How to change AssistTick timing?

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

0.03 seconds later is nothing, you'll live.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

It's enough to turn a Marvelous into a Perfect, Perfect into a Great, and so on.
I ordered a Cobalt Flux dance pad, so I want things to be solid.

Go start a sync'd song in Stepmania, but before the notes come, hit F12 twice, then play it. If you have good accuracy, and the song was sync'd beforehand, then you'll notice a decent drop in score.

Edit: Tested this just now, using a 0.04 second offset, I my score dropped by 14.58%

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

If the tick doesn't line up, you're doing it wrong. Slow the rate down, listen to a beat closely, fine-tune offset so that the tick is heard at the exact same time as the beat. This takes practice.

Syncing based off your score is a bad idea. That's mostly because of you. You might get used to the steps, (assuming you play it more than once) skewing your result. You also have to take into account the time in which you can hit marvs/perfs etc. You can hit at anytime within .02 seconds or so, skewing sync.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

I'm using an ITG theme, which uses its own ticking noise, which might be the cause for the difference.

Syncing by score is the most accurate method. If I hear the sound, hit the key on the sound, and get an early Great because the notes were behind a little, then the offset should be changed. (Assuming the BPM and all that is right, of course)

On a "perfectly"-sync'd song, I can typically get a 15:1 Marvelous:Perfect ratio, so that can be used as a marker too.

The idea is to sync the song such that when I play it WITHOUT AssistTick, I can dance to the music without reducing my score. And by fixing this, it can help me step and sync songs faster, without having to play it 10 times (Using AutoSync), or try to get it right, then offset that by another 0.038, etc..

What I mean by syncing via score, is if I notice I'm getting a lot of early Perfects, I can change the offset such that they'll be Marvelouses. I use the music to tell me when to hit, and the arrows to tell me what to hit. If I find that I'm accidentally sightreading, I'll use Dark (Turns off the target arrows) and Hide Judgement (Turns off the "Marv", "Perf", etc, display, such that I can't go by that either).

If worst comes to worst, I'll replace the sound with the default tick.... that actually sounds like the best idea right now.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

Goldenwind, are you intending to write stepfiles under your adjusted offset? I have to change the offset as well when I play. -0.066667 is the only thing that will really work for me.

Syncing via your performance is a fine thing to do in order to play the game. It's actually the same thing I did when I was first trying to get comfortable with Stepmania. I just hope that you change the offset back if you're intending to write stepfiles.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

I have global changed already such that my computer is the same as the ITG2 arcade. Aka, if it's sync'd here, it'll be sync'd there.

But yeah, I know what you mean.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

I heard the default handclap sound of AssistTick has a tiny lag, but I highly doubt it's 38ms late.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

Actually, jimerax, the assist tick lags by .044 seconds, and that's when the sound wave just begins to formulate visibly. The point you will actually hear the assist tick at is something more like .052 seconds, when the first real audible peak of audio occurs.

I once had an idea to change the assist tick on my program. I realized, though, that since everybody is using the "incorrect" assist tick with their systems, that changing it would throw the sync off in their systems. So, alas, a .052 second lag is unavoidable.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

So has someone ever verified this in detail actually (the picture of arrow position and sound wave of the music/assist tick)?

If the wave file has 50ms silence at the beginning, it doesn't always mean it has 50ms lag in actual stepmania system.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

True, the engine could read starting at 40 or so milliseconds into the file, I suppose. I'm not quite sure how you could really verify that it does or not, though. Have any ideas? All the videos I've ever recorded have sound lag. Maybe somebody with a really good camera could record a level being played on autoplay and then open the video up in a video editor. Then you could really see, frame-by-frame, if the arrow lights up before the assist tick goes off.

Also, I'm assuming the assist tick hasn't been changed from Stepmania 3.9 to Stepmania 4.0, if there are any differences between the versions people here are using.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

Late keystrokes are punished more than early keystrokes.

Press F11 twice and see how you do.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

Wait, you are worrying about assist tick and you don't even have the pad yet? My cobalt flux was synced with no lag right when I got my pad.

Re: How to change AssistTick timing?

Posted this before I had my pad. Got my pad now, and it's like I assumed. The pad is fine, by all means, but many of the songs are (and were) a bit offsync. It'd be a lot easier to sync them via AssistTick + F11/F12, assuming AssistTick was reliable for that.

Like, there are alternative ways to do this, but for many hundreds of songs, this would just be a convenience.