Constant speed for cubes?

[ovtchina]

Is it possible to make the cubes move at a constant speed for all the songs? There doesn't seem to be a setting for this ingame. Maybe some mods can do this?
I understand that some songs have a certain cube speed set on purpose, but much more often I have a feeling that an otherwise good song is ruined by the cubes moving either too slowly making it very hard to read or incredibly fast so that I can barely react to the suddenly appearing cubes.
I suppose it is doable by manually editing the song files, but maybe there is an easier way to do it?

[Brian David Phillips]

Choosing different difficulty levels should help with this. An easier difficulty has fewer cubes so you will feel more lead time to hit them while the more difficult levels will have a lot more cubes in less time. You can also go to the settings (look left) and choose faster or slower song playback. If you go to the practice mode you can mess with speed even more.

[Kurtino]

Since cubes are mapped to song beats, the speed is dictated by the song itself, or how each person has mapped the cubes to the song.

The only way I can see us being able to adjust cubes is if you adjust the song tempo at the same time, which isn't great and can be already done. Otherwise cube placement would have to be automated and detect things like auto patterns to swap between (place a cube to all beats, fastest beat, background beat etc).

Like Brian said, some people include different difficulties that can adjust speed, or how many cubes appear.

Still, since every song is different, I think it would be difficult to set cubes to a base amount and have every song sync up well to this.

[ovtchina]

Sorry, maybe I used the wrong words here - what I mean is that on some songs the cubes are slowly floating towards you at barely 1 m/s speed while for other songs the cubes fly at huge speeds (of, like, 30+ m/s maybe?). And when they are too slow there are lots of cubes onscreen at the same time which often doesn't feel right or necessary for me. And when the cubes are fast there are few of them onscreen at the same time, which makes them easy to read but require fast reaction as they fly by immediately after spawning.
What I want is to set the incoming velocity of the cubes to a constant value for all the songs, leaving the songs and the cubes themselves at the same timings related to the song where they were (so that the cubes arrive at the same times as before) but fly with a fixed velocity of, let's say, 10 m/s and basically spawn at a different time than originally intended - or spawn at a different distance, if that is at all possible.
(The same as a C-speed setting in Stepmania, basically)

[Kurtino]

Originally posted by ovtchina:

Sorry, maybe I used the wrong words here - what I mean is that on some songs the cubes are slowly floating towards you at barely 1 m/s speed while for other songs the cubes fly at huge speeds (of, like, 30+ m/s maybe?). And when they are too slow there are lots of cubes onscreen at the same time which often doesn't feel right or necessary for me. And when the cubes are fast there are few of them onscreen at the same time, which makes them easy to read but require fast reaction as they fly by immediately after spawning.
What I want is to set the incoming velocity of the cubes to a constant value for all the songs, leaving the songs and the cubes themselves at the same timings related to the song where they were (so that the cubes arrive at the same times as before) but fly with a fixed velocity of, let's say, 10 m/s and basically spawn at a different time than originally intended - or spawn at a different distance, if that is at all possible.
(The same as a C-speed setting in Stepmania, basically)

Ah I see, so you mean like the appearance speed of the cube? You are still hitting the cubes at the same moment of the song, but whether they appear sooner and move slowly towards you, or appear suddenly that requires quicker reaction, is determined by the player?

Actually I'm trying to wrap my head around this, especially since I haven't played Stepmania, but from what I can gather from CMOD, instead of the arrows appearing faster if the song is faster, you keep the scroll rate the same, but I suppose you would just have more arrows on screen at the same time?

So you would adjust the spawn rate of when cubes appear, as well as the velocity? If the speed of the cubes were static, the only way to play a faster song with the cubes being slower would be to bunch them up closer, and probably spawn them further away, and if it was a slow song you would spawn the cube closer to the player and increase its speed?

I think I'm understanding it, but I think it would break some songs if the cubes didn't have enough space to visually see what direction they were if the speed was changed. I could imagine it being kind of difficult as song mappers determine themselves the fade in/spawn distance, speed, and positioning (close to central vision, further spread out etc). I don't know if trying to unify all that into one system that can modify it would end up looking good, not sure. I've played a lot of songs that deliberately have stylistic positioning of cubes to match the song too, so I don't know how they would turn out.

It sounds possible with modding, but no one's done it yet as far as I know.

[ovtchina]

Originally posted by Kurtino:

Ah I see, so you mean like the appearance speed of the cube? You are still hitting the cubes at the same moment of the song, but whether they appear sooner and move slowly towards you, or appear suddenly that requires quicker reaction, is determined by the player?

Yes, exactly. Though the point is to make the velocity of the cubes constant, they may even appear at the exact same moments they used to (but farther or closer so that they arrive at the right moment with altered speed).

Originally posted by Kurtino:

I think I'm understanding it, but I think it would break some songs if the cubes didn't have enough space to visually see what direction they were if the speed was changed. I could imagine it being kind of difficult as song mappers determine themselves the fade in/spawn distance, speed, and positioning (close to central vision, further spread out etc). I don't know if trying to unify all that into one system that can modify it would end up looking good, not sure. I've played a lot of songs that deliberately have stylistic positioning of cubes to match the song too, so I don't know how they would turn out.

Yes, if the speed is slowed down too much and the cubes bunch together closer that would make them hard to read, so this mode is usually used if you want to have a constant high speed that would be as high as you can comfortably play. The benefit of this mode is that it makes the game easier to play as you always hit the cubes at the same positions with the same feeling no matter how fast or slow the song is - the flow is always the same. If the distance between cubes is lower, you hit them more frequently, if it is larger, you hit them less frequently, and the same distance always converts to same timings because the velocity is the same for any song so playing new songs with complicated tempo becomes much easier. Also, easier songs become more pleasant to play as you can get perfect timings without being confused by slowly moving notes you are not used to.
But indeed, it on the other hand decreases overall variety in the gameplay, so that is not the mode everyone would enjoy and it is really likely to break the stylistic things in the song, especially the beautiful custom walls (I guess they would just stretch/shrink if the speed is changed, but they will likely be distorted somehow).

[WDG_Fence07]

just put the note jump speed (njs) a bit down this is possible with the practice plugin or editing in the song files. dunno if its on 1.7

[ovtchina]

Originally posted by DirtyWristFlicker:

just put the note jump speed (njs) a bit down this is possible with the practice plugin or editing in the song files. dunno if its on 1.7

I'll look into the song files and see how the changes affect them, thanks! Looks easy!

[Pegarex]

Something to keep in mind, Note jump speed is formulaic, and is not explicitly the speed of the notes. The game uses both BPM and NJS together to determine both how fast the notes move and how close to the player they spawn... I tried asking one of the modders how it all works in the BSMG discord once, and was given half complete and over simplified answers. I am not really sure how it all works myself tbh, but I was told that much atleast.

[ovtchina]

Just tried a couple of songs with very different BPM (159 and 274) and edited the _noteJumpMovementSpeed. First I tried setting NJS so that NJS*BPM = const (why not?), the result was - very slow cubes on high BPM song and much faster cubes on slower BPM song. Then edited NJS to be the same for both songs - and I would say I didn't really feel the difference in cube speed at a first glance, so I would assume for now that NJS == cube velocity and continue experiments on Friday (Having a different workout planned for today, Beat Saber will have to wait...). Thanks for your thoughts and advices.
(Also noticed that some info.dat files are not broken down into lines while 99% are which broke the lazily written autocorrection script :))) Will have to rewrite it properly this time :))

[Pegarex]

Originally posted by Cavey:

Bear in mind while you are doing this that it is uploading scores to scoresaber and making your profile look most unusual. I couldn't say if it will result in you being banned, but it wouldn't surprise me if it does...

If you have the capacity to disable scoresaber submissions while you're doing this, it would probably be a good idea.

IDK, if the system could be cheated so easily by just swapping out folder contents, we would have seen hundreds of thousands of false submissions already.

And I don't think BPM or NJS really effects your score, unless you mean that making the notes a more comfortable speed would be cheating... but if an advantage by comfortability is cheating, things like SaberTailor would have been shut down long ago

[Kurtino]

Originally posted by Cavey:

You can look at his/her profile any time you like - it submits the scores, but creates a new leaderboard with just a single entry. Whether or not Umbranox wants that happening is up to him. I find it unlikely that they'll receive a ban, but at the same time, I wouldn't want them to go messing with things without knowing the possible consequences.

Whether or not to allow members to select their own NJS and offset has been discussed many times on the official Scoresaber discord and has been rejected each time.

As to whether it makes the game any easier - I suppose with offset that it's subjective. You could try this though: download Heeartbeeat Oveerheeat!!!! - Camellia feat. Nanahira and try playing it, then change the offset to default and try again. For me, it goes from painful to simple in a couple of clicks.

When it comes to NJS it definitely makes the game easier, because it alters the timing window giving you more or less time to hit each cube.

The game and it's mods currently as they are setup are certainly not designed around people modifying this value it seems, especially if modifications of songs count as a new song being uploaded. Sounds like if you wanted this to work well you'd need to have a mod that doesn't change the song but modifies how it plays mid-session, but then count this as tinkering and invalidate it as a leader board submission unless you allow it as a separate category.

[Pegarex]

Originally posted by Cavey:

You can alter both NJS and offset quickly and easily by just using the practice plugin and playing on practice mode - which also removes all score submission. Unfortunately that will also mean no local scores are saved, which I am guessing is not what the OP desires.

if they were to tinker with the songs and play in party mode instead of solo, would upload to scoresaber? The other option would to just be to remove the scoresaber plugin to stop it from uploading... It would still save the scores locally, but it would be a pain to uninstall and reinstall it every time you want to play with/without the online leaderboard

[ovtchina]

Thanks for bringing it up, I didn't really think about how scoreboards work. So, I can just uninstall the Scoresaber plugin, and that would be fine, right? (I don't really feel like competing anyway so that's no problem at all.)

[fruhead]

You could also get the PracticePlugin mod. This allows you to adjust the NJS (speed of the blocks) and such while in game. You could always play the songs in practice mode with this to avoid having the scores uploaded, or use it to fine tune what NJS feels right to use for them (though I would suggest to play them in party mode to avoid the score submissions).

[paul]

i have a update idea for beat saber: flying notes mode! flying notes mode will be the average mode except, you have to break notes flying at you!