CH Leaderboards October 2025 Devlog

CH Leaderboards October 2025 Devlog

It has been a long, tumultuous time for CH development since the announcement of the leaderboards update. This is in great part due to how busy the team has been, but also to a lack of communication on how things were going behind the scenes, which we do recognize. In an effort to improve in this department, here is the CH Leaderboards October 2025 Devlog!

Devlogs will be concise, to-the-point posts about the general work that has been going on with Clone Hero. Rest assured that we are hard at work, juggling life things and pouring our free time into the game (if you are not aware, noone on the development team works on CH full time). A huge amount of work has been put in the game over the past year, too much to list in this one devlog, so here is a surface-level overview that should give a good idea of where we are sitting right now.

The gist of it

Generally speaking, leaderboards are functional and scalable, and every front-end task is done. What this means is that the look and feel of things has been established and is essentially final. We have tested out a gameplay loop of connecting, validating, and submitting runs on real production hardware (not just development configurations), with success.

The bulk of the remaining work is back-end work, and pertains to what goes on behind the scenes. A brand new infrastructure of servers has been put in place to support the load on CH leaderboards, with appropriate failsafes and backups were something to go wrong (which it will, like with any self-respecting project!).

Additionally, the new CH launcher has been finished up and its UI polished. Among the new features are:

Remaining work

A number of features still need work before a full release can happen. Here are the main outliers.

Chart hashes

Chart hashes are a big task that still needs some work. Simply put, a chart’s hash is the name it uses when asking the leaderboard system for its entries. Because many charts of the same song can exist, it’s not enough to use a simple string like “Through the Fire and Flames Expert Lead Guitar” as a name; instead, a more complicated calculation is carried out to be able to uniquely identify each chart of each song, for each difficulty and each instrument.

The main improvement over the current way chart hashes are done is that CH will keep track of 3 different types of hash, song, track, and tempo map hash, allowing charters to add instruments or difficulties to a track without resetting its leaderboards on existing instruments and difficulties if they haven’t been touched. It will also ensure that songs included in several song distributions that share one or several of the same charts will point to the same leaderboards, even if they differ in other ways, like for example having a full difficulty release and also having a single difficulty release. In this case, the Expert Lead Guitar chart on both releases will point to the same leaderboards. Finally, charters will be able to alter lyrics and section names without resetting leaderboards.

Because of this new functionality, more work on the song scanning is left to be done. This is especially important to get exactly right, because any change to this system after release is likely to soft-reset the entire leaderboards.

Perfect FCs and the ghost meter

With the advent of leaderboards comes a new focus on introducing rewarding mechanics to incentivize clean gameplay. Initially presented in the latest PTB, Perfect FCs (or PFCs) and the new ghost meter will reward players for playing the notes that charts ask of them, and no more.

As a first attempt, we are trying the features in these ways:

The exact mechanics and details of both of these features still remain to be fully tested, and will be accessible in the upcoming Public Test Build. Head on to our Discord server to participate in the PTBs.

Final word

Work has been rocky but sustained on the leaderboards. We are aiming to do more of these devlogs as the team tackles the final tasks. The current course of action is to release one such devlog monthly to cover what has been done in the past month. If very little gets done, then the post will be small, but we will do our best to make one regardless.

Thank you to all players for your continued interest in the game. See you in the next devlog!

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