Chop It
v1.0.3 - All Your Memory Are Belong to You
That's right, we skipped a whole patch version!
Optimizations
We fixed two pretty gnarly memory issues. Both were a result of importing tracks, but let's discuss each individually.
1. Audio data for all tracks imported from StreamingAssets was staying in memory indefinitely. Even when compressed, this caused a considerable amount of bloat. For 16 imported tracks we saw almost 2GB worth of unnecessary memory usage by Audio Clips. To fix this, we modified the import behavior to store file pointers to imported audio files instead of loading audio data on start. While this was a win, when we built the executable and loaded it up we still saw considerable bloat when importing a lot of tracks. That takes us to issue #2!
2. Those weren't really file pointers at all! The WWW File objects themselves are quite bloaty as well. So, while our memory usage by Audio Clips looked great, we were still seeing up to 1GB of bloat when importing the same 16 tracks. For this, we deferred all File and Audio access until it was needed - when previewing, mapping, or playing a track. We then unload and dealloc all File and Audio objects when they are no longer being used.
The result of the 2 fixes is that "no matter how many" (probably) tracks you import, you should never see memory bloat larger than that of the most-recently-used audio track. For a lengthy WAV file this was less than 100MB when we tested.
That's it. Less scary bug fixes and tweaks are coming soon!
External Mapping Tools!
Brief update here.
We now have a 2D mapping tool that works within your browser. It's a work in progress, but is already very functional. You can check out the latest stable build at Tanner's site which is:
http://mapit.tannern.com
More polish and permanent hosting coming soon.
We also have a working MIDI->beatmap converter that we'll be adding to the tool soon. If you're eager to convert your MIDI tracks to Chop It, just hit me (Techboy) up on our Discord (https://discord.gg/Yq3dzm2) and I'll help you convert.
Thanks!
Join us on Discord!
We got ourselves a big ole' Discord!
Come do these great things:
1. Talk with the devs
2. Check out beta and experimental features and tools
3. Share songs and beatmaps
4. Big ole' party time
!
https://discord.gg/Yq3dzm2
Adding Songs and Beatmaps to Chop It
We've released an article on our Medium blog that walks you through adding songs to Chop It and creating/editing beatmaps for those songs. We also go into detail about the file and directory formats for our beatmaps to enable external developers to create their own beatmapping tools.
You can find the blog here.
https://medium.com/giant-scam/adding-songs-and-beatmaps-to-chop-it-d7a7342df69a
Please use our Steam Discussions forum to provide feedback. Help us make the importing and mapping experience as good as it can be for you!