Thanks to everyone that got interested by the repo.
Even if we left the project on the side we may be able to work on it.
Unfortunately, it is REALLY hard to get this done as we are a really small team.
And we lack motivation and knowedges as most of us never did any decompilation in the past, me included.
Open-Ribbon Discord Server: [join via the github]
Whoa. This blew up! I’m working on a vibribbon like game and was curious about some of the internal workings and found your repo. I am interested in helping. I’ll come hang in your discord this weekend and see what I can help with.
Woooo! This was a simple but great game, and the music was just GREAT. Also, you could pop open the PS1 CD reader, and put whatever Audio CD you had around, so you could play with custom music that, more or less, was followed by the game levels.
Which was fascinating, technically speaking, because the PlayStation was never intended to be played without a game disc in the drive. Vib Ribbon's graphics are so brutally simple because the entire game has to fit in 2 megabytes of RAM when you remove the disc. It loads it on boot and then never touches the data track again.
The custom music wasn’t followed the game levels — the game was designed for you to swap in your own CD, and the levels would be generated off of that music.
It’s why the digital re-releases have been somewhat lackluster — the default music is fine, but not notable on its own.
Love the game, even bought an E3 shirt for it from a random person via a google image search years back.
Might be worth just directly asking Masaya Matsuura about this if you get stuck, he's fairly accessible via facebook (or at least he used to be).
Also, I've done no machine learning stuff at all, but wouldn't something like Vib Ribbon be absolutely ripe for reverse engineering via finding trends in the kinds of levels produced on the basis of the kind of music played fed into them?
The algorythm used can be found in the game patents, they explain how they are analysing the audio waves in order to generate the map.
For the default soudtracks, they are simply pre-created with a script file explainig the map format.
I love this so much. I remember reading about this game in a PS1 magazine as a kid, but I could never get my hands on it. For some reason, it stuck with me for all these years until I finally got around to making an open source Android game inspired by it: https://github.com/beat-feet/beat-feet. The idea of loading up your own MP3 files and playing levels is something I think should get a lot more mileage.
What's up with the recent blow up in popularity of this simple rhythm game woth sound generated obstacles, that is neither groundbreaking technologically and not even impressive gameplay wise, with unaccurate obstacles not matching anything really in the sound and lacking in variety?
I have first seen it like a week ago in this video essay https://youtu.be/1X6D39Cd34k where it seemed to have an adorable initial vibe, but after a minute of interaction, there is no more novelty and engaging content in it.
What in this concept makes it worth our time, compared to AudioSurf, osu, PaRappa, or more recent, stunning Thumper?
Dude, it's a game from the 90s, cut it some slack, damn.
Not only is it a cute game, but it's interesting technically too, the entire game fits in ram so that you can remove the game disk and pop in a music CD to generate a level.
They shelved it during dev for like 1.5 years or something until they figured out how to look 8 seconds ahead of the currently playing music on ps1.
It was originally being developed as part of an ad campaign for Mercedes A class, but then Mercedes dropped out and the game eventually became vib ribbon (cool origin story).
The vector graphics are pretty unique stylistically for ps1 as a platform, no other games really used that style.
Plus reverse engineering it would probably help people build better modified audio tracks to get the game to produce even better maps.
Those are just some of the reasons why other people might find it worth their time.
I think my only nitpick with it is that the generated levels could match the beat a little more/game seems like it could be a bit more difficult.
Is this legal? I know decompiling is legal in some areas for specific reasons. But I don't think that you can open source the result of that decompilation. You end up with an artifact based on something you don't have the rights to relicense.
Well, its not legal obviously to decompile and share the code online. But its just a matter of "will they care" and the answer is most likely NO. Just like SM64, it is open sourced on GitHub but they never got any complain from Nintendo asking to shut down anything.
It's probably fair use. There's no harm to the market for the original work (ROMs and assets aren't shared, only the decompiled/recreated code), it's not made for profit/commercial use, the nature of the use and work is about the code and not the artistic aspects of the game, etc.
Nintendo hasn't gone after the repos because they have a very solid fair use defense. They have, however, taken action against shared EXEs derived from that source code which DO contain the copyrighted SM64 assets. The fact that they went against that and not the code-only project shows they probably agree with this analysis.
First encountered this game about a decade ago at the TATE gallery in London on an exhibition showcasing their newly created video game collection. Was immediately taken by the soundtrack and chased it down. Fantastic game, fantastic music
I've never played the game but listened to Vib-Ribbon Blues a million times. Seeing this I took the opportunity to watch a playthrough, and wow, the singing voice is actually the character speaking in the tutorial. I had no idea.
One of my favorite games for the dev, non region locked, ps1 I have. Picked it up out of a used game bin for a couple of bucks. I still find myself humming the soundtrack.
