cherrypie is a score tracker and ranking for all current versions of Harmonix's Guitar Hero series.
Currently, the only games supported are Guitar Hero, Guitar Hero II, Guitar Hero II for the 360, and Guitar Hero Encore: Rocks the 80s.
Rock Band support is planned for a mid-December rollout.
If you are playing Guitar Hero I songs: This is perfectly normal. In Guitar Hero II, the formula used to get star ranking made it easier to achieve 5-star status. Since Guitar Hero I songs may be shared with the 360 version, the site has been standardized to use the new grading system only. This makes development much easier, because otherwise we'd have 360 owners going "why is my 5-star a 4-star?". Accept the praise. :P
If you are playing any other game: I guess my cutoffs must be wrong. Email me.
They're the next logical step. They were added to the site to bring life back into the game to those who can already 5-star every song, so they can go up to the next level. These are blatantly taken from Score Hero as well, and if enough 6-star scores go up, I may add 7-star and 8-star ranks as well.
Songs without all information are missing because I can't verify if scores are legit or not that way. Once the info becomes publically available, I'll gladly add them to the site.
I can guarantee that neither of these will be supported out of the box, there's usually a bit of waiting after the game's release for all data (notecounts and base score) to be gathered. Once enough information on the scoring is known, expect a real answer to this question.
cherrypie is free for all users to use. I don't plan on making people pay to use such a site, because that would be incredibly cheap. I have no plans on making a tiered version of the site to sell subscriptions, mainly because that would be too hard to implement, and I hate ads as much as anybody else, so I don't really want to add ads to the site. I would definitely appreciate donations if anyone's up for that, but I have no way of getting any directly. Besides, would anyone want to donate? I don't think so?
I'm not really trying to compete with Score Hero in any way, because their community's work on custom songs and figuring out the scoring has been incredibly helpful to this site among others.
I wasn't satisfied with Score Hero at all. Having used sites like VJ Army and DDRecall for score entry on other music games, I had a much higher standard of how a score tracker was meant to work and look. Score Hero seemed to use some incredibly hacked-together interface, it didn't share entries for songs with the same chart on Xbox 360 and PS2, and just didn't feel right to use.
Nevertheless, it got the job done. I started getting really tired of dealing with it when I got around to playing Guitar Hero a lot more in April, so I decided to code a little something up, and that little something became cherrypie. I still like to think that it works a lot better than Score Hero, but both sides have their ups and downs. We don't have their massive community or exclusive content from Neversoft/RedOctane, but we definitely have the advantage in the looks department.
Ideally, please email me at kirbykirbykirby@gmail.com. Preferably prefix your email's title with [cherrypie/Bug] or something that contains cherrypie somewhere in the title so I can filter it and see that something's going on, as I get several hundred emails a day, yet manage to get my inbox to zero on a daily basis. If you do this, I'll most likely see it right away and add it to the list of stuff to fix and add.
I'm sorta taking them, and sorta not.
The site's development is planned in "releases". The version you're on right now is Version 1, but each new feature added incrementally gets us to Version 2. I have a list of features I want to be present in Version 2, and once all of those are in, an announcement will be made about it.
Each release is generally characterized by one or two major new features, and little bug fixes or minor new features. If you give me a feature request, I'll generally add it to the "after this planned release" list, and then it'll be considered. Bugs have priority, then new features I've planned, then yours, unless they're easy to implement.
Because Internet Explorer sucks. Get something else, preferably this, as it's what the site was tested on. No, I don't plan on making the site standards-compliant or validate correctly because I suck at writing perfect (X)HTML and CSS code. As long as the site shows up fine in Camino and other Mozilla-based browsers, I don't care about the "political correctness" of the code.
Besides, getting rid of IE users by making it look hideous on their end will definitely get rid of tons of losers!
Addendum: We may add IE support once the main CSS structure for cherrypie is decided on. An announcement will be made when someone decides to correct my terrible CSS code into standards-compliant CSS code.