New beatmaps and struggling with sync

Time for the weekly ZakZakNeko devlog update! :3

The newest release (0.14) features two new beatmaps, which seem to be a bit better than the first one (Milkshake). I'm by no means no more than a beginner beatmapper, but I feel like there has been progress. It's very satisfying to craft a part of a beatmap, which matched well with a song. 

As for today, creating beatmaps is a bit tedious as I'm using a DAW (LMMS) and mapping means clicking midi events in manually. To change that, I started coding a beatmap editor. Oh boy, the first hurdle was to plot the song waveform. Did not work out-of-the-box in Godot 4.3. After bunch of searching, the easiest way to have waveform preview is to compile a custom godot build, which exposes the preview...*whines in gdscript* Well, now we have a nice preview and it looks fine. I look forward to craft an MVP version sometime during March. 

The second, and more important, thing I investigated was the synchronization of music, gfx and user input. The thing is: I always felt like I keep getting "good" hits from time to time instead of "perfect" although the hit felt "perfect". (Does this make any sense? :D) So, I dived into a deep rabbit hole trying to figure out what's going on. Long story short: I connected my blue yeti mic headphone output to an ESP32 microcontroller Analog-to-Digital input and programmed the ESP to figure out when a click sound comes in. Once ESP "finds" a beat, it sends a message over the serial port to a Python script, which then triggers a key press. Tada: my own rhythm bot ;) With this funky setup I was able to measure the sync issues with < 1 ms accuracy. So what's going on then? Well first of all: I seem to get random 10ms delay out of nowhere, which might be connected to the way how Godot handles input events. (Even if the bot hits "perfect" notes with 1-2 ms accuracy, every 6-10 hits, accuracy goes to 10ms!). I got a bit tired trying to figure out the root cause for that, so I'll continue with that at some later point. Anyhoo: the takeaway here was that it is me who is responsible for not having 100% accuracy ;) 

Have fun with the Zaks regardless if perfect or not ;)

Take care,

Haru