Month: October 2020

Earlier this week, I decided to switch over from the default Wacom tablet drivers to the custom Hawku driver. The Hawku driver was made specifically for the osu! rhythm game. I’ve heard good things about it, and since I don’t use my tablet for anything else, I decided to give it a try.

Supposedly, the Hawku driver reduces input latency, removes cursor smoothing, and allows for an easier time when changing tablet area. First I’ll go over the input latency. Input latency is basically the amount of time it takes for a movement from the tablet to be processed in the game. When I used to play with the old Wacom drivers I’d get between 1-2ms of input latency, but with the Hawku drivers it’s only 0.6ms. The difference isn’t really that big, and I can’t really tell a difference, but it’s faster so that’s good.

One of the other things that the Hawku driver does is remove cursor smoothing. Cursor smoothing is something that can be put into the hardware of a tablet or is provided with a tablet’s drivers. What it does is smoothen out your cursor’s movements so that lines are more uniform. This is helpful for when you’re drawing, but smoothing can change the position you want your cursor to be and can also increase input latency. The Hawku driver allows you to choose whether you want to have smoothing or not. You’re able to change the amount of smoothing applied if you do use the filter though. For me, playing without any smoothing felt a lot different that what I was used to before. Since the cursor is also moving faster without smoothing, I started experiencing some screen tearing, but I was able to fix that with playing in windowed mode. I know that some people like to use smoothing because their hands shake a lot when they get nervous, but so far I haven’t had too many issues.

The last big thing that the Hawku driver does is that it makes it really easy to change your tablet area. Tablet area is the amount of space where the tablet is active. You can can make this bigger or smaller depending on your preference, and will change how far you have to move your pen to reach different parts of the screen. The Hawku driver has lots of different ways you can set your area. One way is by inputting the coordinates of the different corners of the area you want. This is the way the Wacom drivers did things, but you can’t actually tell how long or wide the area is. By converting the coordinates to millimeters, the Hawku driver makes it a lot easier to just set the size you want and share different areas. Especially since not all brands of tablets use Wacom’s coordinate system. I decided to try a few different top players’ areas, but my own still felt more comfortable for me. However, being able to easily test out different areas was still a nice feature.

Overall, I feel like if you only use a tablet for osu!, you should give the Hawku driver a shot. My aim definitely feels a lot more consistent than it used to be now that there’s no smoothing. Even it’s just placebo, the ability to precisely and conveniently change your tablet area using an actual unit of measurement is really helpful. If you don’t like the feeling of the new driver, you can always try adding smoothing or just go back to whatever you were using before.

For the past two weeks, I started doing another music exercise from the show Legend of Korra, but this time instead of the opening, I’m using the main theme of the show. Compared to the opening theme, there are a lot more tempo changes and the instrumentation is quite different.

To start, my music teacher told me to listen through the entire thing first and try to figure out the tempos for different sections. Since Logic’s tap tempo system isn’t the most intuitive, I kind of just guessed and went back and forth between my click track and the music. Another thing that made mapping the tempo difficult is that at the very beginning there are strings playing really slowly. This made it difficult for me to figure out when the downbeat was, but eventually I managed to get something pretty close.

After mapping out the tempo, we started to figure out those slow opening chords played by the strings at the beginning. Figuring out the chords here was a lot easier than with the opening theme because there were fewer instruments. The opening chords are being played by a string quartet, and the timbre of each of them is really easy to tell apart. I was able to just listen and copy over the notes I could hear. If I was missing some notes, I could just use the notes that I’d already figured out and kind of infer what the chord would be to fill in the blanks.

Then, there’s a really short cello solo that comes in afterward which was pretty easy to figure out, so it wasn’t really that big of a deal. However, after that was when the music starts to pick up a bit with the cello playing an upbeat ostinato sort of thing that outlines a chord. To figure that part out, I just kind of listened for the note that was emphasized first, and then I tried to fill in the rest by thinking of the different intervals relative to the emphasized note. The cello continues the ostinato, but once the melody comes in it shifts around. It was still playing the same pattern but just a different chord. I just assumed that the chord structure for each chord change would be the same, so I moved the entire ostinato down to the emphasized note. It ended up being pretty much spot on with just one note that needed to be changed.

The last thing that we ended up doing was looking at the melody part that comes in when the cellos play their ostinato. For me, this was probably the easiest part so far because there are two instruments that are playing the melody that comes through really clearly. I just figured out which notes were being played for each phrase and then matched the rhythm after that.

Overall, that’s what we’ve done so far with the Legend of Korra theme. There was a bit more to it than just trying to listen for the chords because of how quickly the music changes compared to the opening. We’re still not completely finished with it though because my music teacher wants me to try and fill in the rest of the things that we still haven’t done like the percussion and some other harmonies that we didn’t cover. So most likely, we’ll revisit this soon.

Genshin Impact is an open world fantasy RPG that was released a few weeks ago. The game features different characters, locations, dungeons, and quests for you to play through. Since the game is free to play, I decided to give it a try a couple days ago.

The first thing that you’ll notice about the game is the art style. Genshin Impact uses a pretty clean anime art style that not a lot of other games use. As far as I know, the only other game I’ve seen with a similar art style is the yet to be released Blue Protocol. I think that Genshin Impact’s visuals are a lot different compared to something like Black Desert Online, but it certainly has its own appeal.

Another thing that is a big feature for Genshin Impact is the in-game gacha system. For those who are unfamiliar, a gacha system is a common mechanic in these types of RPG games where players can use in-game items and currency for a chance to unlock new characters or items. In Genshin Impact, this is pretty much the only way to unlock new characters. Playing through the game’s story does give you a few free characters, but the rarest 5 star characters can only be unlocked through the gacha.

One thing that I feel like is pretty important to note about the gacha system is that the rates for getting 5 star characters and weapons are really low. The base rates for 5 stars is only 0.7% which is pretty low compared to other games. What makes this worse is that the items used to roll on the in-game gacha is really hard to get once you get past the beginning stages of the game. After that, the only easy way to get more chances is to spend real money and hope you get the character or items you want.

As for the in-game story and gameplay, I found it to be pretty enjoyable for the first little while, but I can definitely see myself getting a bit bored if it was the only game I played. You can switch between your different characters who have different abilities, and you can go around exploring different areas of the world or take on quests. The game does include side quests along with the main quest like most other games, but that was about all I found.

Genshin Impact also isn’t necessarily multiplayer. There’s an option to play through dungeons with up to 4 other players, but other than that, the game is pretty much singleplayer only. For, me this kind of makes the game a bit less enjoyable. I’m already not really the type to play that many story-based games unless they seem really interesting, so for me, I just really like the art style and graphics.

Overall, Genshin Impact does seem like a really cool game, and I can see why a lot of people are playing it right now. Personally, I’m not too big of a fan, but if you like singleplayer games and don’t mind the bad gacha rates I think the game could be really enjoyable. In the end, I think I might make a few new accounts for the free gacha rolls to see what I get. I probably won’t get anything good, but I think Genshin Impact can still be a game I can dabble with when I feel like it.

This week, my music teacher decided to try something a bit different with me after finishing up our voice leading exercise with different modes. He showed me the intro to the show the Legend of Korra which was the sequel to Avatar the Last Airbender. It was quite similar to the original Avatar intro where they say the four elements and each one has a different chord.

The first thing that I tried doing was figuring out at least one note being played during each chord. For me, it was the easiest to pick out he highest notes that the choir was singing, and I was able to get those notes pretty easily. At first, I thought that it would be simple and that the highest note would be the root note and we could go from there. However, my music teacher reminded me that in full orchestration the highest note isn’t always the root note and that you can’t automatically assume.

Since, we needed more information, the next best thing for us to do was to listen to see whether or not the first chord was major or minor. To be honest, it was really hard for me to tell especially since an entire orchestra was playing and I was hearing all sorts of different timbres. In the end though, my music teacher helped me out there quite a bit and we established which chords were major and minor.

After that, we listed different major and minor chords that included the high notes as any of their chord tones and slotted them in until we found one that fit the sound. After the first two chords we started to try and determine the key and mode. Eventually we narrowed things down to a few possibilities so that we would be able to predict what our next chords could be. Unfortunately, we had a problem when it came to our third chord because theoretically there wasn’t any chord within our possible key signatures and modes that included the high note that we were hearing.

I spent a good few minutes trying to figure out whether or not we did something wrong or if I heard the wrong note, but eventually my music teacher just told me the key was a harmonic minor scale where the 7th degree of the scale is raised by one semitone. This allowed changed one of the previous minor chords that didn’t work into a major chord and we finally had our third chord figured out. The last chord wasn’t too special since we figured out that it was just the first chord again but an octave higher.

Once we finished figuring out the first four chords, there was a second section with more instrumentation and an actual melody. Just like the first section, I didn’t have much trouble figuring out the higher notes, or in this case the melody. What was different this time around though, was that now I know exactly what key we were in and was able to fill in chords based on what the melody was outlining.

Overall, I think that even though the intro was 20 seconds or so, it was still kind of difficult to pick out specific things. The fact that there were lots of different instruments playing which makes voicings a lot larger made me pretty confused, but in the end it was a good listening exercise for me to practice with.

A few days ago, I noticed that I had a few extra dollars in my Steam Wallet funds and was look for a new cheap game to play. Eventually, I found out that the rhythm game Muse Dash was on sale for less than two dollars, so I decided to check it out. Here are my first impressions on the game.

Muse Dash is a side scrolling rhythm game where different notes come from the right side of the screen in two rows. You have two keys that you can use to hit notes on the top row, and you have another two keys that you use for the bottom row. I find this kind of similar to another rhythm game called Taiko No Tatsujin, but it’s still pretty different at the same time.

I think what makes Muse Dash a different kind of rhythm game for me is that you’re controlling a character which hits the notes that come from the side. Your character has to hit the notes and sometimes avoid obstacles on the ground as they run through a song’s level.

There are basic notes that you just hit once, notes you hold down that look like music sheets, and objects that you have to hit as many times as possible in quick succession. Those are the main things that stand out to me, but there are still other objects that you come across that the game kind of lets you figure out on your own. Another thing to note is that the different objects you hit are themed to each song’s level. In one song you might be hitting clouds and another you could be hitting a combination of cars and hats. This kind of fits with the game’s cartoony type of story, but at the same time there’s no real story.

One of the things that I don’t really like about the game is how you can unlock certain characters that give you special perks. Some characters can boost your overall accuracy at the end of the song and another can make it so that you’re immune to obstacles. I feel like rhythm games with aspects like these make getting good scores kind of unfair in way because there’s no guarantee that everyone will unlock the same characters. The way it works is that every time you finish playing a song you will get an item which goes towards unlocking any random character. This makes it so that it could take a long time to get the items for a character you want or need. People that have “better” characters will have some sort of advantage of other’s that don’t. I think this takes some of the skill away from these types of games, but I know some people probably like having another game element besides the main content.

Another thing that I think is worth mentioning is that the game only has around 40 default songs for you to play unless you buy the DLC packs. The game does temporarily unlock one song from each DLC pack, and every week the song will rotate, but there’s still a limited selection of songs. There’s no community level design opportunities unlike osu!, so you won’t be able to play all of your favourite songs.

Overall, Muse Dash for its base price even without the DLCs has still be pretty fun. The levels do get quite difficult, but without community involvement I think that high level players must get bored sometimes. However, I think Muse Dash is generally more of a casual type of game which I think is still fine. I’ll probably keep playing it a bit more and see how much better I can get.