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Skip this section and start from the next section if you're only interested in adjusting the latency settings.


I think that I'm not too bad at this game. Still, I often get the feeling that the timing judgment of this game is a bit inconsistent. When I play with Coda, often the hardest part is the one with lowest enemy density.

Moreover, it seems that quite a few people are struggling on latency settings on this game. Here are several comments I've read on Reddit.

• "... The readjustment after the test for video and audio calibration being so drastic for me never seemed right."
  
• "... When using this games calibration it suggested +20 video, +60 audio. I played with that for awhile and felt it was off."
  
• "Yeah, I felt it. When I was playing with auto calibration it felt off, because when I was doing perfectly with my beat, the game just gave me randomly "good" or "great". And when I turned it off it was just perfect, as it was."
  
• "Definitely felt this. Using the calibration test has led to recommended adjustments from +30 to -20. I gave up and manually adjusted to get something that feels right."

To see why the calibration test does not work for many people, and to find the best latency setting values for myself, I started my investigation.

In the end, I learned how do the latency settings work, and various quirks of them, including ones that likely made a lot of people frustrated. In addition, I've devised my own way of calibrating latency settings, which I'll share here.

Note: This guide is for the version as of 2025-02-25. I suspect that this guide will be outdated sooner or later....

Before we start, let me define some terms I'll use throughout the guide.

• AL: Audio Latency setting value
  
• VL: Video Latency setting value
  
• CT: Reported Calibration Test value
  
  • "You seem to be a little late on beat. Want to adjust by 20ms and test again?": CT = 20ms
    
  • "You seem to be a little early on beat. Want to adjust by -20ms and test again?": CT = -20ms
    
  • "Looks like you're good to go! You can re-calibrate at any time.": CT = 0ms
• "Play without sound" = mute all sounds and do the calibration.
  
• "Play blindfolded" = don't look at the screen, and play from memory while focusing on the music.

For example, the image above shows:

• AL = 44ms
  
• VL = 17ms
  
• CT = 34ms

I recommend configuring these settings before doing latency calibrations. However, do note that none of these settings are mandatory, and if you prefer, you may modify them as you wish.

Set volumes for Monster SFX, Hit SFX, and Telegraph SFX to 0%.

Caveat: If you've played other rhythm games with keysounds on, then setting those volumes to 0% might be not optimal for you. If you do need to set those volumes greater than 0%, then I recommend against using Audio Calibration for fine-tuning AL.

Enable Early/Late Hits and Accuracy Bar. However...

• If you are not used to manually adjusting latencies in rhythm games, I recommend against enabling Early/Late Hits during calibration.
  
  • This is to prevent you from unconsciously adjust your timing based on immediate feedback. This is harmful for accurate calibration.
    
  • If you can keep that from happening, then do enable them during calibration.
    
  • Nevertheless, even when you're not, do enable them during normal gameplay.
• Accuracy Bar is not shown during Calibration Test.

Also, you may want to enable other accessibility settings such as Static Monsters and Static Portraits, but (unless you're experiencing frame drops) I don't think that they affect timing judgments in a significant way.

Note: While doing calculations, be careful on negative values. For example, subtracting -20ms from 30ms would result in 50ms (= 30 - (-20)), not 10ms.

First, do these three steps.

1. Do Audio Calibration.
   
   • You may try it multiple times, record each AL, and use the average value as your new AL.
2. Do Video Calibration.
   
   • You may try it multiple times, record each VL, and use the average value as your new VL.
3. Go to Manual Calibration. Compute AL - VL, and use that value as your new AL.

Note: Whenever you have changed AL via confirming on Audio Calibration, you MUST also do step 3. More on this later.

After having set up AL and VL, you should test your calibrations via Calibration Test.

Note: NEVER press the "Adjust & Retry" button after having completed a Calibration Test.

1. Play without sound, and confirm "Looks like you're good to go!".
   
   • If not, then adjust both AL and VL manually as following.
     
   • Set AL - (CT/2) as your new AL.
     
   • Set VL + (CT/2) as your new VL.
2. Play blindfolded, and confirm "Looks like you're good to go!".
   
   • If not, then adjust AL manually as following.
     
   • Set AL + CT as your new AL.
     
   • Leave VL unchanged.
3. Play normally, and confirm "Looks like you're good to go!".
   
   • If not, retry from the first step (of either "Adjustment" or "Initial Calibration").

After gameplay, if you feel that you get too many earlies, then try increasing AL by 5ms and decrease VL by 5ms; in the other direction if you get too many lates.

• This assumes that your video latency is more unstable than your audio latency.
  
• Otherwise, you may do steps under "Adjustment" but with actual gameplay instead of Calibration Test. In this case, getting too many earlies corresponds to a small negative CT (something like -5ms), and getting too many lates corresponds to a small positive CT (something like +5ms).

However, on more difficult patterns, people tend to hit enemies earlier than when they should be.
Therefore, unless you're very experienced in other rhythm games, then I would recommend keeping latency settings and instead you should try adjusting your own timing - as long as they work fine for calibration test and on easier charts.

---

That's it!

... However, you are probably wondering what the heck is going on behind all those steps (and why). Maybe your timing still feels off after having executed all the steps. Or maybe, you are the developer of this game (thanks for a wonderful game <3) and wondering what is this guy up to with these weird procedure.

If you are one of those people, then continue reading.

Here are what each latency setting compensates.

• Audio Latency: Compensate for relative audio delay - the difference between audio latency and video latency.
  
• Video Latency: Compensate for input delay.

This is a bit different from what the names suggest, but this is found by doing experiments on how increasing values for each setting affect playing blindfolded and playing without sound:


If VL only compensated video latency, then it should not affect blindfolded plays. However, it does, which proves that it actually compensates for input delay.

Actually, doing so is natural for programmers, so this is pretty typical for rhythm games. For example, the arcade rhythm game Chunithm works in the exact same way (Offset A corresponds to AL, and Offset B corresponds to VL).

OK, so the names are a bit misleading, but otherwise nothing unusual. So, what causes the inconsistencies felt by many people?

As an example, let's assume that a player, with perfect skill:

1. Got AL = 20ms on Audio Calibration.
   
2. Got VL = 15ms on Video Calibration.

Audio Calibration confirms that the true (as we assumed that the player is perfect) audio latency is 20ms. However, as the compensation by the game for audio latency is AL+VL, Video Calibration incorrectly sets the audio latency compensation to 35ms, deviating from 20ms.

Moreover, as Audio Calibration does not take VL into account, doing it again will leave AL unchanged, creating discrepancy between Audio Calibration and Calibration Test.

In this situation, the correct values should be AL = 5ms and VL = 15ms. This is the reason behind step 3 of "Initial Calibration" in my method - after VL has been obtained, AL obtained via Audio Calibration must be adjusted by removing the portion compensated by VL.

I've found that the calibration ticks for Audio Calibration is incorrect. This would add small (something like 10ms or less) inaccuracies for measuring AL.

AFAIK there's nothing wrong with it. Still, as the calibration UI does not represent an actual gameplay, the measured VL can be inconsistent. Playing an actual game without sound is more accurate.

It's a handy feature for casual players. However, it adds CT/2 to both AL and VL, which compensates audio latency by CT and video latency by CT/2. I don't think that doing so (using one value to adjust two latency compensations at the same time, in general) is a good idea.

The CT value is clipped to ±40ms. For example, if the calculated CT is 50ms after calibration test, the reported CT would be 40ms. This is not wrong (after all, you would likely want to iterate calibrations if the latencies are high), but if you do need to set AL and VL manually via CT, then together with the following problem, the clipping will cause some issues.

Based on my experiments, the message is displayed as long as -15ms ≤ CT ≤ 15ms. This is too wide, especially considering that CT is an average (or median, or something like that) of 20 timing deltas, and for something like Coda play, 15ms is a seriously large bias that needs to be adjusted further.

Moreover, together with CT clipping, this makes manually adjusting AL and VL properly via CT much more tricky than it should be.

I still have no idea what exactly causes it, but based on my experiments, changing VL by 1 and playing without sound results in CT changing by 2. This implies that CT would not converge to zero while adjusting VL via Calibration Test.

So far I have not found a significant evidence for these:

• I suspected (and still do tbh) that the timing judgement jitters during gameplay. However, so far I can't rule out that it's me who is inconsistent. The timing window for this game is not wide, after all.
  
• Other than what I've already stated above, I found no evidence of significant jittering while using Audio Calibration, Video Calibration, and Calibration Test. (For VL, some jitters are unavoidable due to framerates.)

As part of my investigation, I did Calibration Test many times. I mean a lot. I have done nothing but teleport bread play Calibration Test for four hours.

Here are my results, showing negative side-effects of CT values being hidden/clipped, and giving evidence that CT changes more than VL does.

Note: I played fullscreen, on a 60Hz monitor, with a (cheap) headphone connected via 3.5mm audio jack.

My CT, when AL=0, varying VL.

My CT, when VL=-1 (I was testing something else), varying AL.

The initial calibration for obtaining AL and VL is the same as the non-hard way. Let the initial values be AL0 and VL0 respectively.

Basically, draw two graphs like I did above.

1. Fix AL = AL0. For various VL around VL0 (start from VL0 - 15ms and VL0 + 15ms), play many Calibration Tests (without sound) to gather data points (VL, CT).
   
2. Discard data with incorrect CTs, and find the x-intercept of the regression line of the remaining data. Update VL0 to that value.
   
3. Fix VL = VL0. For various AL around AL0 (start from AL0 - 30ms and AL0 + 30ms, play many Calibration Tests (blindfolded) to gather data points (AL, CT).
   
4. Discard data with incorrect CTs, and find the x-intercept of the regression line of the remaining data. Update AL0 to that value.
   
5. Play Calibration Test normally to confirm that AL = AL0 and VL = VL0 feels correct.

There could be a friendlier guide to people who don't know how to draw a regression line, but I'm too tired writing this guide to devise one :(

I propose these changes to be made, which I believe that will make the gaming experience more pleasant overall.

• (High Priority) Either Audio Calibration and Video Calibration should take into account that VL affects audio latency compensation, or the functionality of VL should change so that it only affects video latency compensation.
  
• (High Priority) Timings of ticks for Audio Calibration should be corrected.
  
• Calibration Test results should always show raw CT values. I think that it's fine for "Adjust & Retry" to use clipped CT values.
  
• Add "Manual Calibration" option to the Calibration Test result scene.
  
• (Low Priority) Video Calibration should be based on actual gameplay.

Until the changes are made, you should be aware of the issues while calibrating latencies on this game.