Control / Timing Issues

[♾]

I'm absolutely loving the game! I found 2 major problems with higher level play. There's about a ~200 millisecond gap between a key press and the note playing. This makes faster notes, like in Beethoven's Fifth for example, unnecessarily difficult. On top of that is the flat score calculation per note without accounting for its length. This makes it so very long notes are overly lenient and the shortest notes are, especially in quick succession, combined with the ~200 millisecond gap, excessively difficult. Under these circumstances, perfect play requires you to filter out the trombone noise because its noise is delayed too much to be a proper indicator of accurate timing on bursts of fast notes, but you also want its noise as an indicator of accurate pitch. I managed S ranks on every song, but it feels wrong on faster songs. If it's possible for the trombone noise delay to be fixed and the note score calculations to take length into account, 10/10 game! :)

EDIT: The most recent update improved the short note score calculation!

Bonus EDIT: Have since managed an S rank on the champ mix with mouse only. Everything is doable, but it's hard on your finger(s)!

[StaticR]

I can say from personal experience, an audio input to output latency of more than like 20-30 miliseconds is a pretty big deal when playing music. Having the sound from your instrument be delayed by any more than that can really throw you off while playing even on real instruments.

Using the keyboard makes it pretty much entirely unplayable for me, and using the mouse is a lot of strain especially on repeated notes. Having the right mouse button be able to trigger notes as well would help a bit with that but it's still not ideal.

[SuperContact]

I did some testing by recording keyboard/mouse click sound vs. note sound played in the headphone output and analyzing the waveform. Here is the result for Trombone Champ:
Keyboard: 150ms avg. gap
Mouse: 152ms avg. gap
which is pretty bad. In comparison, the result for Osu on my computer is:
Keyboard: 27ms avg. gap
Mouse: 28ms avg. gap
Note that I'm using Windows high definition audio driver with no enhancement and a program to reduce audio latency called REAL. Without all this setup I would get ~180ms audio delay in Trombone Champ and ~70ms audio delay in Osu.

I think it's harder for Trombone Champ to have lower audio latency since it needs to generate the audio on the fly rather then preloading an audio file, but a 100ms+ extra delay seems way too much for a music game - I did S all songs but I felt that I was constantly fighting the delay and having to press way in advance to compensate.

[Mr. Holy Wow]

The newest update made short notes slightly more forgiving! We will continue to tweak short notes as time goes on.

At the moment any noticeable delay is likely just due to the way Unity handles audio, as there's nothing in the code that should create an additional delay. We will definitely research this!

[Mr. Holy Wow]

Just pushed a very small update to v1.04 which may make the audio latency a bit better. We haven't measured the latency against the previous version, but It does feels a bit better IMHO! Please check it out and let me know if you can feel a difference!

[SuperContact]

Just did a quick test after the new update, now the latency seems to be around 80ms overall (down from the previous 150ms). Awesome improvement already! Holy dev you are so fast with the fixes :D

[-ßЯҢ- CYBER PYRO]

The latency feels a lot better, thank you!

The only issue I'm having now is that when alternating note keys, having two pressed means no tooting happens. If I'm going back and forth between two keys rapidly, the input cuts out entirely between the presses or can not register at all if going too fast between key presses. Before the update this would mean the note was held longer, but now it means no note is being held or triggers late and short.

[Mr. Holy Wow]

Originally posted by -ßЯҢ- CYBER PYRO:

The latency feels a lot better, thank you!

The only issue I'm having now is that when alternating note keys, having two pressed means no tooting happens. If I'm going back and forth between two keys rapidly, the input cuts out entirely between the presses or can not register at all if going too fast between key presses. Before the update this would mean the note was held longer, but now it means no note is being held or triggers late and short.

I'm glad the latency is better!

As for the second thing, that's actually a purposeful design decision that people have specifically requested, because it means you can alternate keys and be guaranteed a little gap between keypresses no matter what. Previously, it was difficult to alternate keys and confirm there would be a gap. This might take some more tweaking to make everyone happy - thinking maybe having this as a setting in the settings screen...

[J3Xtrom]

Originally posted by Mr. Holy Wow:

The newest update made short notes slightly more forgiving! We will continue to tweak short notes as time goes on.

At the moment any noticeable delay is likely just due to the way Unity handles audio, as there's nothing in the code that should create an additional delay. We will definitely research this!

The short notes are so much better now. Thank you for updating the game so quickly!

[torttuP]

The game feels better with the latest patch, thanks for taking the input seriously and acting fast on it!

[Offbrand Rhythm Game]

Bro I dunno what the devs did but I FINALLY got the last achievement/last S Rank needed for said achievement. I was stuck on "The Entertainer", "Stars and Stripes", Beethoven's Fifth", "Skabird", and "Skip To My Lou".

I GOT AN S RANK ON "STARS AND STRIPES" OF ALL THINGS. Can't wait to finally get the S Rank for "Skip To My Lou" which has been pissing me off for the past few days. Thank you so much devs lmao.

[nbst]

Thank you so much - got a S on first try on Stars & Stripes after this update, and it definitely felt better!

Edit: In fact I S'ed all the remaining songs (on first try so it sure is a lot more forgiving than before), which shows how great that game is because I normally would have stopped playing after I got the last achievement ;)

[Mr. Holy Wow]

I'm extremely glad the short doots and latency seem to be better, thank you for the feedback. As mentioned, we will continue to gradually make the "game" part of the game better. 🙏

[SuperContact]

Hi Dev, from the other thread you mentioned setting the latency setting from "Best latency" back to "Good latency" to fix certain issues, so I did another test of the audio delay and it seems on my computer:
Best latency is ~80ms delay (tested right after the initial update)
Good latency is ~103ms delay (tested just now)
I wonder if it is possible to expose this latency setting somewhere in the game for people caring more about latency and not having problems with the "best latency" option?

[♾]

Thanks for the improvements, dev! Absolutely loving the game! :)

[Mr. Holy Wow]

As a heads-up, I'm talking with a guy on Twitter about implementing ASIO to get the latency even lower. He got it working already using a publicly-available plugin, so it might not be too difficult to get implemented...