Topics

16

Troubleshooting / Pro run credited to an Elite character; score not logged

« on: August 24, 2010, 03:22:54 pm »

I recently surfed a song using Eraser that didn't get logged to the scoreboards at the end. I checked the usual suspects - Internet connection working? Yep. Audiosurf server up and running and accepting requests within a reasonable amount of time? Yep. Logged into Steam? Yep. So I brought up "My age" on the website and noticed that the song was in fact listed under my "Most Recent Songs", with the following bit of information after the song title:

using Pointman Elite for  points

So, it apparently glitched not only on the character data, but also the number of points scored. The latter is probably a good thing - it was a darn good score, and it would have been really unfair to others to have a Pro score logged on the Elite scoreboards (since Pro scores are often higher). I'm guessing that the system saw some data inconsistent with the character it thought had surfed the song, and intentionally failed to log the score. But it still registered that I had surfed the song. Weird, huh?

This hasn't happened to me since, but I figured I'd bring it up to see if anyone else had noticed this odd phenomenon.

17

Discussion / Does Ironmode reduce your powerups?

« on: July 19, 2010, 04:28:11 pm »

I haven't played with Ironmode much, so forgive me if this is a dumb question: Does Ironmode reduce the number of powerups you receive, by virtue of having no shoulder lanes? A lot of the powerups tend to show up there, so I'm not sure whether the game gives you the same number of powerups and just shifts them all into the main track, or whether it simply doesn't display any powerups that would have been generated in the shoulder.

I suppose I could just play in Ironmode a bunch of times and see if it makes a difference, but the reason I'm asking is because I'm trying to figure out whether Ironmode (with its slightly faster traffic) would prove useful on tracks where I missed a throne by that much and being able to keep a chain going a little longer could make that tiny bit of a difference. Since I'm playing Pro, having fewer powerups would likely negate that advantage. It's mostly an issue for slower songs where the blocks are spaced just far enough apart that it's hard to keep the chain.

Just doing a bit of strategizing here. I'm playing Eraser, which admittedly isn't wonderful on the slower songs, but erasing and replacing blocks does seem to help extend the chain. I suppose I could experiment with Pointman a bit more to get around the chaining problem. I'm trying to only use Vegas as a last resort on these kinds of songs.

18

Discussion / How do you select which songs to play?

« on: July 14, 2010, 04:55:15 pm »

I'd like to know what a typical Audiosurf playing session looks like for people.

Do you tend to focus on specific songs that you're trying to throne, and play them over and over until you get it?

Do you start with track 1 of an album and play through that entire album, or through a hit list of favorite songs by a given artist?

Do you use an external app to set up a playlist for yourself, or to randomly pick tracks for you?

Do you wander through your music collection and pick weird songs (or non-songs, as the case may be) just to experiment and make the game spit out erratic tracks?

Do you just go with whatever's on Audiosurf Radio?

Personally, I generally play through full albums. Sometimes even full artist discographies, going back through to redo songs where I couldn't get the throne. I've also got a collection of mix CDs I've made over the years of songs I liked at given points in my life, and I've been going through and playing all the songs off of those, which has provided a great nostalgia trip. It's interesting to see where my tastes intersect with popular culture, and where I'm the first one to play a song, as I do this.

19

Discussion / The Michael Phelps Finish (a.k.a winning by a ridiculously narrow margin)

« on: April 09, 2010, 05:15:25 pm »

What's the narrowest margin by which you've ever dethroned someone, or been dethroned?

Yesterday I played the 8-minute "Song for a Friend" by Jason Mraz and was astonished to find out that I had claimed the Pro throne by a mere 49 points. Seriously, that's like the difference of matching an extra set of purples or something.

http://www.audio-surf.com/song.php?t=popular#621844

I've been dethroned by folks who led me by a few hundred points before, but being within 50 seems a lot like that time Michael Phelps got a gold medal by 0.01 seconds or whatever it was.

20

Discussion / What's your hardest character?

« on: April 06, 2010, 12:33:31 pm »

For those who have played with a variety of characters, what's the one character you can't seem to get the hang of? (Bad grammar. I apologize.)

I've been trying to break into the Elite ranks lately, going back and forth between Pointman, Pusher, and Eraser. It's proving to be quite a task with any of these characters, but that's just a natural part of learning the game. However, Pusher seems to be the one that I really can't get down. I understand the basic controls and I'm not too bad at pushing one color one way and a second color the other way. But I always seem to get at least one extraneous block in there that nullifies the clear bonus, and then I just start losing track of what I'm supposed to be doing in the mad rush to fix my mistakes. Switching back and forth between characters might be my Achilles Heel here, because I'm used to prioritizing the white blocks and trying to match as much as possible with the other characters, even if it doesn't all clear at the same time. But still, even in sessions where I concentrate solely on Pusher, it seems to have the steepest learning curve.

DV is also very hard for me, but I rarely play it because I don't like using the keyboard.

21

Troubleshooting / How often does the server go down?

« on: March 25, 2010, 12:00:56 pm »

I used to notice only very rarely that Audiosurf (the game) would be unable to connect to Audiosurf (the server) to log my scores at the end of a song. Maybe on the order of once a month or so. Now I'm noticing it more than twice a week. It's generally only for a few minutes, but it's enough to really worry me when I'm in the middle of an exceptionally good run. I'm not on this thing all hours of the day - generally just late evenings Pacific time when I'm playing it. I don't know if folks have noticed server crashes at other times or if I just happen to be playing at a time when the server is hammered.

What would be really spiffy, as a future upgrade to the game, would be if it could check its ability to connect to the server periodically and warn you during a song if the connection was lost. That way, you could choose to pause the song and wait for the connection to be restored, and not risk losing your score when you finish the song.

Failing that, please give us back the Resubmit button!

22

Troubleshooting / Problem viewing score details on audio-surf.com

« on: March 24, 2010, 11:32:05 am »

Sometimes, when I get a dethroned Email and I click on the link to view scores on audio-surf.com to see how bad the damage was, I don't get any details when I mouse over the scores. The normal behavior is that I get a popup showing the track shape, runtime of the song, how long ago the score was attained, and a link to get further details and one to report. But sometimes these popups won't show.

I'm using Firefox, and I haven't disabled JavaScript or set my browser security settings to high or anything like that. I tried Ctrl-Shift-J to view the JavaScript console when it happened yesterday, and verified that it was a JavaScript error - some undefined variable or something.

Interestingly, when I search for a song rather than clicking a direct link to it, the problem goes away.

It's also intermittent - yesterday I noticed the error, today I can't seem to replicate it. I don't know if it's specific to the song and if there's sometimes a character in there that messes up JavaScript. If I see the JavaScript error again, I will post it. I will also try other browsers.

23

Troubleshooting / A weird bug that actually helps me

« on: February 27, 2010, 12:40:10 pm »

Here's an odd one for you. I've noticed that if you get a multiplier power up pretty much exactly at the end of a track, it will sometimes apply to your first combo in the following track. This has happened to me by accident twice - once when doing my usual pointless dump of Vegas powerups I didn't get to use right as a track ends (I'm not the only one who does this, right?), and once when a question mark just happened to show up in the margin and was just so timed to allow me to hit it right as the song ended. Both times, I saw something like "x4" above my head at the beginning of the next song.

I wasn't really able to use this to my advantage, since my first combo in the vast majority of songs is usually something like a small handful of blues or purples. But it could conceivably give a good running start to someone who knows what they're doing, or is just lucky enough to get a white right out of the gate. Might wanna nip that in the bud - but I won't complain if it's never fixed!

24

Feature Requests / Consistent behavior for matches/powerups

« on: February 20, 2010, 12:46:46 pm »

A cardinal rule of Audiosurf, and perhaps the thing that makes it manageable to play on faster/denser songs, is the notion that a full column with a match in it will immediately register and remove the match when overfilled, allowing you to pick up long strings of the same color without worrying about whether they will overfill the column (so long as there are at least 3 available slots in that column or a match already identified farther down in the column, of course).

But lately, I've been seeing some inconsistency as far as the Paint powerup is concerned. I can't tell you how many times I've fired off a Paint after carefully filling each column, aiming for the Match 21 bonus, only to hit a block immediately after painting the entire grid and having that column get treated as an overfill and removed. The remaining columns still get painted, flash, and disappear, crediting me for the match of 14 blocks. So clearly I used the Paint before hitting the extra block. (It was in my possession using either Vegas or Pointman - if I'd hit the block before using the powerup, the powerup would have been forfeited and no blocks would have been painted).

My guess is that it takes a few split seconds for the painted blocks to finish changing color, and during that  brief window, they're still treated as their previous colors, even though they all look the same to the user. Since a match of blocks that were acquired from the track rather than using paint starts flashing immediately, this seems inconsistent to me.

Also inconsistent is the behavior of lightning bolts. Two problems I'm having here:

1) If you fire off a Sort powerup while blocks from a lightning bolt are being "flung" into the grid, they all disappear and aren't taken into account during the sort. (Though this also happens with a brick you've hit that hasn't "settled" yet.)

2) If you fire off a regular-colored lightning bolt while one or more columns are full, no extra blocks appear in that column. If you fire one off while all columns are full, no new blocks appear at all. But if you fire off a wild card lightning bolt (which produces three glowing blocks in the same column) while positioned in a full column, you overfill and get penalized. Yet if you fire off the wild card lightning bolt and one or two spaces are available in that column, the wild card bricks that show match with whatever's below and disappear, while the remaining bricks settle down from above.

That last one only happens in Vegas mode, of course, but is a particular point of contention for me, as I seem to have the worst luck when waiting for the precise moment to paint an entire grid, only to have that nefarious glowing lightning bolt show up in my queue at the exact moment I right-click intending to release the paint - so I overfill and lose the paint powerup. Aargh. Maybe that's just the luck of the draw for a character whose performance does depend to some degree on luck, but it still takes skill to fill the entire grid with no matches when and have Paint in your possession (or Sort and at least 3 of each color plus no whites), so it's annoying to get robbed of that so quickly that you had no way of anticipating it.

25

Feature Requests / More robust song search

« on: February 18, 2010, 04:58:34 pm »

Some ideas for the "Search Songs" feature on the audio-surf site:

1) Search for substrings instead of exact string matches. Sometimes I want to check before playing a song to see how others have it tagged, but unless I can guess the exact syntax, I can't find it in the search. (Is it "Jason Mraz -- Lucky"? "Jason Mraz featuring Colbie Caillat - Lucky"? Or "Jason Mraz -- Lucky feat. Colbie Caillat?")

2) Failing that (since I know LIKE operators can be much more expensive database operations than simple string matches), a wildcard search (e.g. "Lucky*") might be nice, as a way to indicate that I want to do a LIKE search without the system assuming that every single search is a LIKE. (Caveat: This could mess things up when a song title actually has an asterisk in it.)

3) Ability to search on artist AND song title combined. Say I'm looking for the song "Shine" by Vienna Teng. A million other artists have songs called "Shine". Vienna Teng has many other songs that have been played enough to bump "Shine" off of the search results list. It's impossible to find the scores for this exact song, short of actually playing it and then viewing the results.

4) In conjunction with #3, return more search results. Especially if I'm looking for variants of ways that a particular song has been tagged, it would be nice to see literally every song by an artist that is in the database. Those variants are likely to be low popularity-wise, so I don't want the list to cut off after the top N results. (I realize that a list which goes on forever wouldn't be optimal, though, so maybe just make N a higher number like 100 instead of 20 or whatever it is currently.)

5) Be more forgiving about punctuation. Apostrophes are already being automatically removed (though searching for anything with an apostrophe in it returns no results - replace 'em out in the search terms if you're gonna replace 'em in the stored data), and ampersand is seen as equivalent to "and". Alphanumeric characters matching are probably a good enough indicator that song titles match. This would also help to clear up some discrepancies such as "REM" vs. "R.E.M." (Caveat: What happens when a song title is all punctuation? I know some smart-aleck band probably named a song "@" or something. Perhaps in that case, an exact string match would be necessary to bring up that result, since otherwise you'd be searching on a blank song title. Ugh. I hate special cases.)

26

Feature Requests / Better Keyboard/Menu Navigation

« on: February 18, 2010, 04:37:15 pm »

Putting this under Feature Requests instead of Troubleshooting, because nothing here is truly buggy, but it's awfully awkward to use. I've found the song selection and options menus to be extremely sluggish to navigate, particularly in Fullscreen mode. Some specific nitpicks:

1) For some reason, Fullscreen slows my mouse down quite a bit when navigating the game menus, but NOT when playing the actual game. (Meaning I can surf just fine, but I overcompensate for a sluggish cursor and end up clicking on the wrong song or display option, etc.) This doesn't seem to happen in "windowed" mode, but then, when I need to register what blocks are what color and respond accordingly in a split second, I want those blocks to be as big as possible! (In other words, I don't want to play the game at any resolution other than Fullscreen.)

2) Due to the sluggishness of the mouse, I often resort to keyboard when trying to navigate through my music files and pick a song. For example, I'll hit "K" to jump to the folders in the list that start with K (since I have each artist in a separate folder), click on that folder, and then if there are multiple albums in that folder, I'll hit the first letter of the album title (since all of my mp3 files are named "Album Title - 01 - Song Title.mp3"). But for a letter with a lot of entries such as "S" or "M", I'll still have to scroll a bit to see them all on screen. It would be nice for keyboard navigation to work cumulatively, like it does in Windows' file menus - i.e. typing "MU" in rapid succession would make it much easier to get to "Muse", rather than "M" taking me to the first item under "M" and then "U" immediately jumping me to the U's.

3) Related to #2, I've also noticed that using the keyboard to navigate further up in a list (i.e. hitting "A" or even "Home" to try to return to the beginning of a file list) sometimes doesn't work at all. Again, this forces me to use the sluggish cursor to scroll back up. All letters should work. "Home" should return to the first file in the list. "End" should jump to the last. A functional "Page Up" and "Page Down" would be nice bonuses.

4) I'd honestly just use the external file browser to pick songs all the time (since the keyboard navigation works as expected there), except that doing this takes me out of Fullscreen mode. Windows is particularly slow about switching between the two modes, and it's annoying to change resolution back and forth every time I pick a new song. I realize it probably isn't possible to switch to another window that exists outside of Audiosurf while keeping Audiosurf fullscreened. But maybe this can be resolved by a "Maximize" command for Audiosurf that goes to the highest resolution that fits without truly going to Fullscreen? Then the other window popping up wouldn't reset the resolution.

Can any of these things be fixed? Pretty please?