0.7.5 Preview r1068

Archived development update discussion from past versions
Archived development updates.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

PREVIEW r1068
Download from the pink box above.

Changes in r1068 since r1065:
  • The first and last 200ms worth of "held points" in Rhythm mode are given for free. This means you can hit the onsets on-time instead of gaming it for max points by hitting them early. It also means you have a little more flexibility on note release.
  • Holding a note longer than 200ms past the end of the note will cause the "held points" to tick down in reverse at the same speed they added up for that note, all the way down (past the free starting/ending points) to 0 held points. This discourages holding the pedal the entire song.
  • Note onset matters again in rhythm mode! Instead of it being a flat multiplier (where a "Barely!" gives you nearly zero points regardless of ANY other conditions), it is just a small bonus multiplied into the base value of the note. See scoring link below.
  • Non-overlapping "You Play" time is now calculated correctly for the purposes of practice scoring.
  • Direct credit card payments are now accepted when purchasing a Learning Pack key.
  • Added a "Lighted Keyboard Support" block on the front page of the site.
Now that a few website tasks out of the way, I was able to focus on the scoring changes. This feels really close now. I like it. Most of the weird exploity stuff is gone and the scores are still nice and min/max'able because of the timing variation stuff. The scoring page on the Wiki has all the gory details.

Next (and nearly last) up for 0.7.5: Paged datagrid and track settings screen revamp (using the new datagrid).
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cairnz
Posts: 182

Post by cairnz »

This discourages holding the pedal the entire song.
However for some songs (like Moonlight Sonata) holding the pedal for quite some time makes it sound better. In the start if you hold the complete duration of the left hand A, i suppose your A C E -combos will be worthless for the first three atleast, even though the song sounds better :)

But you can't have it all.
Typhlosion
Posts: 82

Post by Typhlosion »

I hope the chord-bug in practice mode will be fixed soon :/
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

cairnz wrote:However for some songs (like Moonlight Sonata) holding the pedal for quite some time makes it sound better...
Sounds like a job for (me to implement using) a sostenuto pedal. That would solve the problem. Though, unless you have a high-end digital piano (or Raymond' application), you probably don't have one. At the very least, there is already support for it in the MIDI standard. Not sure I've ever seen a sostenuto message in the wild though.
Typhlosion wrote:I hope the chord-bug in practice mode will be fixed soon :/
I'm taking a look at that next. I wanted to get this preview out before too much time had passed. As we approach the end of the month, I try to get things in your hands as quickly as I can.
vicentefer31
Posts: 899

Post by vicentefer31 »

The new score for the Practice Mode is really bad, why? Before, we had a target if we played a song with 100 % speed. We knew 10.000 was the score for a perfect play and all the songs had the same 10.000 points for a perfect score so it was very easy compare between songs. But now this is not so easy as before.

Example of two midis played with 100 % speed in practice mode:
a)<Stats version="2" notes-user-could-have-played="167" notes-user-actually-played="167" stray-notes="15" total-notes-user-pressed="182" longest-combo="62" speed-integral="16700" score="11675" user-held-time="74036101" possible-held-time="36521688" in-practice-mode="1" practice-overage-time="5409311" date-time="2010-Sep-24 09:16:47" />
b)<Stats version="2" notes-user-could-have-played="391" notes-user-actually-played="391" stray-notes="8" total-notes-user-pressed="399" longest-combo="355" speed-integral="39100" score="12752" user-held-time="67089940" possible-held-time="19696486" in-practice-mode="1" practice-overage-time="16735252" date-time="2010-Sep-24 09:34:44" />

There are some solutions about this:
1) Nicholas Mode: You'll like it in a few months. Give it a chance.
2) Vicentefer- Post-It® Mode: Not a good idea for this
3) Back to the "old score"
Picasso: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

vicentefer31 wrote:There are some solutions about this...
Or,
4) This is a bug, practice scores shouldn't have changed, thanks for reporting it.

Sheesh.

The intent is on the scoring page:
Scoring page on the Wiki wrote:So, at 100% speed ... the max score for perfect practice is 10,000. At the lowest (0.01) and highest (4) speeds, it's 9,010 and 13,000 respectively.
If that's not how it's behaving, I'll fix it.
vicentefer31
Posts: 899

Post by vicentefer31 »

I liked the Nicholas Mode Solution :lol:
Picasso: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
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cairnz
Posts: 182

Post by cairnz »

Nicholas wrote: Sounds like a job for (me to implement using) a sostenuto pedal. That would solve the problem. Though, unless you have a high-end digital piano (or Raymond' application), you probably don't have one. At the very least, there is already support for it in the MIDI standard. Not sure I've ever seen a sostenuto message in the wild though.
It's not the same and won't give the same sound feeling. This is however just nitpicking, but I personally don't think overheld notes/chords should be penalized. So if you play with pedal pressed all the time, it'll sound like, crap if the song doesn't suit long held notes, and it'll sound good if it fits it. Onset timing is way more important than whenever it's released.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Oh, you're saying just from a stylistic point of view? You're holding the pedal not because it's what's showing in the song, but because you like the sound more?

That feels like the "Exhibition Mode" item on the voting list. There is a good chance scoring will just be completely disabled while in that mode, so you can do whatever you want.
TonE
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by TonE »

vicentefer31 wrote:The new score for the Practice Mode is really bad, why? Before, we had a target if we played a song with 100 % speed. We knew 10.000 was the score for a perfect play and all the songs had the same 10.000 points for a perfect score so it was very easy compare between songs. But now this is not so easy as before.
No, it is still very easy, you only need to use "Achievement" values instead. In the last time I was still looking for a cool way of dealing with looping methods and I have found something interesting I think, I am still testing it. Soon I will publish the AutoHotkey solution here. I just need to check one more thing, like answering following question:
In the cases where Synthesia needs to be closed to be restarted just after it using a different command line with different loop-start and loop-end options, what would be the best or fastest method?
I wanted to check how the side effects of killing Synthesia would be as this would be the fastest "Synthesia closing solution" imo. But I am not sure if Synthesia will loose any information in that case, having a shortcut for closing Synthesia normally from any window, directly, would be best, now we have pressing ESC five times in sequence, but this is not the fastest method as I need to add some "Sleep times" between those ESC to ensure this closing operation will work with any slower computer also.

Here how the loop score looks then so far:
Loop score
Loop score
LoopScore.jpg (180.77 KiB) Viewed 15733 times
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Killing the process would mean no data is saved. The XML files are written during (clean) shutdown.

For your purposes (with the clipboard copying stuff) that might be fine. It sounds like you don't rely on any of my stored data so much as just getting it a little at a time from the clipboard.

Otherwise, as far as MIDI devices go, good luck. I suppose it would depend on the driver how it acts when it's not shut down cleanly.
TonE
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by TonE »

Nicholas wrote:Killing the process would mean no data is saved. The XML files are written during (clean) shutdown.

Otherwise, as far as MIDI devices go, good luck. I suppose it would depend on the driver how it acts when it's not shut down cleanly.
Well, not loosing the game settings would be also nice, like which were the YouPlay tracks. (In all those cases where you would not set the YouPlay tracks via the command line.) Secondly having a clean direct closing hotkey would be great, something like Alt-Q or so, which does internally everything in the same way as pressing five times ESC in sequence does.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

I forgot. Alt-F4 does that. That's equivalent to clicking the top-corner X in windowed mode. It shuts everything down nicely.

I don't think it'll catch your in-progress score if you're in the middle of a song... but it might write the track settings. It also closes MIDI devices cleanly. Experiment with that and see if that's what you're looking for.
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cairnz
Posts: 182

Post by cairnz »

Nicholas wrote:Oh, you're saying just from a stylistic point of view? You're holding the pedal not because it's what's showing in the song, but because you like the sound more?

That feels like the "Exhibition Mode" item on the voting list. There is a good chance scoring will just be completely disabled while in that mode, so you can do whatever you want.
Exactly. Now only to figure out a way to fade out the keys being held by pedal after the note has been released.. it gets pretty "green and blue" down there after a while :=)
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

Same place as usual. Open the config tool, open the manual settings section, and click the "Open data directory" button. That's just a shortcut for the Start->Run "shell:appdata\Synthesia" thing.

Dev versions and official versions use the same data directory. This actually introduces a bit of challenge for me and risk for you guys. Right now if you bounce back and forth between 0.7.4 and any dev version past r1065, it will keep wiping your scores each time you run the dev version again.

Not sure why you're looking for tracks.xml though. At this point, all of those bugs should be fixed. You shouldn't have to delete it anymore.
Nicholas
Posts: 13135

Post by Nicholas »

vicentefer31 wrote:The new score for the Practice Mode is really bad...
Found and fixed. I also removed the speed component from practice scores altogether. Now the max is exactly 10,000 at 1% , 100%, or 400% speed. (That cleaned up the scoring description quite a bit.)

It had virtually no impact in the first place, and the closer we get to the online scoreboard, the more I'm thinking of the following rename:
  • Melody Practice
  • Rhythm Practice
  • Recital
Those map to the current practice mode, rhythm mode, and the upcoming "forced 100%, no loops, no FF/RW" mode that must be used to compete online, respectively.

So... if it's going to be called "Melody Practice", there is no reason to take into account speed. (Though, I guess that's unfair because saying the same about "Rhythm Practice" means you shouldn't have to care about the notes. ;) )
vicentefer31
Posts: 899

Post by vicentefer31 »

Nicholas wrote:Now the max is exactly 10,000 at 1% , 100%, or 400% speed.
Wrong, the speed should be in the score like always. Even the score-board should have some improvements like you can see in the picture
Image
Other improvement: The datagrid of the score should work like the datagrid of the Song Library. In the Datagrid of the Song Library we can choose how it should be always organized by name, last played,... the same should be for the score, if we want always the datagrid oredered by Grade, score, Errors, time spent,...
Picasso: I am always doing that which I cannot do, in order that I may learn how to do it.
TonE
Synthesia Donor
Posts: 1180

Post by TonE »

Nicholas wrote:I also removed the speed component from practice scores altogether. Now the max is exactly 10,000 at 1% , 100%, or 400% speed. (That cleaned up the scoring description quite a bit.)
Could you write into the wiki also since which version of Synthesia the new scoring model is true? I think since r1068 something changed and the old practice score model is not valid any more, I seem to get even higher practice scores than the old possible max values as given below:
Perfect practice AFTER
at 1% speed: 9010
at 100% speed: 10000
at 400% speed: 13000
MaxPoints := 9000 + Speed * 10
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