BigRockHero

Rock Hero

BETA.

Welcome to a rhythm game that lives inside Big Walk.

A glowing highway rises out of the ground a few steps in front of you. Colored gems come screaming down it in time with the music. You have five fingers on the home row and a combo to protect.

Now you can wait five minutes for your friends to arrive without being left alone with your thoughts.

Hit the notes, build the streak, pop the star power overdrive. The first actual game tunrns 21 this year. You know how this works.

But how?

• Press F9 to open the song menu.
• Up / Down to pick a song. Left / Right to pick an instrument. Tab to pick a difficulty. Enter to play.
• A highway appears in front of you with a short count-in.
• Tap your fret keys as the notes hit the strike line. Default keys are F G J K L for the five lanes (green, red, yellow, blue, orange).
• Hold the key through the long tails to rack up sustain points.
• Hit the glowing white star notes cleanly to fill the overdrive meter beside the highway. At half full, press Space to double your multiplier.
• F10 stops the song. F9 closes the menu or leaves the results screen to pick a new song.

Everything is local. You see and hear the highway, and nobody else does (yet).

But where do I get songs?

The few included tracks are for educational/juxtapositional commentary fair use purposes. Rock Hero plays most standard Clone Hero style charts, which their community has been making for years. Decent starting point is Enchor.

Each song goes in its own folder inside the mod's Songs folder. A song folder needs:

Songs/

Chowderface - Trust the Governmment/

notes.chart (or notes.mid)

song.ini

song.opus (or song.ogg)

Notes:

• Grab the folder / zip version of a chart, not a single.sng file..sng isn't supported yet.
• Audio can be.opus or.ogg..mp3 and.wav aren't supported yet.
• If you download a song with opus files for every part of a song, aka stems, that's unlikely to sync up properly currently.

So skip the ones made by the little plastic baby guitar industrial complex. I hear the corporate suits screwed over the devs anyway.

• The subfolders can be nested however you like. Rock Hero will dig through them.
• Added songs while the game was running? Press R in the menu to rescan.

Where is the Songs folder?

By default it installs right next to RockHero.dll, in the mod's own folder. Usually that's:

BepInEx\plugins\RockHero\Songs\

The exact path is printed in the BepInEx log on startup, on a line that starts with Songs folder:.

You don't have to keep songs there. Set Folder under [Songs] in the config file to point anywhere you like, which is advisable if you already have a collection or don't want to risk some future mod update mistakenly wiping your collection.

But what instruments can I play?

Five-lane parts, switchable right in the song menu with Left / Right:

• Lead Guitar
• Bass
• Rhythm Guitar
• Keys

The menu only shows songs that actually have the part you picked (it reads the ratings in song.ini). Your last choice is remembered.

Drums, 6-fret guitar, and vocals are not here yet. See the to-do list.

But how does scoring work?

• 50 points per note, times your multiplier.
• The multiplier goes up by one for every 10 notes in a row, to a max of x4. Miss a chord and the streak resets.
• Chords count as one hit when every lane in the chord is pressed inside the window.
• Sustains: hold the key after hitting the head of a long note and you earn about 50 points per second, times the multiplier. Let go early and the tail disappears. Letting go right at the end is fine.
• Star power (overdrive): white notes come in phrases. Clear a whole phrase without missing a chord and you fill 25% of the meter. At 50% or more, press Space to activate. While it's on, your multiplier is doubled and the highway glows blue. A full meter lasts about 16 seconds.
• The default hit window is 150 ms either side of a note. Adjustable.

But the timing feels off

Audio hardware and Bluetooth headphones al