I like it when the top ranking in a music game is tough to consistently get, and like how hard Marvelouses are to get in DDR; it makes you feel there's always room to improve, and you can actually get better without striving for absolute perfection; perfection becomes an ideal rather than an extremely frustrating goal.  Pre-SN2 DDR was just boring as hell getting SDG after SDG and offering very few songs that were actually challenging (at least ITG has the benefit of having many very hard/barely physically possible charts).

You know, your logic never made sEnse to me. I can quad 9s relatively easy but have tons of room on 11+. maybe timing windows should vary proportionally with difficulty

Anyway, there's no such thing as too good. I'm only good enough to feel reasonably confident that chromatic timing windows = r16 windows. The extra speed mids probably help slightly as well

Like I said in my post though, DDR had the problem of not having very many bullshit hard charts.  The problem with DDR pre-SN2 was that neither the charts themselves nor the timing was difficult at all.  When it's possible to get perfection or very close to it on a very vast majority of the charts, that's when there's a problem.

SN2 and onward DDR have strict timing that makes perfection on all but a few charts possible (when I had access to e-amuse, only the very easiest-to-time charts had worldwide high scores of 1,000,000 [we're talking stuff like Dynamite Rave Air Special], meaning that no one in the e-amuse accessible world could get perfection on the vast majority of charts).  ITG is challenging to perfect just because of the sheer difficulty of its charts.  Though being the masochist I am, I'd love to see both tough charts and strict timing together in a dance game.

Actually I think we were just so used to ITG3 timing. I mean ITG2 at Narrows is a DDR machine, if it was a dedicab it'd probably feel similar to Chromatic. =P

Oh and to be more clear, I meant you're so good that you don't even notice the difference in timing because you get high 99s. Right now I can barely 98 shit, so to get a 98.30 on Pina Colada Boy when I wasn't even trying just makes me wonder about the timing. I honestly think I've been the same for a while, no improvement really.

Typically, the better you are at the game, the MORE readily you notice timing discrepancies. Just sayin.

Oy you guys sure did talk a lot while I was gone...

If you recall, we increased the size of the timing windows by .0005sec (I believe this is the correct amount) to line us up to the national standard, which we are now at along with basically every other major region. It's not the Chromatic theme that affected the timing, it was that specific change. So yes, before Chromatic and at some other locations, such as Narrows, it will seem tighter, but this is only because of the lack of this slight change. As for it being too loose, it's still VERY hard to get a quad, it's not like theyre falling from the sky or anything. If anything, DDR's timing is too tight (in my opinion), because tons and tons of steps that sound exactly on are greats. That being said, a lot of DDR charts are also off-sync and since it doesnt have the -excellent/excellent- type of system there's no truly good way to get the timing right without guessing and playing a given song a lot. ITG is *slightly* easier now, but by no means too easy in my opinion, as again, it's still very very hard to get a quad.

To address this:
I didn't think it was terribly relevant to mention charts lower than 9, as I and many others don't really play these much, however about a third of these songs do have easy, normal, hard, and expert charts, and hence there are also a number of 7s, 8s, and below. I apologize if you thought I was throwing these charts out or something. I just didnt count up how many 8s and below there are. Hope that answers your question

Okay I'm going to address this as well as I can because I believe people still misunderstand the purpose of JudgementWindowAdd.

There are two types of Dedicated cabinets.

Andamiro's cabinet
Roxor's cabinet

Andamiro made the first cabinets which didn't have this JugdementWindowAdd onto to it, because the hardware didn't need the compensation. I don't know all the specifics myself, but there is this thing called a pole rate which I assume has something to do with the video card and the pad. Anyways the ACME machine is an Andamiro cabinet.

Roxor cabinets were some of the last versions made. They changed the video card on these from an onboard to a dedicated video card (nvidia or something for example) which in turn changed the pole rate and made the timing window actually feel A LOT tighter than it should have. So for these versions they added the JudgementWindowAdd of .0015(I think, might be .00015) in the metrics to compensate for the pole rate. Tom has a Roxor Cabinet for instance

I know this to be true because when you guys added that onto ACME's machine Tom and I checked his JudgementWindowAdd on his machine and the .00015 sec add was already there and his machine's timing window is tighter than ACME's. Not by much though.

Correct me if I am wrong on any of these points please. There is giant post somewhere in the community about this from a guy name vyhd. I couldn't find it so I did the best I could in explaining this.

Polling rates are inconsistent among versions and cabs too, btw

For the sane reason the windows are inconsistent; you can change it :p

Yeah, but I'm talking about what Roxor was doing intentionally to the cabs, not what the community has changed.

Funny you mention that Keby. Tom came by to play ITG at my place on Sunday and within one set he said "It feels like the timing window is a LOT tighter on your machine". Mine hasn't been messed with (aside from transitioning to OpenITG) since I got it. So, I would assume it has "factory standard" timing windows. My personal preference is to have it tighter, but I can understand both sides of this argument.

P.S. Tony wrote an essay about what "should be" the standard timing window on one of these forum threads, if anyone cares.

I wonder what the Narrow machine is set at. I'm going to Olympia today and hopefully I can find out what the timing is on there. Where would it tell me in the operator menu?

It doesn't. Most themes don't show this in the operator menu. It's in the metrics.ini or static.ini file.

On top of all the software versions and types, there's the whole inconsistencies with hardware that makes every machine that you're not used to feel like it has tighter windows.

Suko:
Your machine's timing is fine, contrary to what this said before - I misremembered the timing settings.  JudgeWindowAdd may have been thrown off by some random theme at some point, though, so you might want to check /stats/Stepmania.ini to be sure.  Static.ini overrides anything a theme attempts to set, so I'd recommend setting JudgeWindowAdd to whatever you prefer to be safe, since it takes all of 5 seconds to do so - then there's absolutely no question about the timing.  I will say that last time I played on your machine, my timing didn't seem too heavily affected, but if anything it's tighter than Acme's timing.  Tom's machine may be easier than Acme now, but I can't say for sure, since I've only played there once or twice since he switched to Ubuntu.  I believe he has JudgeWindowAdd set to 0.0015 but he also has a Linux kernel that supports USB 2.0, so his timing may be feeling slightly looser because the polling rate might be better (I honestly do not know).  I will say that mistakes more frequently felt like actual mistakes on his machine - on Hard charts, I could consistently tell I was supposed to get an Excellent as I stepped, whereas I can usually only tell a little over two-thirds the time.

The new Acme computer will be able to poll as fast as the pads can poll (USB 2.0, plenty of free CPU and memory), so I'm planning on playing around with JudgeWindowAdd when I do my live test at Acme.  I need to find out how to benchmark the poll rate, because if it is better than the old computer, I do want to tone down the JudgeWindowAdd, otherwise scores will jump noticeably.

Keby:
PIUIO is the Andimiro dedicab I/O driver, which is known to have a terrible polling rate (around 40-50 Hz) as opposed to ITGIO, which backed upgrade kits and had a polling rate around 160 Hz.  The low polling rate made dedicabs VERY hard to play on until they were patched with JudgeWindowAdd=0.0015, since a 40-50 Hz polling rate means each sample lines up with a 20-25 ms sample and the Fantastic window is +/- 21.5 ms; it was possible (and common) to get the samples to line up so poorly with the steps that the timing was tighter than intended.  The r16 patch included a partial fix for the polling rate via a patch to the Linux kernel's I/O drivers which got it up to 80-100 Hz, which was good enough that it'd take a top player to feel the difference compared ITGIO, but Roxor forgot to set JudgeWindowAdd back to 0.0000 (they deleted the line, which the machine interprets as "do whatever you've been doing" not as "set it to 0"), so the looser timing stayed even though it wasn't needed.  Roxor's mistake led to the controversy over the "correct" setting, and ultimately people decided that, since an r21-r23 unhacked cabinet would have JudgeWindowAdd set to 0.0015, the looser timing should be considered correct.

I don't know if Roxor dedicabs actually work any better - the polling rate issue was caused by their older Linux kernel not supporting USB input that well, and all dedicabs use USB input (whereas upgrade cabs use a JAMMA card for input from Konami's JAMMA based input system).  The differences in computer configuration would have a minimal impact on timing - the machines have USB 2.0 ports, but only USB 1.1 software, so even the oldest cabinets would be able to keep up with the pitiful polling rate.

Tada:
Per all of the above, PIUIO can't handle DDR's marvelous window with any degree of stability.  I don't know the exact details of how ITG rounds polling periods to fit theoretical timing windows, but it's not outward in both directions, so when the timing windows are particularly tight, the worst case is that only one or two polling periods count as a Fantastic and it's not centered on the correct time.  Assuming we get an 80 Hz polling rate (12.5 ms polling period), setting it to +/- 16.6667 ms (to match DDR's Marvelous window) would cause some steps (completely randomly, but fairly frequently - the I/O system runs separately from everything else in the game) to only yield a Fantastic if you hit within -20 ms ms to +5 ms of the correct time (or something like that - again, I don't know the specifics of the rounding system, just that it is known to cut steps to a single valid period if the timing is set too tightly at at a very low polling rate).  Since this will start happening randomly, there will be no way to adjust for it and the game would be rendered artificially hard - you'd basically have to learn to time within 5 ms instead of 12 ms (even with +/- 16.6667 ms windows, there'd be some poll clipping and you'd have to player tightly to compensate).  I think poll clipping is responsible for ITG's timing commonly being "late" - the rounding algorithm tends to cut samples which run early while allowing ones that run late - when Roxor doubled the polling rate in r16, they also changed the global offset from -0.006 to -0.003 for reasons not stated.

Travis:
Acme's JudgeWindowAdd is hardcoded to 0.0015 in Static.ini, the rest of the timing is derived from the theme.  Chromatic uses the standard +/- 0.0215 Fantastic window, since it's r2-based.  These are completely standard settings.  The main things that makes Chromatic easier to play are the lack of distracting elements and huge number of speed mods.  I was in Vegas over the weekend and my scores held up just fine on two different machines running H4X (green recolor of ITG2) - I even outdid some of my personal records.  As for the timing data, that needs to be ripped from the computer itself, which takes a bit of work; the timing should use the default ITG2 settings (0.0215 Fantastic) since the ITG2 theme sets it to that, then varies JudgeWindowAdd based on the machine type (0 for upgrades and early dedicab revisions, 0.0015 for r8 and later dedicabs, 0.0030 for ITG on PS2) to achieve consistency.

I found this: http://rhythmatic.net/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=20062&postdays=0&postorder=asc&start=0

That's the source of the controversy - players immediately crusaded against JudgeWindowAdd=0.0015 for about a year and a half and vyhd (one of the main OpenITG developers) made sure OpenITG's built-in themes set JudgeWindowAdd to 0 until enough people pointed out that an unhacked r21 cabinet would have the looser timing and, even if it was a mistake, Roxor made that loose timing "official".

Since OpenITG is meant as a drop-in replacement for ITG, the team forces themselves to adhere precisely to ITG's behavior when they can.  OpenITG beta 3 uses JudgeWindowAdd=0.0015, even though earlier releases used 0.  This is ripped from the theme metrics on an untouched beta 2 install on my Windows desktop ("cabinet" is for dedicabs):



H4X, mentioned in that thread, is one of many themes that were based on a rip of an r2 dedicab's theme.  Chromatic is too.  Almost every theme is, since metrics.ini is around five thousand lines long and it's much easier to copy a theme and change a few things than to do it correctly and point to an existing theme as a fallback, only changing the few things you need to change (and adding new graphics).  This is from Chromatic's metrics.ini (I re-downloaded it just now, so this is untouched):



Also, I need to make a correction to what I said in my last post, OpenITG's default theme Chromatic, and ITG3 all use a 0.0215 (21.5 ms) Fantastic window, not a 20 ms window.  Suko's machine is fine.  The timing in all of these themes matches what is claimed in the Stepmania.ini documentation.

I've updated my last post to reflect the correct information.

Oh yeah, ITG's right coin slot does not work at all.  I opened up the coin door yesterday and noticed the coin mech is missing, so I'm assuming it's out for repair/replacement and Bill is therefore aware, but it's pretty important for everyone else to know that you cannot get a coin to register on the right side as it's not physically possible to do so.

Oh yeah that reminds me

Itg 1p side left arrow is a bit weak, I think either bottom or right sensor. I don't get pad misses often just by virtue of playstyle, but it's been recurring lately. On the same token, the up arrow has been spuriously triggering (= pad wayoffs/ too sensitive).  I forgot to make a service call and I don't have the number.

Randomly decided to go visit yesterday around 5:30 & was glad Tuan happened to appear as well~

He called Bill for assistance, & presently the coin machine slots on the ITG cab (which required the luck, simply to play a single round) have now been fixed on both sides.
That cab is also no longer louder than the SN2 & Guitar Hero machines; if all 3 are being played, you'll have trouble hearing your song.. not that it's too quiet on its own necessarily.

Didn't notice tooo many pads errors today, but Tuan was not happy with how Infernoplex turned out XD
He needs to play more songs of my choice, then he may quad more often, like he did last night.

Here I go again. Anyone else think ITG and SN2 cancel each other out too much? I think it'd be a good idea to put SN2 near the back, that way it'd be alot better to play both games and I don't have to be paranoid about basketballs hitting me.

No

I can't help but be distracted by ITG when I play SN2.

Bill,
The high tom (green drum) on the DMV3 needs to be attended to.  Does not register hits about 50% of the time.
Thanks,
Chris

Hopefully we can schedule that drum for rebuild early next week.  Looks like earlier repair did not hold up well.

Hoping the ITG sensor work earlier this week is holding up okay?