Bracket 2 - Discussion

[Zounder]

Just to generate some more discussion:

I really don't know anything about what makes a good ITG simfile but here are some that I enjoyed:

Muenzuka Set 02- This just felt really authentic, from what I can remember of the last time I played an actual ITG chart.

Disconnected- I think Yuke and I have the same taste in music because this and Bubble Pop! are my favorite songs in the contest.

Please Play This Song on the Radio- I appreciate everything about this file. This must have been fun to create!

And for good measure, from bracket 1...

Hammerhead: Another very authentic-feeling set of charts.

Sound of Delight: I've actually played this quite often. This feels like a perfect example of something that wouldn't work in DDR due to repetition and length but it is really fun in an ITG environment. I love the alternation between 16th sections and 8th note streams that are present in both heavy and expert. Of the ITG files I have played (about 20% I guess) this is my favorite.

[BLueSS]

It has been a ghost town this week. Blame Labor Day?

Anyway, I might push this back a week so we can get a proper amount of reviews for bracket 2.

[cpubasic13]

Been a bit busy and distracted. Have yet to play everything either.

[Hainaut]

It's basically the curse of the second bracket, which always gets less feedback than the first. But yeah, on top of that, I guess there was labor day, and, for me at least, the beginning of school.

[Valex]

I began school as well so I haven't had as much time as I would've liked

[joe2]

I began school as well so I haven't had as much time as I would've liked

this has been me

I plan to get to them hopefully this weekend, but I have been (and will continue to) put school first

[jammitch!]

Yeah, my company is getting ready to host its biggest event of the year (over 7,000 customer attendees) and I'm getting ready for our local con as well, so I've been very strapped for time. I'm going to try to crank out the rest of these DDR reviews tonight though.

[hellrazor]

Work for me as well, a week extension is necessary because I want to offer reviews again.

[y3v0n]

jammitch: the main reason the art is aliased is because the source image [l'amour et la liberte] is 320x240. i don't know if i could have improved on that outside of filtering the absolute shit out of it [which i already did].

[Telperion]

Using .mp3 or .ogg does not cause sync issues by themselves, they both sync up the same way OFFSET and BPM(s), no difference. Video does not cause issues (at least not in SM3.9 and 4.0) it's a native 320x240 and I've never seen slow-down caused by 320x240 video files no matter how weak the PC, plus any slowdown would be a frame-rate and that doesn't cause off-beat.

It shouldn't, but I know sometimes transcoding OGGs to MP3s can add delay to the sound file and wondered if you might have done that and not adjusted. Video definitely shouldn't, though; you're right about the frame rate being disjoint from the step timing.

I'm absolutely confident in the song-cut, I calculated them out and I'm absolutely confident in the BPM so it's a GlobalOffset issue, I sync my entries to the ONLY standard ever officially endorsed, the STEPMANIA Sync standard: http://zenius-i-vanisher.com/v5.2/downl ... leid=19461
So if my files don't sync up to your machine, I can't help you, I cannot anticipate what value will work best for you, I even understand that had I submitted an .ogg it would not play well on an ITGR21 machine because that doesn't follow the STEPMANIA Sync standard. If you want I can provide 20 more .dwi files (there was zero data lost by using .dwi for this file which is why I choose it) with different OFFSET values and you can pick the one that suits you best but there's no way for me to anticipate how to meet your needs beforehand and synching to a standard is the most logical choice IMHO.

We - and I mean that specifically, you and I - have had this exact discussion before ;) Ultimately, I could just leave you with this question: why haven't I had a complaint from anybody else about my offsets since 2011 (aside from a few couple-millisecond shifts by ITG sync mavens), and why is it that 95% of other artists' simfiles feel on-sync to me when very few of yours do?
I will note in passing that you're using a SM4 sync standard, and since SM4 is entirely deprecated and unsupported at this point it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to port over part of it like this without making sure it applies. But you know which standard I prefer~

(there was zero data lost by using .dwi for this file which is why I choose it)
[...]
But I was clearly told that judges cannot mark down points for violating the rules and this isn't the only entry in the contest that has a .dwi ONLY stepfile chart and the others haven't been DQ'd or marked down because of that.

I will admit that I didn't check every file - yet - to see whether it was .dwi format or .sm format; yours only stood out to me because the song preview was broken, something that's never happened before in my SM5. But I'm surprised that you or anybody still uses .dwi: it's essentially deprecated, provides no (or less) data advantage or precision over .sm, and, as I mentioned, flat out won't work on an ITG setup.
That said, the points I took off weren't for the format mismatch, but for the broken song preview and the sync.

[Hainaut]

0 / ±1 - Tilt
Super cheesy song choice. Were you saving this for Cheesemix 7?

Yeah, I actually did have it in mind for Cheesemix 7, but I ultimately decided to release it here while it was still fresh, and I didn't have many other ideas anyway.

[hellrazor]

We - and I mean that specifically, you and I - have had this exact discussion before ;) Ultimately, I could just leave you with this question: why haven't I had a complaint from anybody else about my offsets since 2011 (aside from a few couple-millisecond shifts by ITG sync mavens), and why is it that 95% of other artists' simfiles feel on-sync to me when very few of yours do?
I will note in passing that you're using a SM4 sync standard, and since SM4 is entirely deprecated and unsupported at this point it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to port over part of it like this without making sure it applies.

I don't know why the #SAMPLESTART or #SAMPLELENGTH would be messed up in SM5 from a .dwi file, that sounds odd. As for synching, there simply is no other standard, should I point out all the files (there are MANY) that are not synched up? Or do I simply understand that the majority of players don't have a synching standard and OFFSETS are just going to be wrong most of the time? I have given up on complaining about bad offsets they are easy enough to fix, it's only bad BPM's that I go after anymore. To add salt to the wound, if you look at previous Best-Mix contests in the rules there is guidance to use the StepMania 4 synching standard, additionally at Z-I-V for some of the worst official simfile packs (some of those X-Box ones with lots of songs with random BPMs) they entirely used my synching which is based on the StepMania 4 synching standard that means you won't like ALL of the offsets in those packs.

For reference I have not taken off any points for OFFSETS when I was judging even though some were +40ms and some were up to -60ms so there were BIG differences among files, I've just come to accept that as fact.

[rikame]

We - and I mean that specifically, you and I - have had this exact discussion before ;) Ultimately, I could just leave you with this question: why haven't I had a complaint from anybody else about my offsets since 2011 (aside from a few couple-millisecond shifts by ITG sync mavens), and why is it that 95% of other artists' simfiles feel on-sync to me when very few of yours do?
I will note in passing that you're using a SM4 sync standard, and since SM4 is entirely deprecated and unsupported at this point it doesn't make a whole lot of sense to port over part of it like this without making sure it applies.

I don't know why the #SAMPLESTART or #SAMPLELENGTH would be messed up in SM5 from a .dwi file, that sounds odd. As for synching, there simply is no other standard, should I point out all the files (there are MANY) that are not synched up? Or do I simply understand that the majority of players don't have a synching standard and OFFSETS are just going to be wrong most of the time? I have given up on complaining about bad offsets they are easy enough to fix, it's only bad BPM's that I go after anymore. To add salt to the wound, if you look at previous Best-Mix contests in the rules there is guidance to use the StepMania 4 synching standard, additionally at Z-I-V for some of the worst official simfile packs (some of those X-Box ones with lots of songs with random BPMs) they entirely used my synching which is based on the StepMania 4 synching standard that means you won't like ALL of the offsets in those packs.

For reference I have not taken off any points for OFFSETS when I was judging even though some were +40ms and some were up to -60ms so there were BIG differences among files, I've just come to accept that as fact.

I plan on reviewing that bracket maybe, but I did check your sync. The BPM seems correct, though at first I thought it wasn't because some of the very last sounds are actually somewhat offbeat (but that's minor). As for the offset, I don't know what syncing standard you're talking about but, in my personal opinion, it's best to use the one for ITG IF your file is an ITG file. From what I can tell your steps seem to be 16ms early, which isn't a huge deal but it's still avoidable. In my opinion though, it's no-where near enough to take off points lol

[cpubasic13]

Rendering an MP3 will cause sync issues due to SM's MP3 frame delay, but OGG has no such issue. This has been confirmed by SM devs and applies to any SM build.

Also I have never heard of this "officially endorsed" Stepmania Sync Standard. There exists a standard in ITG due to the same hardware being used across all ITG players (the machines are already set at an offset, so changing that would be stupid), but SM has no standard. Chances are if a whole bunch of simfiles are off, your SM offset is incorrect and needs fixing. You should be syncing simfiles to a standard offset of 0, but if that is offsync for your SM build, you need to adjust your Stepmania offset before considering changing the sync of the simfile or else you can make the simfile offsync for everyone but yourself.

[hellrazor]

Rendering an MP3 will cause sync issues due to SM's MP3 frame delay, but OGG has no such issue. This has been confirmed by SM devs and applies to any SM build.

Also I have never heard of this "officially endorsed" Stepmania Sync Standard. There exists a standard in ITG due to the same hardware being used across all ITG players (the machines are already set at an offset, so changing that would be stupid), but SM has no standard. Chances are if a whole bunch of simfiles are off, your SM offset is incorrect and needs fixing. You should be syncing simfiles to a standard offset of 0, but if that is offsync for your SM build, you need to adjust your Stepmania offset before considering changing the sync of the simfile or else you can make the simfile offsync for everyone but yourself.

Thanks for chiming in, I'm aware that ITG2 R21 will have a standard due to similar hardware, but it doesn't apply to ITG2 R16 and prior nor to ITG1 or even ITGPC nor ITG for PS2, so there really isn't an ITG standard. Plus many of the ITG official files have OFFSET issues which makes it difficult to agree on which song is the best choice for a standard.

StepMania 4 does indeed come packed with a Synching Standard, it's an .ogg file, I linked to it a few posts up. It's roughly -12ms behind what I consider to be ITG2 R21 standard, but since my file was .mp3 and .dwi it's not meant for an ITG machine anyways, I choose to use the StepMania standard which is the only officially endorsed standard.

And the point about .ogg converted from .mp3 is moot. Basically all you are saying is that if I convert my .mp3 into an .ogg I won't have to adjust the OFFSET, that's nice to know but doesn't help anything. There is no magical feature of an .ogg file that makes it work perfectly no matter which version of stepmania it's running on or whose PC, it's impossible. Some of the basic reasons to change a GlobalOffset is based on the distance of the pad to the speakers, the further back the more you need the music ahead of the arrows. You can't simply set GlobalOffset to 0 and have it work for everyone, that's also impossible there are differences in versions of StepMania and PC's, audio cards, TV's, Video Cards etc that will affect the GlobalOffset. The best thing would be for everyone to set their GlobalOffset such that the StepMania sync standard (or ITG sync standard if you ever find one, and you need to be aware that not everyone agrees with nor aims for an ITG synching target) plays perfectly and if you move your pads or get a new version or a new PC or install it at a friends house you will have to do that again but just once. If you standardize all of your GlobalOffsets then you no longer have to worry about adjusting song Offsets.

Sorry for being long winded but you need to keep your feet in reality when it comes to GlobalOffsets, I know it's a common misconception that somehow it's a field that doesn't need to be adjusted, many times it's because there are only very small changes needed (perhaps in the 5ms range) and it seems like players accept a 'close enough' range thus it doesn't seem to matter but if you want musical accuracy a synching standard is essential and adjusting GlobalOffsets is a must.