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Comment by 10ren | Hacker News Reader

The site and game look great, success seem inevitable; but I find playing unsatisfying.

The chosen notes often seem independent of the guitar lines in the song; and when played, they're not in sync. So for me, it's more like a simon-says game with incidental background music. :-)

- Is this a technical problem? Flash is not so great at syncing sounds and actions; and additionally, I'm trying it on a low-powered eee PC (most flash games are fine on it).

- Or is it me? I've heard that these games are not like playing the instrument at all (I'm an old guitar player, just garage bands and teaching, but I can play), and so maybe this spoils the experience for me.

I hope this feedback is useful to you - and even better if you can enlighten me! Thanks :-)

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They seemed to be about as in sync as any other game of this genre. Your eeepc might be part of the sync issues.

But how in sync is the genre? :-) That's part of my question.

However, it now seems the eeePC is the main factor, as it's straining at some other points in the UI.

It is entirely a technical limitation of Flash. You have no way of guaranteeing a set sound latency, or even monitoring how much is present. According to the Adobe devs this might change in future versions.

But for right now, music games on Flash can't live up to the expectations set by games on other platforms.

All true on this thread. We push Flash pretty hard (could probably beat it a little further), but if you're interested in helping solve these tough problems, we'd love to talk.

To be honest, until Adobe changes Flash, I think Java is the best bet in terms of responsiveness (there's still random garbage collection delays of around 100ms so not perfect; but an improvement). Installation base is comparable to Flash.

But not in terms of design: for although a Java version theoretically could be as pretty as your Flash version (and it is very pretty), the designer-tool support really isn't there. It would be hard to port; and hard to modify. Sun has some tool support for designers, but I'm sure it has nightmare usability.

I think both design and responsiveness are crucial in your space, so this is a difficult one.

This is something we looked at for a while when starting out, and even posted on HN to ask about (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=203864). In the end, we chose Flex because it seemed like we could get good enough performance while enjoying the benefits of quicker development. We mostly use pure AS3, but we saved some time with a few components. Hopefully someday we can strip those out and cut the Flex framework overhead.

But yes, Flash player has an unpredictably crappy internal clock and performance varies significantly based on the browser and OS, so synchronizing the notes with the music has been a challenge. For the most part, I think we've done a fairly good job compared to the existing players. We scale intense tasks dynamically in game but there is definitely room to improve (custom a/v delay, controller delay, really-crappy-performance mode, etc).

Sorry, I made a mistake: I was thinking you are producing sound when the player hits a key - but you aren't. I think that's not part of the "guitar hero" concept anyway (it is in a drum version I saw in an arcade; a different story).

Anyway, I found that java can play user-triggered sounds instantly (or perceived as such), whereas Flash can't. I experimented with this in Flash, researched it/asked about it on FlashKit - and all the Flash music games I found with triggered sounds suffered from this same problem. So it's very likely true, but not relevant for you. :-)

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