After you start using Performous you might tend to consider it a karaoke program but it is actually much more than that.
Instead of just displaying the lyrics, notes are also displayed and the performance is scored based on how well you actually hit the notes. Unlike in most other games in this genre, you will also see the precise pitch that you are singing, so that you can see what you are doing wrong and easily (well, everything is relative) correct your pitch.
Most of the songs available also contain the original vocals and actual karaoke versions are rare.
For those who sing rather than well, a karaoke mode is provided. In this mode only lyrics are displayed and there are no notes or scoring.
Performous uses the same instruments and songs as these games and obviously the gameplay is quite similar.
However, the developers have deviated from the original concept by changing the scoring system and other things. They aim to make the game fun to play with and to make the scoring system judge playing skills as accurately as possible so that scores rather than percentages can be used for comparing players.
Here are some key features of "Performous":
· Should work on almost any platform
· Very accurate singing pitch detection
· Noisy environments are not an issue
· Multiple simultaneous tones can be detected and separated properly
· Intelligent gameplay with guitar and bass
· The engine determines what was intended rather than simply picking the nearest chord
· Hammer-ons and pull-offs are undoed when the player accidentally does them and then picks the note in the regular way
· Drums
· Dance pads
· Device autodetection
· Guitar Hero and Rock Band instruments
· Generic dance pads
· SingStar and Rock Band microphones
· Fallback to other audio devices when no SS/RB mics are detected
· Top-notch visuals
· Fully OpenGL-based rendering
· Music videos as backgrounds
· Smooth UI animations and other eye candy
· Solid C++ engine
· Performs well on slower machines too
· Rapid but still safe development thanks to advanced C++ features
· Plenty of threaded stuff like background loading of songs and videos
Requirements:
· Up to four microphones
· Graphics chip with OpenGL acceleration
What`s New in This Release: [ read full changelog ]
· Since 0.5.0 you can use dance pad to play dance songs in StepMania format. Again, the performance is scored based on how accurately the scrolling notes are hit.
· Many fixes have been made on the code lately (SingStar ripper enhancements, left-handed support, new highscore, and other bugfixes).
· Advanced timing code for reducing jerkiness (but causes more jerkiness for some because it is not properly tuned yet)
· Dance gameplay improvements
· Many controller detection and mapping fixes
· Fix flashing singing note issue
· Dutch translation
· Add a simple joystick button identification utility (--jstest)
· Other small tweaks
