RBN2
By Matthew "Nord" Nordhaus in Rock Band Network on
August 23, 2010 2 Comments
RBN2 Details
Today we are announcing our plan for Rock Band Network 2.0. We'll have a cool name soon, but I want to get information out regarding features and dates well in advance of our implementation, in order to help you (the authoring community) plan the transition from RBN to RBN2. We've listened to your requests, and we will continue the user-generated revolution you began with improvements and updates to the entire RBN toolset. We want to keep the RBN toolset on par with our internal audio team, and continue to let you build top-quality content that exceeds the standards of our competition.
First,
RBN2 will support the following new RB3 features:
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Pro Drums: although you can add MIDI information for cymbal gems to RBN1, RBN2 will add the ability to audition with cymbal gems as well as a few enhancements to streamline the audio submixes.
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Keys and Pro Keys: full support of our brand new keyboard peripheral will be available; both regular (5-lane) and Pro key authoring.
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Vocal Harmonies: three part harmonies. Sing!
- All of these features will be optionally supported by RBN2, and each song may implement as many or as few of them as the creators wish.
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Audition mode will be updated as well. The exact feature set is not final, however we are planning on supporting the following enhancements:
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Practice Sections: full support for named and placed practice sections, plus the ability to check them in Audition mode. Auto generated practice sections will still be an option.
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Rewind while you are auditioning a song. YES, WE HEARD YOU.
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Custom camera controls to allow you to view specific band members during audition mode (to check animations, lip sync, etc.)
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Dramatically improved auto-generation for the venue track.
There are a number of other enhancements that we want to add, and will prioritize after the list above, including skipping to song sections, feedback for audio mixing issues, fixing store audio preview bugs, improved Magma error reporting and MIDI validation, guide audio for vocals, and more. We are not committing to any of these and will complete them if we have resources available. But we will be asking the community for input on which items we should prioritize, because we want you guys to be as efficient and effective as possible.
You probably noticed that there is no support for Pro Guitar. We considered supporting this feature very carefully, but after much wrenching discussion decided that we cannot support Pro Guitar for RBN at this time. There are several reasons:
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Because of the way that Pro Guitar DLC is implemented in RB3, it would have been substantial work to add to the pipeline for both Harmonix and Microsoft.
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It is extremely time consuming to author, to the point that it might be just as time consuming to author a Pro Guitar part as it would be to author the rest of the track.
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Peer Reviewing any Pro Guitar songs would be problematic due to the fact that we will be building a brand new install base of Pro Guitar players at launch.
As I mentioned, this was not an easy decision, as we want RBN to be on parity with DLC as much as possible.
We can certainly revisit this decision in 6-12 months, however, at least for now, we aren't supporting Pro Guitar.
Schedule
All these dates are subject to change, however here is our best guess at when each phase of the RBN 2.0 rollout will be available:
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RBN2 Docs and Reaper Templates released this fall prior to the RB3 ship date (October 26th).
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Magma 2.0 and RBN2 Audition mode (added to RB3 360 with a patch) will be released shortly after RB3 ships.
- A beta version of creators.rockband.com that handles RBN 2.0 songs will be available for song submissions in early 2011
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RBN2 content will start to appear in the RB3 store at the end of Q1 2011.
* Note that RB3 will support existing, and any newly created RBN1 content, from Day 1)
There are still some details to work out, the biggest of which is probably the transition plan from RBN1 to RBN2, and how we are handling the changeover. We'll be letting you know more concrete dates and our rollout plan as the date approaches.
Please discuss this post here:
http://creators.rockband.com/forums/showthread.php?p=44353
