CH Leaderboards PTB release!
Clone Hero Leaderboards are here! In form of one of Public Test Builds (PTB), leaderboards are now available to the public.
Recap: What are Leaderboards & Score Validation?
Since our initial leaderboards reveal in November 2024, we have been working non-stop on this new release. A lot of rework has happened in Clone Hero since then to make this possible. If you have been following our latest devlogs, the main area of work to make leaderboards possible was making scores completely recreatable on our servers. For this to happen, a massive engine rework has been done to make sure that the game and the server agree on the calculated score. In summary, when you play a song, our servers receive all of your game input, and creates a replay that can be used to validate that the score submitted is legitimate.
The main issue with this new system is making the validator work perfectly in all situations. The game simulates the instrument engine every frame while the server has to interpolate the state of the run based on your inputs and the chart data, which can lead to rare score mismatches. This is what we call “desyncs”, where the game and server disagree on the score achieved. And over the past year, we have been hard at work on finding these desyncs and fixing them one by one. Today, we have finally reached a point where we believe that the majority of desyncs have been fixed, with a very few small edge cases remaining. This Public Test Build will be focused on gathering even more replays from the players, which will allow us to catch the remaining desyncs and fix them before the final release. It also allows us to load test our new servers and make sure we have the right infrastructure in place for launch, while also letting players try out the new leaderboards system.
Apart from all the work on desyncs, this PTB has several other QoL improvements, a massive amount of bugfixes and new features.
What to expect from this PTB
The game now has 2 modes; regular and leaderbords mode. For regular, that’s your traditional Clone Hero experience, with local scores only. In leaderboards mode, you will be prompted to login to CH Leaderboards, and from that point on, the scores will get submitted. You are able to switch between these modes in the main menu.
Leaderboards mode has certain differences from regular mode:
- Online and versus mode are disabled. Leaderboards can only be played in singleplayer mode.
- The songlist has a complete new look, showcasing the song information in an abdriged section. This allows to show the current leaderboards for that song in particular, as well as your submission ranking and stats, if it exists.
- During gameplay, you are able to see your current position, as well as the top 5 of the leaderboard. If you are in the top 5, your name will be shown as well, allowing for some friendly competition if you are good enough to be up there.
How to report issues
Thanks to our infrastructure, for leaderboard issues like desyncs, you don’t have to do anything to report them! We get all the information we need from the replays that are generated during a run.
If you find any additional issues with the rest of the game or servers, please report those in the PTB channel in our Discord server. We will be monitoring this channel and hope to fix anything we find as soon as possible.
Guitar Leaderboards only
This PTB only includes leaderboards for guitar charts. Because of remaining desyncs, Drums leaderboards are not yet ready for public testing, but are coming soon. As most of the engine’s Guitar code is shared with other instruments, it was critical to get those fixed first. Drums is now our next priority as Guitar is more stable. It’s important to note on this aspect that the whole infrastructure to support drums leaderboards is already in place and fully working, so once the Drums engine is stablized you will be able to try it. On a similar fashion, while gamepad mode is able to submit scores to the leaderboards, most of them will be marked as invalid due to some desyncs we still have yet to fix.
Regions
Leaderboards are global, but our backend infrastructure is designed to have multiple regions and assign you to the best one depending on your location. For this PTB, we have 2 regions available; US and EU. We plan on expanding this over time, depending on the playerbase, demand and cost.
Leaderboards limitations
As this is a PTB, with a whole new system for everyone in it, there are certain limitations to be aware of for this initial leaderboards phase:
- During the initial rollout, and while we assess the resource requirements for leaderboards, each region will support up to 100 concurrent sessions. A session begins when you start a song, and ends when you leave a song. These limits will be progressively increasing during the PTB as we understand better the resources needed for leaderboards.
- Leaderboards will only be available for a limited time. We expect this PTB to run for around 3 weeks, but this is subject to change depending on how things go. We will keep you updated in our Discord server and socials. When leaderboards are down, the game will also let you know via an in-game popup.
- Leaderboards might go down for maintenance or updates. The game will also let you know these via an in-game popup.
- When submitting a score after a run, you might see a popup indicating that the replay was invalid but still submitted. For these tests, we are allowing desyncs that do not impact scoring to go through, you do not need to report these.
- Mobile builds are available, but leaderboards are disabled on that platform for this PTB. Eventually, we plan on having leaderboards available on mobile as well, but for this initial phase, we want to limit the number of variables in play, as mobile devices connections can be unstable and lead to a bad experience.
As this is still a test, any scores submitted to the leaderboards are not guaranteed to stay up and might be wiped at any time. This is dependent on if we find any issues or need to do any modifications that might impact the integrity of the leaderboards and we will let you know if this is needed.
We hope you understand these limitations, as this is all new ground for us. We are excited to see how this PTB goes, and we are looking forward to your feedback and reports.
Website
Launching alongside the game, we also have a website for leaderboards here where you can create your account and see the global positions on every song that has been submitted during the PTB. It is currently a bit bare-bones as most of our focus went into the backend side of this, but we plan to expand it, independently from the game, during the PTB and beyond. Any feedback and ideas for it are welcome!
Exciting new features (Mobile devices support!)
If you have been reading carefully, you might have noticed we have mentioned a mobile build. We’ve been giving the mobile build a bit of well deserved attention recently and we’re very excited to finally show you what we’ve been working on!
We will be releasing this PTB on mobile devices as well. This time not only on Android, but also for the first time on iOS! You will be able to experience the game on your iPhone, iPad and even visionOS devices with iOS 15.6 or later installed. Initially, it will be distributed as a .ipa file which you can sideload on your device using methods like the AltStore. Controller support is still system dependent, but it should at least work with modern console controllers.
We’ve also been focusing on improving the overall experience for players in the mobile versions and we are very happy to announce that the game has full MIDI inputs support now and is finally fully playable without external controllers thanks to an all-new, fully customizable, in-game touch interface!.
Finally, thanks to a lot of the rework improvements and the iOS port, we’ve been able to identify and fix all of the crashing issues many players were experiencing on the mobile port, making what we believe is the most stable build of Clone Hero in mobile ever. It is important to note that even with all of these improvements, mobile is still not our top priority, so please expect some rough edges here and there.
Clone Hero Launcher support
This PTB also marks the first release of the Clone Hero Launcher, a new way to manage your Clone Hero installations, updates, and more. The launcher allows you to easily download and install different versions of Clone Hero, including this PTB, without the need to manually download and extract files. It also allows you to discover community members via the Twitch “Now live” section, and more features are planned for the future. The launcher is supported on Windows, Mac and Linux.
Part of this PTB is also to test the launcher itself, so please report any issues you find with it as well.
How to join the PTB
The only way to join the PTB is thorugh our Discord server, which you can find here. Once in, navigate to the Public Test Build channels, where you will find the dedicated channels for PTB announcements, downloads and discussion.
Download and install
There are 2 ways of using this PTB; standalone builds and through the launcher.
Standalone builds
In the PTB announcements channel, you will find links to download the standalone builds for Windows, Mac and Linux. Download the appropriate build for your OS, extract it and run the executable inside.
Launcher
If you want an easier way to set this up, you can use the newly released Clone Hero Launcher, which you can also find in the PTB announcements channel. Download and install the launcher, from there, you can go to the “Game Downloads” section, press the PTB tab and you should be able to see the latest PTB available for download. Download and install it, then launch it from the launcher itself. The launcher lets you launch to Clone Hero with leaderboards directly, as long as you have logged in with your leaderboards account in the launcher.