Paradiddle February Update: Major Performance Improvements, Rock Band Pedal Integration, Pedal Guide

Happy New Year everyone - the February update is out!

Quite a bit has changed and been improved internally, so if you find yourself running into any new issues that you weren't seeing before, you can always roll back to the early_version branch on Steam. Here's what's new with this update:

Performance Improvements

I've been meaning to optimize parts of the app since the beginning of Early Access, and I'm happy to say that I was able to spend the past month and a half to optimize some of the more performance-hungry components. It was really helpful to be able to get your feedback when you were observing performance drops, so a huge thank you to everyone who let me profile and debug their performance issues!

As a result, there have been major improvements in the amount of CPU and GPU time consumed by Paradiddle. If you were ever running into frame rate issues or spikes, or were having trouble maintaining a constant 90FPS in the app, it'd be great if you could give the app a try again and see if things are better now. If you're still having frame rate drops - please let me know and I'd love to help you figure out what the bottleneck might be. There are still a few areas of optimizations left, but all the big ones have been taken care of. On my PC, I've seen CPU usage decreases up to 80% and a GPU usage decrease up to 30% during some of my more intense playing sessions.

Rock Band Pedal Integration

Rock Band Pedals can finally be used in Paradiddle without going through other keyboard emulating software like Joy2Key, or other tools like rb2midi. There are two ways of doing it:

• Through USB: This method requires you to connect the pedal to your PC via USB, by connecting your Rock Band kit. You might need to get the USB breakaway cable in addition if the kit doesn’t already have one. Once your kit is connected and the drivers properly installed, it’ll work like a regular controller, and the kick pedal will trigger the kick in Paradiddle by default. If you’d like to use the pedal to control the hi-hat instead, you can change this in the Controls menu under Options, where it says "USB Input" under Rock Band Pedal.
• Through the microphone jack: This method doesn't require any additional hardware except for the pedal itself, so you won't need to have a Rock Band kit/controller or the USB breakaway cable. To configure it, go to Controls and click "Mic Input" under Rock Band Pedals. This will bring up a list of your audio input devices. Select the microphone jack that your Rock Band pedal is connected to, and then select the action you want it to trigger. Note: The mic jack currently isn't saved and loaded automatically across sessions, so you'll have to re-do it when you start Paradiddle. This will be added in the next update, sorry about the inconvenience in the meantime!

The Pedal Guide

Up until now, information about how to use pedals in Paradiddle, pros and cons of each option, and other tips I've shared have been scattered around on our Discord and the FAQ. This is why I decided to create a comprehensive pedal guide on the website to act as a central resource for all of this info. If it looks like I missed anything out, feel free to let me know so that I can update it. I hope this helps some of you who are trying to figure out which pedal to get, or how to get your existing pedals to work in Paradiddle! You can find the pedal guide here http://paradiddleapp.com/pedal-guide

Other Changes

• Kick Drum Default Velocity Setting: You can now adjust the default velocity of the kick drum under the "Drum" tab of a kick drum's options. This affects the velocity that's played when the kick is triggered via the controllers, pedals without velocity information (USB pedals, Rock Band pedals), or any other peripherals emulating keyboard input such as driving pedals.
• Drums now have a fun little load animation when they are loaded into the scene.
• Opening a secondary window in the Options tab now closes any windows that were previously open. This prevents things from getting ugly where you could have multiple windows open on top of one another in previous versions.

As always, more changes are on the way. I'm still trying to push some smaller core features out, but my plan is to also release some bigger features throughout 2019, such as more types of percussion instruments, a functional note highway system, some built-in educational content, Steam Workshop integration and more.

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 and resources I'll be able to get in realizing that goal. Thank you for your support so far!

- 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
Reddit: http://reddit.com/r/paradiddle