After months of hard work and iteration, we're really excited to finally release the Note Highway Update! Our goal with this update is to make it much more engaging and easier for anyone to get started with playing music in Paradiddle. The note highway system is a highly customizable and powerful rhythm game mode built into Paradiddle, with custom song support and much more. This is a huge step for the app, as we'll now be able to take anyone across the whole spectrum of learning -> practicing -> performing all in VR.
Some of you have been testing an early version of this already, but every part of the highway has undergone a rework since then. We have a whole new timing system, working customization options and improved visuals.
While I'll be putting out an announcement trailer for the update soon, here is one of our early sneak peek videos to give you a rough idea of how it works:
UPDATE - March 18th Minor Highway Update
With this additional minor update, the Note Highway is now the default version of the app on Steam! In addition to all the major updates below, here are some additional fixes and changes:
- Added a restart song button to the highway UI.
- Fixed an issue where setting the Drum Track Volume below 70 would make it inaudible in the song.
- Closing the hi-hat (via a pedal or controller) now triggers hi-hat notes on the highway.
- Fixed a bug where the drum kit volume wasn't being loaded properly.
- Fixed a bug where some text would appear sideways at the end of a song, if the highway was in horizontal mode.
This is a huge update, so let's take a look at all of the Note Highway features!
Custom Song Support:
We know that a big appeal to rhythm games is the ability to bring in your favorite music. We've built the Paradiddle Song Creator as a standalone tool that lets you import custom songs to Paradiddle by combining the audio tracks of a song with a MIDI file of the drum parts. This lets you bring in almost any song you want into the app, including songs you might find in other popular rhythm games. Check out the custom song guide for more info.
- Song Creator Link: Download ParadiddleUtilities.zip from https://github.com/emretanirgan/ParadiddleUtilities/releases/latest.
- Custom Song Guide: http://paradiddleapp.com/custom-song-guide
Music Lineup
The current version of the highway ships with 6 incredible original songs, all created by our very own ElNeax from the Paradiddle community. Over the next few months we'll be expanding the music lineup with more originals from ElNeax, as well as some songs from various indie artists.
Highway Customization Options
- Multiple Layouts: We currently have 2 highway layouts: perspective and horizontal. We'll be introducing a 3rd layout in the future, the immersive layout, where the notes will be flying directly to your instruments.
- Song speed: Adjust the song speed (without changing its pitch) to slow down tough songs, or speed it up to gain ultimate mastery.
- Highway speed: The note speed can be adjusted to your liking.
- Control drum track and drum kit volume separately:
- Turn down the song's drum track to just hear your drum sounds coming out of Paradiddle.
- Turn down your drum kit if you just want to hear the song's drum track and nothing else.
- Auto-rearranging highway layout: The highway lanes will always reflect your current drum layout. Try moving your drums around to see what this looks like!
- Highway placement: Move the highway around to your ideal spot.
Local High Scores
High scores and star ratings for song performances are currently local, meaning that you'll only be able to see your own personal best and not global high scores. We'll be introducing global leaderboards in a future update.
New Recenter Headset Button
Found in the Options tab. This has been long overdue, but you can now use this button to make sure the highway is right in front of you.
- Quick note: If you're not using an Oculus headset, this button currently does not work properly. This will be fixed in a future update, however you can use the "Reset Seated Position" button in the SteamVR dashboard to get the same result in the meantime.
Known Bugs
- The notes in the first few seconds of the song all get stacked into one spot (most noticeable in the lower note speeds). If you're making custom songs, try not to have any notes within the first few seconds of the song. This will be fixed in a future release.
- Intermittent crashes when closing the app: there have been a couple of users who reported crashes while trying out the note highway. If you run into similar issues, please let me know! What's most helpful is if you send me a zip of your whole logs folder (under your Paradiddle installation folder, in Paradiddle/Saved/Logs) so I can take a closer look at what might have gone wrong.
Bug Fixes
- Fixed hi-hat pedal close sounds not playing properly.
- Fixed a bug where MIDI in/out enabled and mute options were not saved in kit save files.
Upcoming Highway Improvements
This is just the beginning! We'll be improving the highway system over the next few upcoming months. Here are some developments you can expect to see:
- Immersive layout, where notes come towards your instruments.
- Global Leaderboards for all built-in songs.
- More songs!
- More visual polish.
If you're enjoying your VR jam sessions in Paradiddle and excited about upcoming features and improvements, I would really appreciate it if you wrote a review on Steam. It doesn't have to be long - any review helps in showing that Paradiddle is trying to be the most flexible, responsive and user-friendly VR drumming app out there. The more we can get the word out, the more support I'll be able to get in realizing that goal.
- Emre
[email protected]
Join us on Discord!: https://discord.gg/paradiddle
Twitter: https://twitter.com/ParadidleVR
Paradiddle drum covers Youtube playlist (your cover could be on here too!)
Official Paradiddle website: http://paradiddleapp.com
FAQ: http://paradiddleapp.com/faq