Dealing with audio latency on some platforms

[inkajoo]

Hi all, I'm new here.

 

I'm working on a music game with a team for the Baltimore Indie Games Game Jam #2 - Play the Music and we've just hit the important milestone of playing the music while animating some sprites in time with the music.  

 

Here is the link to try out our current prototype: http://sambatista.com/bigjam2/v0.0.7/

 

Right now the beat-sync is done by polling the current time position of the song and dividing it by a step length.  It works really well on desktop (Chrome/Firefox). 

 

We also have put in the "touch to begin" required by Android to unlock the audio system, and wait for the song to decode before starting the game.

 

On my Galaxy S3, I'm experiencing a pretty sad delay of ~.5 seconds between the action on the screen and the corresponding "position" in the music.

 

I wish we could do something to fix the latency but something tells me this won't be possible.  If we knew the latency amount, we could compensate for it.  Our last idea is to add a Calibration Screen that would find out the latency amount using player interaction.

 

Recommendations?

 

Roger

[alanakyan]

Hi Roger,

 

We are facing the same problem.

I am also thinking about doing 2,3 tries in background and approximating the delay.

 

Did you find any other solution ?

 

Thanks

David.