On Audio Latency

[StaticR]

A lot of people have probably noticed that Trombone Champ has quite a bit of audio latency. I was curious how much exactly so I did a little test to find out.
I put a mic in front of my speaker and my mouse next to it and recorded a trombone toot to see the time difference between the click and the trombone sound
I repeated that test with the Low Latency mod as well as a control triggering a sample in my DAW via clicking on a virtual keyboard.

Results were:
Vanilla TC - 106 ms (sum of Mouse input + Trombone Champ + Speaker Output)
Low Latency mod - 69 ms (sum of Mouse input + Mod + Speaker Output)
control - 22 ms (sum of Mouse input + DAW + ASIO driver + Speaker Output)

These are, quite honestly, atrocious results. Trombone Champ adds at minimum 80 miliseconds of additional latency which is, like, exceptionally bad when it comes to music especially when it's involving any sort of live input or performance.
And 80 miliseconds is a generous estimate because it is based on the assumption that the 22 ms result I got in my control test is all because of input latency and therefore needs to be subtracted from all the other results. to get the audio latency. In reality it's most definitely more.

[StaticR]

I guess what I'm tryiing to say with this is:
"latency bad plz fix"

It's kinda wild how the more I play and the better I get at the game the more this sticks out to me.

[StaticR]

A few days ago I managed to get a way to get audio feedback at basically no latency whatsoever by routing my input through a DAW and triggering samples.
And even with just a click it's so nice to actually have immediate feedback as soon as you press a button and not only after you already pressed like 2 more.

Downside is I can't have the trombone sound on anymore not for technical reasons but because with the click now highlighting the immense latency of the game's audio it's even more distracting than it was before.

Honestly I just can't really bear the game's audio anymore because of the latency it's just major disappointment every time I press a key :(


Also side note going no latency led me to discover the notes and everything are shifted early by like 70 ms. Was this to make up for some of the delay?

For a rhythm game the timings of everything are really all over the place.

[Mr. Holy Wow]

Unfortunately, getting the latency lower than what the low latency mod provides would probably require rebuilding the game in an entirely new engine! We've researched this before, and the only solutions we found were reducing audio buffer (an option in the game - personally, I set it to 320, which feels better than 512) and using plugins that reroute audio through ASIO, which is what the Low Latency Mod uses. We'll continue to look into this, though...

Tracks should definitely not be shifted left by default - this is probably due to the track audio having the same latency as the trombone audio.

[StaticR]

Yeah I kinda thought so. I assume it should be possible to throw out and replace the audio engine or or bypass the game's audio engine entirely like what the low latency mod does but even these would probably be a stupid amount of work to do properly

I'm using 320 as well but unfortunately the buffer settings only have a very minimal effect. It's only like a 5 ms improvement over 512 at 44.1 khz.

Kind of baffeling that the most popular video game engine has potentially the worst audio engine I have ever heard of.


By the way I kind of assumed the track shifting was intentional because it kind of helps reduce the gap between the song audio and trombone sound. With both of them being shifted there is less of a gap between the two sounds and it encourages players to do inputs a bit early which most would probably do instinctively anyways.
Though the trombone seems to be shifted about 35 ms more than the audio so with the trombone being on I usually play at -35 latency adjust to have at least the sound aligned.

If you were to make the notes align with the audio visually the massive audio delay would probably become extremely blatant to anyone.

I kinda wonder if it'd make sense to add a sort of latency compensation option alongside the latency adjust to set between aligning things based on visuals or based on audio so that either the notes are aligned so they hit perfectly in sync with the song audio or shifted early so the trombone sound hits in time with the song audio, taking into account the game's natural audio and input latency, buffer setting as well as playback speed because I found that changing that messes with the timing difference causing a discrepency of over 100 ms between the slowest and fastest speed. But that's more of an issue a mod like TootTally that encourage you to play at different speeds so it might be for them to solve.

Thank you for replying :)