(April 29 2016) Sonic Beat Updates Thread

Sonic Beat update April 29 2016:

This is another MASSIVE update for timing accuracy, especially regarding songs with multiple BPM changes or stops. You'll notice every song in the game feels "snappier" as a result. All the better now, since we award you for achieving the prized Full Combo! Here are some gameplay videos showing off all the changes!





Changes since last version:
[FIX] Healthbar display now clips correctly. 100% at the top, 0% at the bottom, just like it should be.
[ADDITION] Celebration for achieving a Full Combo. Includes animation and a badge on the high score marker.
[ADDITION] Added a "More Songs" button at the bottom of the Featured Songs list, because no one seems to find the 30+ other songs available.
[ADDITION] A song progress bar. The symmetry feels good, man.
[CHANGE] Fancier health bar asset to match new progress bar.
[ADDITION] New achievements for: 1) Playing a StepMania import, 2) Getting a Full Combo on Vindicate Me (Challenge difficulty). Yeah, good luck with that one.
[ADDITION] A star progress indicator.
[CHANGE] Moved multiplier indicator below judgement. Tastes like Rock Band, but who are we to argue with excellent UI design? Love you, HMX! Please don't sue us.
[FIX] BOOYAH! No more StepMania restrictions for 192nd notes.
[FIX] DOUBLE BOOYAH! No more 600 bpm limit. Now it's 1800, which would be one note every frame at 30 frames per second. Incidentally, you can now play Robotix.. for the most part.
[FIX] A memory leak in the audio engine. This would cause song starting points to creep backward after playing several of them in a row. Now, songs will always start on time. This was a pretty big deal.
[FIX] Several StepMania importer issues. You will have to re-import files you suspect were imported incorrectly.
[FIX] Charts ending in a hold note will no longer appear cut-off by a small amount.
[FIX] Off-by-one error in BPM change placement. This was a pretty big deal too.
[FIX] We had an error reading multiple stops within one beat. There is still work to do here, but now Sonic Beat sees all the stops.

New song charts added since last release:
Dead or Alive - Bon Jovi

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Sonic Beat update April 25 2016:

***UNINSTALL YOUR PREVIOUS VERSION BEFORE DOWNLOADING THIS UPDATE***
So we have a lot to talk about. This week's changes are a big deal, as the entire game engine was rewritten. The new game engine is massively more accurate than the previous one, and it fixes a ton of issues, especially on Android. Both iOS and Android benefit from better timing across the board. You will likely have to revisit your calibration settings, so please do let us know what calibration numbers seem to work best for your make and model of phone.

The new engine should also allow us to lift some StepMania import restrictions, such as 192nd notes and and absurd BPMs. We weren't able to work those into this version, but all SM Imports benefit from the timing accuracy of the new engine anyway, and yes we were able to finally allow Stops of arbitrary lengths. This requires testing.

Thank you again for your continued excitement and help! As usual, you can contact us through the app or reply to this thread with any questions and findings you have.

Changes since last version:
[CHANGE] Entire game engine rewritten for timing accuracy.
[CHANGE] Adjusted default calibration times: iOS: 10ms (was 40ms), Android: 120ms (was 200ms).
[CHANGE] Remove cocos2d-x engine calls for operating systems we don't support. 5% performance gain.
[FIX] More accurate music start timing with real-time compensation for scheduler inconsistencies across devices.
[FIX] Oversight where hold-terminating swipes would pass judgement onTouchEnd instead of requiring a swipe. woops.
[FIX] Stops can now be any length instead of whole beats. This was originally an engine limitation.
[FIX] Android: Hardware Back button now closes filter and sort dialogs.
[FIX] Android: Crash after closing app when a notification is scheduled to appear.
[FIX] Android: Support more than two song cuts. Fixes "Hold Back the Night" by The Protomen.
[ADDITION] Android: Hardware Back button now asks the player to confirm exiting the app.
[ADDITION] "Tap Here" graphics added to Tutorial, hopeful that bashing players upside the head with it will stop them from covering up their view with their thumbs.

Specific charts have had timing corrections. You must uninstall the app and reinstall in order to pick up the changes:
Uptown Funk
1985
Let It Go
The Wind
Stitches
Waka Waka
Short Skirt/Long Jacket
Downtown
Shut Up and Dance
Take It Easy
All About That Bass

New song charts added since last release:
Hold Back The Night - The Protomen
Two Princes - Spin Doctors
Don't Stop Believin' - Journey
Summer of '69 - Bryan Adams (should show up shortly after this posting, refresh the song list if you like)

Oh! And we put together a trailer video:


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Sonic Beat update April 18 2016:

Hi everyone! Work continues on Sonic Beat and a new update has been published to Google Play and iTunes TestFlight. Here are the changes:
[CHANGE] Song Intensity is now called Song Difficulty for clarity. As a result, we will be referring to charts in a song as Easy, Medium, Hard, Challenge, and Custom.
[CHANGE] Swipe notes are now larger and more contrast-y.
[CHANGE] We now use our own audio engine. Over time, this will allow us to reign in all the weirdness across various Android hardware configurations. iOS remains solid.
[CHANGE] Judgements now have a visual effect applied to them to ensure legibility in peripheral vision. Also it just looks cooler this way.
[ADDITION] More advertising partners to alleviate not being able to view an ad for a free play.
[FIX] Crash during Song Request if library contained a butt-load of songs
[FIX] Crash during StepMania Import if import folder contained a butt-load of songs
[FIX] Instances where multiple versions of a song in the library might confuse Sonic Beat's audio slicing magic.
[FIX] Crash if song quit via menu after passing or failing.
[FIX] Accuracy of BPM changes for calculations done on Beat. This should fix Stop timings in several songs, but the fix for arbitrary stop lengths is forthcoming. (thank you gameboy573)
[FIX] Alphabetical sorting is now case-insensitive. (thank you gameboy573)
[FIX] Judgement location is now constantly below the note target on all screen sizes.
[FIX] iOS will no longer bully Sonic Beat into playing music when it's not supposed to, such as when the device is unlocked or breathed upon too hard.

This week we'll be focusing on reported issues with offset timing on some of the downloadable charts. (May I just call them DLC? I mean, they're not, but they're similar...) With audio engine improvements having been made the last several weeks, adjustments to support the older engine are no longer necessary. This is great all around, as it also affects StepMania and custom song imports, and now we need to make the DLC fall in line. Please continue to report simfiles that do not play exactly the same timing in Sonic Beat as they do in StepMania, as this may lead to bug fixes.

Meanwhile, Jason is performing a brain transplant on the gameplay scene. The way it was originally built was designed to save resources on older phones, but we're learning that there is a better way to build the scene that will also fix a lot of problems as a happy side-effect. It should allow us to support crazy Stop timings, and it should solve the problem of individual notes spawning just barely out of sync if you're on a very slow device. This is a huge change and we expect it to take the entirety of this week, if not longer.

Once again, thank you for your support and excitement as progress continues. Leave a comment below to let us know what you think!

Edit: End of Monday, just played the first working version of the new gameplay scene. This is going to fix so many problems. Timing is perfect in every song we played with it. We'll look into lifting that 192nd note limitation, possibly the BPM limitation as well. Hopefully this can be published to TestFlight by the end of the week. More information as the week continues.

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Sonic Beat update April 11 2016:

Last week we launched the public beta for Sonic Beat, and the reception has been stellar! Several people have been enjoying the game, some of them brand new to rhythm gaming, and we've been getting a ton of useful feedback and feature requests along the way.

Shout outs to RIME and Matthew B. for thoroughly testing the StepMania import feature and identifying areas we can improve upon before launch. We're happy to say the feature not only works pretty well, but the simfiles translate nicely into Sonic Beat's gameplay. Here's a video highlight of Friday's streaming test using the import feature.



You can watch the full broadcast test here:
https://www.twitch.tv/vampirebox/v/59465011?t=01h14m58s

And with that, we're just getting started. Future updates to this thread will include more detailed updates and a changelog as the project progresses.

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Not sure if this is the place to ask, but I'll try anyway - will there be speedmods higher than 1.5x?

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Well ths looks a bit promising to say at most. Can't wait for more of this game.

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This is as good a place to ask as any. You are not the first to request speeds higher than 1.5x, and we are looking into it. We have some related issues to solve first, such as swipe note direction clarity and the refresh rate (60fps) not quite being enough temporal resolution for anything faster at the current note size. We welcome you to give the game a try by signing up for the beta and let us know your thoughts on the matter. http://www.sonic-beat.com/beta

Do keep in mind our speed modifiers are not the same as DDR / StepMania. 1x Speed is defined as a note traveling from its spawn location at the top of the screen to the target zone in 3.00 seconds.

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New swipe notes: bigger arrows, higher contrast. What do you think?

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Just tried this out. Overall I've got to say it's pretty fun! Some charts transfer over very well and are really fun to play.

A couple of bugs I noticed:
- Sometimes the song won't start at the right spot. The chart starts from the beginning, but the music seems to carry on where the preview ended. Restarting always fixed it though.
- Stops don't seem to always be at the right spot. I noticed this especially with Healing Vision (angelic mix) and Fascination MAXX, the stops seem to be a couple beats early.
- Possibly just me, but sync seemed inconsistent. Some songs were spot on from the get-go, while others I had to tinker with the calibration settings.
- In the song wheel, songs starting with lower case letters are listed after all the upper case letters.

And a few suggestions/recommendations/ideas:
- Maybe some background music? Possibly you're working on this but the menus are a bit too silent.
- Any way to implement banners for the songs?
- Maybe a visual cue of some sort on the calibration screen; this might be pretty tricky though
- Different noteskins? Maybe one with note timing colors, like red = 4th, blue = 8th etc.
- I think a combo counter on the gameplay screen would be cool.

Really excited to see where this goes moving forward!

Excellent feedback! Thank you. Responses inline:

You're describing something we've seen, but are having trouble tracking down. I'm going to assume you played on Android, as so far we've only seen this issue on Nexus devices. What is the make and model of the device you're playing on? A lot of the audio weirdness on Android is due to the poor audio support on the system, and it varies wildly by chipset and operating system version. The version of the beta you played uses that problematic built-in audio support, but Jason just checked in his initial work on a custom audio engine for the game. We'll play around with it tomorrow, and hopefully it will be in your hands for testing by the end of the week.


I'll make sure to check those simfiles. As part of our pending GameScene rework, we hope to eliminate some limitations in our implementation of Stops. Right now, they are limited to multiples of whole quarter beats. Anything smaller than that may desync the track. But you're describing the Stops as triggering early, which will be a new problem if found to be true. I'll get back to you on it shortly.
Update: Yes, you were absolutely right and this uncovered a very important bug in the way we calculated beat timing. Thank you! This is now fixed internally and will be available in the next beta update. 20 points to Gryffindor!

There are a few possibilities here:
1) The packed in tracks "Vindicate Me" and "Firelight" went through a quality pass before launch and should be perfect. Under the same calibration settings, they should be equally on time compared to one another. Please tell me if this is not the case.
2) None of the DLC charts have gone through that quality pass yet. Early on, I made the dumb mistake of changing the initial offsets to match what was at the time a broken version of the shared audio engine. It's going to take some time to revert those changes, but it's on the to-do list.
3) I've noticed a 45ms discrepancy between the built-in tracks and a bunch of simfiles I imported from ITG2. Does this match your findings? Testing needs to be done in this area to eliminate some questions. Does the audio format cause latency differences (mp3 vs aac vs ogg)? Are the offsets in these simfiles simply wrong? Do these simfiles play correctly in StepMania under perfect conditions?

That's.. hmm. Noted, thank you.

Totally agree! We've not touched this area yet, as we don't know if we can / are going to implement song previews as they enter soft focus in the song list a la StepMania. Also missing music for the Title screen.

Why yes, but right now we have no idea how to work them in. If you or anybody else can throw together a concept in Photoshop, we're interested in solutions.

Tricky is an understatement, but it's not out of the question. I've been thinking about how to implement a visual calibration check, but it may have to wait for the new custom audio engine to be solid. Other solutions we're considering: Automatic audio calibration, or keeping a database of known calibration values for different devices. We've been talking to the mad scientists at http://superpowered.com about this, so we'll see what happens.

Absolutely! Jason and I were talking about this today, even. What would you think about the ability to import user-created note skins? What if we also made official, alternate note skins available for in-app purchase (or unlocked with the Infinite Coins IAP option)? Regarding the note timing colors, we have the assets made for this but it is unimplemented. I would like it personally, as that how I always played DDR and have a strong background in reading sheet music, but I'll need Jason's help to modify how our Note object works to make it happen. So, it may end up being a 1.1 kind of feature.

Yes! We have to be careful with how much text we put on screen due to performance limitations of cocos2d-x, but if we have the draw calls to spare I will certainly argue to include the combo counter.

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April 18th's update added to initial post.

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