There seems to be an issue where notes played on instruments get repeated for guests who aren’t the ones playing. They sound fine for the host and the ones actually playing the notes. So–host never hears it. Guests hear it when other people, including the host are playing, but not when it’s themselves who are playing. Not sure when this issue popped up.
Steps to Reproduce
Play an instrument and have someone else nearby who’s not the host listening. Alternatively, be standing next to someone playing an instrument, whether they’re the host or not.
What I expected to happen
Notes to play a single time when a key is pressed.
What happened
Notes repeat when they shouldn’t, which at times can cause major performance issues for some. Playing a song got someone with an i5-12400F, RTX 3060, and 16 GB of RAM down to 1 FPS, which I can’t verify outside of them telling me that in chat, but I can see that their ping hits the 340 cap that the scoreboard has. Testing One Winged Angel their game froze, CPU usage stayed around the same (13-15%) and their GPU usage dropped to 1%. In the second video below you can see their ping return to normal when I pause playing, and jumping back up after resuming. I also noticed that several other peoples games were being lagged to oblivion, however they had left before I could ask them what they heard and what their specs/hardware utilization was like.
Notes having an affect on performance I’m sure is already known and unavoidable, but the repeating-of-notes issue makes it much more apparent. Even a super slow song can get peoples FPS to tank.
Notes / Media
Sustaining notes for longer or shorter durations didn’t seem to have much of an affect on it as far as we could tell.
I wasn’t noticing any game-freezing lag on a Ryzen 7 5800X3D, RX 6950 XT, and 80 GB of RAM, however I did hear the repeating notes on both drums and piano.
We didn’t test bongos.
Hypothetically I should test what happens when running in proton but then I’d have to either reboot or plug my capture card into my Deck and it’s almost 4 AM and i dont really wanna do that rn but ik Wines default audio settings historically have issues with crackling so I imagine that could probably stack for an unpleasant experience.
Got unlazy and booted up the VM and I think I figured it out after a bit.
This was half true, I guess? Duration held didn’t seem to have an affect on notes getting repeated but if a note was repeated, all currently held down notes’d be repeated too.
If a key is being held down, pressing another key has a chance to also re-fire every other held down note as well. So if you’re holding down H, wait for it to fully fade out, and then press E, there’s a chance that both E and H play, even though the only new input is E. This also applies to issues where a note gets stuck down while not being physically pressed. I couldn’t get the one where notes stick when leaving the pianos range to happen, idk if that one’s fixed or if it was just choosing not to happen, the one with selecting the instrument I didn’t test because my computer sorta hard crashed when I clicked back into the VM, but I do know that the one where notes repeat and get stuck after getting off an instrument quickly does still occur, which can lead to this issue. It also will just happen if you have a single note you’re playing–it’ll double up sometimes. But the slam-dunking of performance is moreso related to every note the piano thinks is held down getting played twice, which could literally be every note if you’ve got wack rollover on your keyboard or do jank setup with the above mentioned bugs. I’ve been saying keys and notes, but same applied for drums I believe.
Still didn’t test bongos because i forgor
I did more testing in plaza and it doesn’t seem to happen there. You can still get notes to be stuck down, although it’s different timing compared to condos, but they don’t all repeat when a new key is pressed, which probably means it wont lag people in Songbirds to hell and back (I think).
Also the guest-testing was done in Proton, so that may have some affect on how hard it was hitting. You can definitely hear in some of the clips the issue with audio crackle, but that’s more of Valves or other Proton maintainers issue.
Here’s a video of not that much going wrong in the plaza:
Here’s me testing it with the notes being stuck down from the quick-get-off thingy:
And then here’s my performance dropping so low the Steam overlay FPS counter stopped rendering for a bit:
