.
The basic idea is to press and hold the approriate frets when notes
appear and tap the pick button when the notes hit the row of keys at
the bottom of the screen. With longer notes, you need to hold the frets
down for the whole duration.
You get points for hitting notes. For each ten correctly played
notes, your score multiplier increases up to four times. If you make
a mistake, the score multiplier is reset back to one. For long notes,
the longer you hold down the frets the more points you get. Chords award
you twice the points of normal notes.
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| 4. Editing and Importing Songs |
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With the included song editor you can import your own songs into the
game. Ideally you should have two versions of your song: the guitar
track and the background track. This is because the game needs to
be able to mute the guitar when play it incorrectly. Both must be in
the Ogg Vorbis format. A song can also be composed of just the main track,
but in that case the whole music is muted when mistakes are made.
These keys are used in the editor:
Arrow keys - Move cursor.
Escape - Bring up the editor menu.
Enter - Add a note at the current cursor position.
Hold down Enter and press the right arrow key
to add longer notes.
Space - Play and pause the song. Note that only the guitar
track is played in the editor.
Delete - Remove notes at the current cursor position.
PgUp/PgDown - Change difficulty level
Follow these guidelines when composing different difficulty levels:
Easy Difficulty: Frets 1-4 used, no chords.
Medium Difficulty: Frets 1-4 and chords used.
Amazing Difficulty: Anything goes.
Remember that you shouldn't place notes on top of each other.
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| 5. Importing Guitar Hero(tm) songs |
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The game has a built-in importer for the songs in Guitar Hero(tm) by
RedOctane. To use it, you'll need to have the game DVD, at least 500
megabytes of free disk space and a lot of patience.
The game supports Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero Encore and
Guitar Hero 80s discs. Note that only the Playstation 2 version of the
discs are supported.
You'll also need to have the OGG Vorbis command line compressor
installed. In Linux, you can usually get it in a package called
vorbis-tools. In Windows, copy the encoder (oggenc.exe) into the
game directory.
The importer can be started by choosing Song Editor in the main menu,
followed by "Import Guitar Hero(tm) Songs". The importer will ask you
the path to where the game files can be found. Usually this is just the
driver letter of your DVD drive, e.g. 'D:'.
After you have entered the correct path, the importer will start ripping
the songs. Note that this will take a very long time. For example, on a
1.8 GHz Pentium M laptop with 2 gigabytes of RAM the process took about
4 hours. It is recommended that you run the game in windowed mode so that
you can leave the importer running in the background and do other things
while it's doing its magic.
Once the importer is finished, you'll find the songs in the regular
song selector. Note that if you abort the importer midway, it will
mostly pick up where it left off when you run it again.
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| 6. Troubleshooting |
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Q: Some chords don't work.
A: Some keyboard manufactures reduce costs by making some key combinations
impossible to press. This is especially true with laptop keyboards and
some cheaper PC keyboards. The solution is to change the keys to different
ones. For example, swapping the Enter key with Shift should help a lot,
or changing the frets to i.e. numbers 1-5. Use the key tester in the
settings menu to check your chosen key set.
Q: The sound crackles.
A: Increase your audio buffer size or change to 22050 Hz sampling frequency.
You can do this from the Audio Settings.
Q: The colors look ugly on my ATI video card.
A: Don't use tweaked drivers (e.g. Omega Drivers) that reduce the color
depth to 16 bits.
Q: I can't hit those notes!
A: You either need to practice more or adjust the A/V delay option in the
audio settings. Try increasing or decreasing the delay by 50 and seeing
if it helps.
Q: I can't see my scores on the world charts.
A: You need to enable score uploading in the settings menu first.
Q: I get a strange OpenGL error on startup.
A: If your desktop color quality is set to 16 bits, increase it to 32 bits.
Q: No matter what I do, I get lousy scores.
A: Sell your gear.
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