Limits of the game

A limit is where a counter reaches a certain point and cannot progress any further without rolling over to negative numbers, getting stuck forever or simply crashing the game.

Examples of these are integer limits (particularly 2,147,483,647 in 32-bit programming, which is what was used in the original Guitar Hero games)

Another GH clone by the name of GHPCED 2 had optimised code to allow hundreds of thousands of notes, but it was never released.

In GH:SE however, there is a limit of 2^1004 (variable limit), which if attempted to be exceeded, the counter will simply display Infinity.

But there is no realistic way to reach Infinity, as there is a limit to the counter in GH:SE depending on their behaviour, and are not humanly possible to reach without cheating, as it would take millions of years to get.

Note streak limit
The original note streak limit was 9,007,199,254,740,992, due to floating point problems, but Lawrence added a rule where it could go higher, until 9,999,999,999,999,999, which is 1 off of 10 quadrillion.

How long would it take to get there? If you take 10 quadrillion and divide that by the maximum notes per second, 32 in this case, you would get the answer of 312,500,000,000,000 seconds, which is roughly 3,616,898,149 days, which is 9,909,310 years (assuming the NPS (notes per second) and the FPS remains at 32 the entire time). In Turbo Mode, the 3.6 billion becomes 72,337,963 days, which is roughly 198,187 years. Nobody has ever attempted this as it is one of the most impossible achievements in game.

Another problem that arises is making the song to get to this limit. No custom song can exceed 2^27, or 134,217,728 notes. If this is reached, the game will crash instantaneously. So there is no possible way to get to 10 quadrillion notes on a single custom song. However, if one were to try and get to this limit, using Turbo Mode it would take a minimum of 83887 seconds to reach the limit before the game just crashes, and that in days is close to 24 hours! This limit is the only limit achievable in game, as the other limits take longer than the average lifetime to breach.

Score limit
The original score limit was hard-coded in game to be the 2.147 billion limit, but was removed in V9. Reaching 2.147 billion is realistically possible, though it would take several hours in Turbo Mode to make the song and play it back, which nobody has ever reached. Lawrence made a few attempts for it, but failed every time.

The REAL limit since V9 is 576,460,752,303,423,488 (or 2^59).

How long would it take to get there? If the new allocation limit was technically infinite, you couldn't still get there. If you take 576,460,752,303,423,488 and divide that by 512,000 (the maximum number of points you can earn in just 1 second), it would take you roughly 1,125,899,906,843 seconds, or just over 35,702 years to accomplish (assuming you the FPS remains at 32). If not, Turbo Mode will make it a bare minimum of 714.02 years, which seems to be the shortest time possible in GH:SE to get to a limit like this.

But the game crashes at 137,217,727 notes, meaning the highest possible score is 2,147,483,396,000. (two trillion, one hundred and forty-seven billion, four hundred and eighty-three million, three hundred and ninety-six thousand, flat)

134217728 - 31 = 134217697

250 * 64 = 16000

16000 * 134217697 = 2147483152000 (the score with just the x64 multiplier on 5-note chords)

2147483152000 + 244000 = 2147483396000

Note allocation limit
Although the note streak variables can go higher than this, the note allocation limit is 134,217,727 notes... well, not really.

Whenever a note, a gap between the notes, or a sustain gets placed in the song editor and the page gets scanned, the game goes through logic that allocates notes into a list. If the list is big enough, the game will crash in an instant. In some cases, the game can handle more than 10 million entries, but the game will crash when the song is attempted. If the list exceeds 134,217,727 entries, Scratch itself will completely fail to generate another space in the list and crash.

What does this tell us?
It tells us that the limits in the game are impossible to reach throughout the course of life, except for the 32-bit integer limit of 2,147,483,647. Have you been doing it this entire time while playing beforehand or leaving it going while you were reading this wiki? You're probably not ever going to finish, but is still a challenge overall.

However, say there was no limit other than Infinity. In Note Streak terms, it would be simply;

((2^1004) seconds) / 32 = 1.6977392 × 10293 years

...which even if you started and could live forever, you'd probably not finish due to the sun becoming a red giant and the solar system becoming extremely cold, heat death and by extension, ''' the end of the universe. '''