The release of Clone Hero’s V1 update was supposed to mark the end of feature development and the start of long-term support for the game. But after the closure of ScoreSpy, the community had expressed a strong desire to have something replace it, as it was a driving force for many people to play Clone Hero.

As a result, a lot of new features and major fixes were developed over the past months, and recently showcased on stream during the Custom Songs Central 5th Invitational tournament. This devblog will go into detail about what was shown and elaborate on a few things that were said on stream.

Game code refactoring and chart parsing

One of the big blockers for v1.1 was a large restructuring of the codebase to make it more robust and flexible for any future update, bug fixes, etc. With around 33,000 lines of codes so far being modified. This process was one of the main reasons why no news about v1.1 has been revealed until now, as we were making sure everything was working properly during this huge rework.

Additionally, the parsing of charts was significantly modified to increase performance and resolve subtle parsing bugs. As a result, a lot of bugs are now dealt with such as:

• Broken chords from old charts and conversions can now be fixed with the chord_snap_threshold tag song.ini tag.
• Micro sustains can also be completely purged from a chart with the sustain_cutoff_threshold song.ini tag.
• Some drums specific bugs that would cause chaos one notable example was a bug causing all roll lanes after an empty roll lane to be skipped.
• Even faster song scanning (up to 2x faster), depending on your hardware

New features

Open chords

Open chords are chords that include both an open note and fretted notes at the same time. These are played by fretting the note(s) without anchoring, similar to how strum chords work. For example in the screenshot, you would be required to fret yellow without anchoring green or red. You will usually encounter these in custom charts for fingerstyle guitar and electronic music.

Note color shuffle

Fans of Guitar Hero: Warriors of Rock can finally rejoice knowing their favorite feature will come to Clone Hero! Don’t fret, different colors do not mean you have to fret differently. :)

SP End Visualization

The next new feature is a subtle one, blink and you may miss it! The game can now visually show when starpower will end by only coloring the notes for SP within the time remaining for SP. How is this useful you may ask? It allows you to easily see when you as a player might need to consider squeezing the following note within the current SP activation. Previously you would have had to memorize the length of an activation or have memorized a SP path to consider doing a squeeze, now you can even consider doing squeezes during sightread runs!

This feature was born out of the hit detection rewrite work as now at any time we know the exact end time of SP, previously it was more of a simulation of sorts so we just didn’t have the data which makes this possible.

Revamped Gamepad Mode

The Gamepad mode hit detection mechanics have been reworked to fix many of the fundamental issues with the historical concept of gamepad mode. Previously gamepad mode was at a significant disadvantage when it came to fast strumming sections and with clone hero specifically sections where open notes and normal notes are heavily used together. With these issues in mind we applied the concept of lifting to play a note to this problem.

So now Gamepad mode supports playing notes both on press and release. First a button press must have been previously used to play a note. Then as long as the next note is on the same lane, or is an open note then it will be hit. Releasing a button when no note is within the hit window has no penalty. Overall this makes playing songs under gamepad mode feel much closer to how a song plays on guitar with alt strumming; these mechanics serve the same effective purpose.

No other changes to existing gamepad mode mechanics have been made outside of minor bug fixes in the hit detection.

Added support for Emojis

Thanks to a new fallback font, the game is now able to display emojis in your lyrics and player profiles, for even more customization than before!

Better online synchronization

Previously when playing online if you were the host your game wasn’t actually syncing the start of a song with the other players. Most of the time this wasn’t an issue but if you had a much higher latency to the server than the other players in the lobby it would have triggered some issues. The start of the song is now properly synchronized between all players.

Negative audio offset

Previously, the “Offset” value in .chart files and the “delay” property in .ini files did not support negative numbers. For this reason, current charting conventions discourage their use. Clone Hero will now handle negative values correctly, so this is now a viable alternative to adding silence to the start of the audio file when charting. This change involved a deep restructuring of how the game actually starts audio playback, which actually led to finding the previous online sync issue as well.

Texture rework

Old textures:

New textures:

The in-game textures have been improved in order to make the game look significantly better at higher resolutions, and some elements’ positions were adjusted to be more accurate to the Warriors of Rock look. This has involved a large reworking of the original textures through various noise removal and upscaling tools to produce higher resolution versions of everything.

Additionally, textures for 6-fret have also been completely remade from scratch to resolve many asymmetry and crude design issues of the original. Also this change better sets us up for a much improved color profile system for 6-fret coming in the future as the new textures have been designed from the ground up to be colored at runtime.

New hit detection code

There has been a large rewrite of the hit detection code making it fully deterministic given only your inputs and the time of each input. Additionally for us we can now use the hit detection outside of the game itself, this is key for making leaderboards possible in a secure way. As now we can validate a run server side once you have finished the song before making the score public.
This rework also fixes many subtle issues such as the game giving slightly more star power when playing with a lower framerate, and other things that make scoring slightly inconsistent between computers. This is a large step towards making the game fully framerate independent, but unfortunately the controller input library that Clone Hero uses (Rewired) is still framerate dependent, which means the game for now will continue to read inputs more accurately with a higher framerate.

A brand new Clone Hero Launcher

That’s right, the launcher is back! The launcher will be a new way of handling Clone Hero and community happenings.

These first screenshots highlight the home page of the launcher, which display current and future events (It can be any events, from a large IRL meeting, to Clone Hero tournaments, special livestreams, etc.). It also displays who is livestreaming in the Clone Hero category on Twitch, and shows the latest news (such as this article you’re currently reading!).

Another big feature this launcher will give you is the possibility to manage your game installations. Subsequently, this will allow you to have multiple versions of Clone Hero installed, like a main build and a PTB, and manage those as you wish. You can even set which build you would want as your default build.

After adding or installing a build, you will have access to any of the in-game settings through the launcher, which will make it handy for anyone with multiple builds to apply either the same settings or different settings to fit your preferences.

These won’t be the only features coming to the new launcher, we will have much more to show off in the near future!

New songs to the Clone Hero setlist

As Clone Hero is getting a new update, we decided to expand the game’s official setlist! So far we are officially announcing that the following 11 new songs will be coming with v1.1:

1. 1.O.M - Challenger (Heavy Metal)
2. Alice Kane Wolf - Power On (Instrumental Shred)
3. Ascension - Set You Free (Power Metal)
4. Coma Hole - Old Climb (Stoner/Doom Rock)
5. Cory Hotline - Pressure (Future Funk)
6. FOXCULT - The Garden (Post-Hardcore)
7. Jarod Fedele - Galaxies in Harmony (Progressive Rock/Metal)
8. Mindiode - Postulate (Progressive Metal)
9. Pete Mathers - Resurrection (Metalcore)
10. Shadow of Intent - Saurian King (Symphonic Death Metal)
11. Sorrowfuse - The Paranoia (Alternative Rock)

There is still room for more songs to be added for v1.1, currently 2 more songs are being discussed.

The leaderboards

And here comes the major news: CLONE HERO LEADERBOARDS ARE REAL AND HAPPENING!

Since ScoreSpy announced its shutdown, we have been working hard to officially integrate a leaderboard feature into Clone Hero itself.

(Disclaimer: All screenshots are work-in-progress; expect the final version to be slightly or even majorly different.)

This version of the song selection screen will be visible after you have logged in with your CH Leaderboard account. You can see the song’s information like before, with additional space to display the current leaderboard for this chart. You can toggle to the old view (and enter “offline mode”) by holding the blue fret. While playing in offline mode, any new scores will only be saved locally, and you will not be able to submit them to the leaderboard.

Another thing worth mentioning is that in-menu leaderboards update live! Meaning that if someone submits a score while you are in this menu, the newly submitted score will show up. Bear in mind that the score updates will not be instantaneous, as the server-to-game response will have its own delays.

Finally, the scores displayed in the leaderboard list will only be scores for the currently selected modifiers and/or chart speed. For example, the screenshot for “i ws nvr yr grlfrnd” has 5 submitted scores here, but if you were to select 125% speed or brutal mode, the leaderboard would only show scores played using those specific modifiers.

When leaderboards are enabled, you will also see other players’ scores while playing the chart. This design was inspired by Guitar Hero: Live’s and ScoreSpy’s live leaderboard; and its function will essentially be the same. It will update live as you play through a song and let you see whenever you pass someone’s score. However, unlike the song selection leaderboard display, these do not update live if someone gets a score; it will simply load the current leaderboard that was submitted at the time you started your song. And a little quality of life option: You can move the leaderboard UI wherever you would like!

As of right now, the current login method for the leaderboard is done through the song selection menu. By holding the blue fret, you enable leaderboards mode, prompting you to log in through the CH Leaderboards website. This is not final at the moment but could also remain in a future test build. Another potential option would be an option to login from within the new Clone Hero launcher. Either way, this is a work in progress, and it still needs to be finalized.

Once a score is submitted to the leaderboard database, pressing select on a hovered song will let you open the dedicated new CH Leaderboard website with a more detailed view of the song leaderboard.

Those two screenshots here showcase some of the features currently available on the leaderboard’s website. Additionally we will show off more features closer to launch as things develop further. We are planning to have things like: total player score, your own player profile with all your submissions listed and even more features to be announced closer to launch! Currently the main goal is to get everything in-game finalized and then have the core website featureset done, as we can iterate on the website as much as we want to without impacting the game directly.

Leaderboard Integrity and Security

From the start, the leaderboard system has been designed to prevent cheaters from submitting fake scores, and a lot of work has gone into the game to ensure that hardware differences and chart file differences will not affect scoring.

Chart Parsing Work

Clone Hero’s chart parser has been heavily reworked to fix a wide variety of subtle parsing bugs and edge cases. These are the kinds of bugs that create differences between what the charter intends and what the player ends up playing, and in some cases break song playability altogether. These changes ensure that if a chart file is modified in a way that would impact the chart’s difficulty or scoring, then playing through it would submit to a different leaderboard than the original chart version. This includes any changes to song.ini tags that cause the notes to be parsed differently. However, changes to a chart that do not impact this (such as changing metadata, lyrics, sections, or adding new difficulties/instruments) are allowed, and scores on these modified charts will still be submitted to the same leaderboard as the old version. This gives charters some room to distribute improved versions of charts without worrying about leaderboard resets.

Server side validation

As mentioned previously, the hit detection changes were primarily done to allow for server-side score validation. What this means is that, when playing Clone Hero with leaderboards enabled, in-game controller inputs are sent to the server along with the chart data to be used to re-simulate the gameplay to determine your final score. This effectively generates a server-side “replay” of the submitted run which is then stored. Overall this gives our moderation team the necessary information to catch suspected cheaters. For now, this “replay” system is server-side only and is not accessible to players.

There is currently no exact date planned for the leaderboard update, as we still have a lot of work ahead to make sure the whole experience meets our expectations. That being said, we are confident that a 2025 release is entirely manageable, although we cannot make any promises on a more specific release date. Remember that we are a team of people doing this in their free time and sometimes life gets in the way!

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