EOF 1.3 (Old Version)

[raynebc]

Regarding the automatic note movement, I was referring to when I change the tempo manually from the menu instead of dragging an anchor. The note movement seems to be forced when the tempo is changed this way.

Regarding the note catalog display, I was thinking something like a popup window, because it could honestly take a good deal of screen space to display several of the catalog entries at once without requiring scrolling. The sorting I mentioned would just be the order in which the note catalog is displayed. Ie. from the top left, it could display the catalog entry for note 1, then note 2, then chord 1+2, etc.


Now that I've had time to work with this version for a while, I have some initial thoughts:
-The mini-rewind before playback is great, playback starts where the seek line appears to be and playback is very smooth

-Accidental note move protection is working fantastically, I haven't accidentally fudged any notes or anchors yet!
-I'm glad that the bookmarks are saved in the EOF file now, this is very helpful


Some bugs:
-File modified '*' indicator:
--When changes are saved, the modified indicator is only cleared after changing the active instrument PART (changing active difficulty doesn't work)
--Undoing the only unsaved change does not clear the modified indicator even after changing active PART/difficulty
--Deleting notes doesn't cause the modified indicator to appear even after changing active PART/difficulty

-Sometimes when I have seeked to a beat marker and begin playback with clap enabled, the claps are desynced from the chart

-Chart save glitch: I noticed that upon saving the chart, EOF forces it to save the file as notes.eof instead of just saving the file that has been opened. Any existing file called notes.eof in the directory is overwritten. This is a little limiting if I try to create and experiment on copies of my chart in the same directory. I have verified that this is the case whether the EOF file is opened via command line (file association) or from within EOF itself.

-Note auto-adjustment glitch: Under certain unknown conditions, EOF will delete some notes instead of moving them if an anchor is moved and causes a tempo change

-A click+drag of the first beat marker prompts the user to update the offset of all notes even if EOF prevented the change to the midi offset (too fast of a click+drag)
Edit: I just verified that if this happens and I select yes to the prompt, the notes are moved by the amount that the midi offset would have changed if it hadn't been prevented.

-If playback is started with clap disabled on a difficulty that has no notes, and then during playback the difficulty is changed to one that has notes and clap is enabled, clap will not sound until playback is restarted. Seems as if EOF disables clap for the entire playback session if playback is started in an empty instrument and difficulty part.

-When seeking to a bookmark that was placed on a beat mark, EOF may not have updated the seek variables properly because page down must be pressed twice before it actually seeks to the next beat mark. This glitch is further shown by seeking to bookmark and pasting, as it pastes one beat early.

-When I was ALT+TAB'ing in and out of EOF, I experienced a glitch where EOF thought the tab key was held down and it cycled through the difficulties endlessly until I moved EOF out of the foreground and back. If there's no easy way for EOF to determine when it does and doesn't have main focus, maybe the input buffer should be cleared on each occurence of the program's main loop?


Feature requests:
-Shift+spacebar to play back at full speed regardless of current playback speed setting. This should be easier to implement than ALT+etc. playback keyboard controls (no menu modifier key conflict). And if the active playback speed is set to 25%, there's immediate and convenient keyboard access to play back at 25%, 50% and 100% without changing playback speed.

-Assign a hotkey to the "Clap Notes" submenu, ie 'V' to allow quick keyboard access to the selective clap controls

-Assign 'Y' and 'N' hotkeys to the Yes/No quit confirmation dialog

-Option to toggle on/off the "update note offset on midi offset change" and "automatically adjust notes on tempo change" features, as some changes are just for testing and not meant to affect the entire chart in a permanent way. Likewise, assigning 'Y' and 'N' hotkeys to the Yes/No confirmation for the midi offset change dialog would be cool.

-Option to clear all bookmarks, since as their numbering is not displayed to the user it can be easy to forget the location of all of them if not working on the chart for an extended period of time.

-More features related to text events, perhaps even lyrics? If this is implemented, perhaps a colored line segment with the name of the event (or displaying the lyrics at the very top of the piano roll panel) could be displayed above the beat markers so that the user can see where events start and stop.

-A bookmarks popup dialog window allowing the user to see bookmark timestamps or delete bookmarks, with a text box for each, allowing the user to name them. Perhaps this could be elaborated to include the option to enable a bookmark as a FoF supported text event (ie. drop down box containing valid events such as SOLO_ON) when exporting the mid. So a user can define bookmarks, describe them accordingly and control whether they show as bridge, etc. Since section changes are an obvious reason to use bookmarks, this would be an extremely convenient way to manage events and bookmarks and allow the song to be ready for FoF's practice mode when it's implemented (practicing song sections).

-My memory is sometimes fuzzy, could the Key commands help menu be updated to include the current commands?

-A tick mark on every fourth beat line (just below the anchor arrow perhaps?) to serve as a visual cue for the start of each measure. Likewise, perhaps the measure number (and the beat number #/4 within the measure) could be listed as another line in the information window so that if a note or beat is selected, the user can easily identify the position of the chart when referring to guitar tablature or a midi file


EOF is better than ever and I eagerly await to see it grow further still!

Edit: I might just have not noticed this before, but in the AV delay test chart, notes 15 and up seem to have lost sync with the grid snap that the other notes use, (ie. the ones that fall on beat markers are skewed by 1/192 of a measure or so. I don't know if the audio actually changes tempo or not, but if it doesn't, then it may be a problem with the chart.

[tyros]

Not sure if it's been mentioned before and I don't know if it's a feature or a bug but whenever I put a note, and then drag an anchor to sync with that note, the note moves away a little bit. It looks like it just doesn't want to stay on the anchor beat line.
EDIT: Hmm, I just thought about it, maybe that's because of the new feature that the notes move along with BMP changes?

[raynebc]

That's right. If you're changing anchors, hold shift while moving the anchor to prevent the adjustment of existing notes.

Edit:
More thoughts on the note catalog. It works pretty well, and it's neat that it is saved with the EOF file (low overhead, must be storing an offset into the song and a duration), but there is some logic code that needs some attention:

To me (without examining the code), the catalog appears to use a linked list, and when one of the catalog entries in between the front and end of the list are removed, the list is updated to remove it. But if the final entry is selected and removed, the catalog window shows that the removed entry is still selected and it will still play:


So if all entries are removed in the list in backwards order (removing the last entry each time), the list will indicate there are 0 entries when the last one was removed, but if another entry is then added, it will display a deleted entry and repopulate the list with deleted entries (links de-allocated from list but still unaltered in memory). When this happens, cycling forward will reset the list and display the one and only valid entry, but if I cycle backwards instead, it revisits the other entries that I had previously deleted, until I get to the final one, where it will eventually display just the one valid entry.

Having programmed with linked lists before, this seems like the conductor pointer (references the actively-selected link in the list) isn't getting updated when it is the final link and the final link is removed (this is a special case with linked lists as the conductor needs to be updated since it points to unallocated memory, and if you're using a double linked list, the tail has to be updated as well). If you're using a single linked list, you could either reset the conductor as the head (first entry) or parse from the first entry to the new end of the list so that the final entry is actively selected. Double linked lists require a little extra code but are more flexible for things such as transversing backwards through the list, and the data memory overhead (one extra pointer per link and one pointer to serve as the tail pointer) is minimal.

I haven't been able to produce a crash with this yet, but it certainly is possible. I'm happy to help if I can.


Edit: (I'm combining this into a mega-post because I got slapped for double posting)

I have been working on a chart using an instrumental track (as I often do). I finished and was going to replace the ogg file with the with-vocals version of the song as usual, and since the vocal version is shorter, some notes are pruned off the end of the chart, which is fine. But I think this causes some strange problems where EOF doesn't properly detect the last note of the song. CTRL+end doesn't move the seek bar, so the final note that EOF recognized may be considered out of bounds (after the end of the piano roll). As part of my usual re-sync process, I go to change the tempo at the lead-in to the first verse (first beat after 41 seconds) and change the tempo manually from the menu to raise it by one BPM, it freaks out and duplicates the instrument part from the beginning to the end and places it at the tempo change, causing more notes to be dropped off the edge.

I was able to recreate this glitch using the original EOF file and guitar.ogg together, so this isn't caused by the chart being longer than the song, but a glitch with the tempo change code.

I have emailed you a set of files with which this glitch can be readily-reproduced.

[jiiiiimmmy]

@NewCreature

Now it is working again. I suppose this is because of something MFH did to his mod.
He mention something about it in his to do list.
So no worries for you having to fix it!
=]

[Clubber]

you should make some kind of awsome mericle that would have in the edit task, HO/PO on/off. and of course, STAR NOTE on/off. this would make this program 300x better that feedback and its already 200x better than feedback FEEDBACK SUCKS!!!!!

[blackfriday]

What's the easiset way to fret very fast picking parts? (I.E. TTFAF)

[raynebc]

you should make some kind of awsome mericle that would have in the edit task, HO/PO on/off. and of course, STAR NOTE on/off. this would make this program 300x better that feedback and its already 200x better than feedback FEEDBACK SUCKS!!!!!

No matter how often it has been said, it always has to be said again: FoF determines placement of these, not the chart editor.

[blackfriday]

So, what about my question?

[coolguy567]

Wow, the automatic note movement on BPM change is the best update to EOF since anchors were added in the first place .

[blackfriday]

Grrrrrrrr! Somebody please answer my question?

[raynebc]

You either have to pick notes by ear or by using a chart/tab as reference. Sometimes guitar solos use structured timing (1/8, 1/16, etc), sometimes they're sloppy, you'll have to place notes, and play your notes back slowly (ie. 25% or 50%) with clap enabled. I've been able to fret very fast and random note-timed solos this way.

[Gugered]

dude it would be awsome if eof have an option of PART VOCALS for editing so you can see 'em on Alarian mod

[Philfireball]

Thanks for the new version. Many good enhancements.

two little things:

I noticed a bug with pasting from the catalog.
The notes with tails that are 1/8th and longer are reduced to notes without any tail when they're pasted.

THe other thing is: Wouldn't it be useful, if the little asterisk (the *) dissapears, when you save the song? It's just a little thing, nothing important. I just noticed this issue.

[raynebc]

dude it would be awsome if eof have an option of PART VOCALS for editing so you can see 'em on Alarian mod

I don't think FoF supports playing a midi track named PART VOCALS. I always secretly wished they'd add support for custom named instrument parts, so if I felt like making a synth track, I could call it PART CUSTOM 'SYNTH' so that it shows as 'SYNTH' during the instrument select screen.

I noticed a bug with pasting from the catalog.

I can't figure out how to copy a note from the catalog... But I did notice another minor issue: When notes are added to an empty catalog, the catalog window shows entry 1 of 1 is selected, but it doesn't display the notes until one of the catalog playback/seek controls are activated. This is probably related to some of the missing program logic from the catalog list.

THe other thing is: Wouldn't it be useful, if the little asterisk (the *) dissapears, when you save the song?

For now, you can work around this by changing the selected instrument track.

[to_the_kill]

Maybe someone can help me with this...I already have a post going on the ubuntu forums here but even after installing all the packages suggested there, I'm getting the same error.

I get the "No mp3 support" error as soon as I open it up. I've installed the vorbis and lame packages and the dev packages that go with those already with no luck. I'm stumped -_- Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated.