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Can Full Band Pathing be calculated automatically?

 
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niq24601  





Joined: 07 Jul 2008
Posts: 323

PostPosted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 4:11 pm    Post subject: Can Full Band Pathing be calculated automatically? Reply with quote

Not sure if this belongs in "Full Band" or "Software" but what the heck. I've been talking with Kawigi about this and was wondering if anyone else has thought about it...

A friend of mine has been trying to convince me that you could write a dynamic programming algorithm to compute the optimal full band path, including whammying but ignoring vocal squeezing (i.e. where the vocalist delays singing until other instruments activate, or tries to get to Awesome before OD runs out). We estimated that with eighth-note granularity, on a long song it would take about 160GB of disk space and two hours to run; half that for an average song. In order to keep the space that low, you have to take advantage of the fact that drums and vocals can only activate in certain places. But this is still small enough to fit on a single (large) disk drive.

Does this sound about right, or are we just way off and this really takes five times as much disk space and ten times as much time? We were thinking of trying it on something short like Charlene just to see if it's possible.
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ajanata  





Joined: 07 Jul 2007
Posts: 1167
Location: South Bay Area, CA

PostPosted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 6:57 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

It should be possible, but I'm interested where you go those numbers from. What does your math come up with for just, say, drums, as far as memory usage and time are concerned?

I think you're over-complicating matters. It's just running 4 single-player paths, but taking the unison bonuses and the points from the other parts into consideration.
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meister  





Joined: 09 Nov 2006
Posts: 2257
Location: St Cloud, MN

PostPosted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 7:02 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

ajanata wrote:
It should be possible, but I'm interested where you go those numbers from. What does your math come up with for just, say, drums, as far as memory usage and time are concerned?

I think you're over-complicating matters. It's just running 4 single-player paths, but taking the unison bonuses and the points from the other parts into consideration.



Its not just that, it also has to know where other instruments can activate, which would make it way more complicated
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Kawigi  





Joined: 27 Feb 2008
Posts: 2879
Location: Redmond, WA

PostPosted: Wed Sep 09, 2009 7:39 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

meister wrote:
ajanata wrote:
It should be possible, but I'm interested where you go those numbers from. What does your math come up with for just, say, drums, as far as memory usage and time are concerned?

I think you're over-complicating matters. It's just running 4 single-player paths, but taking the unison bonuses and the points from the other parts into consideration.



Its not just that, it also has to know where other instruments can activate, which would make it way more complicated


Indeed. If it were as simple as figuring out the optimal paths for each instrument if they were playing with a full band but only they were activating, this would be a really easy and reasonably fast problem. That would work if the multipliers for 1, 2, 3 and 4 people using OD were 2, 3, 4, 5, but they're 2, 4, 6 and 8. This means that in a situation where an instrument could activate by itself in a more point-dense place by itself or activate with others in a place that has at least half as many points, the latter is preferrable (and these restrictions impose themselves because every instrument doesn't get OD at the same time, and some instruments can't activate whenever they want).

Niq's numbers are based on a real algorithm that could work pretty well in theory, but requires a prohibitively huge amount of memory (the proposal he gives is to flush intermediate data to the hard disc, which I suppose can bring the RAM requirements down to the level of reasonability, but notice the staggering amount of temporary storage space we're talking about). I don't know if the time estimate is correct - I suspect it would take somewhat longer, probably a good chunk of a day for one song - but it's hard to really be sure without an implementation that's closer to what he's talking about in scope (and perhaps, running it on Charlene like he suggests). I've done some experimenting with computer-generated two-part paths, which is a pretty closely-related problem that is still (barely) within the realm of fitting in memory with some accuracy (and after some optimizations).
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Drum Paths | Star Cutoffs | Scoring Data for Pathing | Notes and Lyrics for Vocalists
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niq24601  





Joined: 07 Jul 2008
Posts: 323

PostPosted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 1:33 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

ajanata wrote:
It should be possible, but I'm interested where you go those numbers from. What does your math come up with for just, say, drums, as far as memory usage and time are concerned?


For drums it's much easier because of the set number of possible activations. Even if there are activiations at strange places (other than every 4 measures), you end up with something like 128KB. For guitar it's something like 1MB of memory.

As others have pointed out, the problem is that each instrument can activate independently, and there's a reward for activating together, but everyone gets OD at different times ... so the number of possible states for any one half-beat (you need eight-note granularity to avoid a certain amount of rounding) is
(# of instrument combinations in OD) * (# of possible combinations of OD across all instruments)

Since drums and vox can only activate in certain places we estimated this as
16 * 64 * 64 * 32 * 5
Which is about 10 million states *per half-beat*. You need 4 bytes to represent the band states, so that's 40 MB. With twice that space needed for backtracking, and about 2000 half beats in a long song, that's 160 GB.
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The Rocktimizer: RB2 Full Band Optimal Paths

"gay" and "rape". You keep on using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
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internetguy87  





Joined: 27 Mar 2008
Posts: 3505
Location: Pittsburgh, PA

PostPosted: Thu Sep 10, 2009 1:49 am    Post subject: Reply with quote

niq24601 wrote:

Since drums and vox can only activate in certain places we estimated this as
16 * 64 * 64 * 32 * 5
Which is about 10 million states *per half-beat*. You need 4 bytes to represent the band states, so that's 40 MB. With twice that space needed for backtracking, and about 2000 half beats in a long song, that's 160 GB.


May I just ask where these numbers are exactly from?
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Kawigi  





Joined: 27 Feb 2008
Posts: 2879
Location: Redmond, WA

PostPosted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 3:51 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

internetguy87 wrote:
niq24601 wrote:

Since drums and vox can only activate in certain places we estimated this as
16 * 64 * 64 * 32 * 5
Which is about 10 million states *per half-beat*. You need 4 bytes to represent the band states, so that's 40 MB. With twice that space needed for backtracking, and about 2000 half beats in a long song, that's 160 GB.


May I just ask where these numbers are exactly from?


16 is the number of combinations of instruments that could currently have OD active. The 64s (which should actually be 65) represent the amounts of OD that Guitar/Bass will have in half/beats. I can only assume the 32 is vocals OD, but I'm not sure why that number was picked exactly, and the 5 is the amount of OD that drums could have at a given point in the song (sometimes may be more than that, really, but sometimes less, too).
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Organizer, Vocalist and path factory for Season 9 League Champion band Barre Exam (RB1) and cofounder of Season 10 League Champion band Better Than You --v (RB2) - The #1 band on scorehero
Kawigi's Rock Band Projects
Drum Paths | Star Cutoffs | Scoring Data for Pathing | Notes and Lyrics for Vocalists
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niq24601  





Joined: 07 Jul 2008
Posts: 323

PostPosted: Fri Sep 11, 2009 11:00 pm    Post subject: Reply with quote

Kawigi wrote:
I can only assume the 32 is vocals OD, but I'm not sure why that number was picked exactly, and the 5 is the amount of OD that drums could have at a given point in the song (sometimes may be more than that, really, but sometimes less, too).


That's just a guess that, on average, the vocals will only have half the states reachable in any one beat. I have no idea what the real number will work out to.

And yes, the 64s should have been 65.
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The Rocktimizer: RB2 Full Band Optimal Paths

"gay" and "rape". You keep on using those words. I do not think they mean what you think they mean.
singemfrc wrote:
When I got GHWoR at midnight the guy behind me was there to buy a copy of Iron Man 2 on Blu Ray and midnight. Buying a movie at midnight release? Wow, so I didn't feel like the biggest loser
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