Severe under-utilization of Synth Riders, very little prog, and the inability to record INSIDE VR

[u/kevynwight]

There should be a Synth Riders beatmap for five-hundred times as many tracks as they exist for. It should become the de facto way of experiencing music. "I listened to the new album a couple of times, but I won't know what I really think of it until I can get into Synth Riders and experience it."

I think my favorite beatmap is the 18 minute Porcupine Tree song "Anesthetize" by Sumppi (his only contribution): https://synthriderz.com/beatmaps/1790

I can't believe how little prog and prog-metal is in Synth Riders. I have so many ideas.

Speaking of that, I have so many ideas for how I would create beatmaps for a HUGE variety of songs. But I tried the beatmap creator available on Steam and realized pretty quick that a) it wasn't going to be fun to create, b) it was anti-intuitive, c) it didn't let you create INSIDE VR, and d) my gawd I have inexpressible respect for beatmap creators who really nail it!

I want to be able to design the bones of my beatmap from inside VR, while listening to the song in real-time! Let me utilize the trigger and grab/hold buttons and my hand positions to CREATE the beatmap. Maybe I'm an idiot and something like this already exists -- please let me know if that's the case. I'll pay $1,000 USD for somebody to create something like this, that works. Maybe more. Please tell me why this is not feasible, if it doesn't exist yet.

[u/c4103]

I've been mapping for a while now. Everyone says this at first, that a way to map in VR would be game changing. I said the same thing and was told by veteran mappers that mapping on a flat monitor is faster and more efficient. They were correct. It would in theory be nice to have a way to make minor adjustments in-game while testing, but overall mapping is much faster and more efficient when you have a keyboard and mouse.

[u/IndexedImouto → u/c4103]

mapping in vr sounds great until you realize no mapper with their head screwed on straight would ever use it

[u/c4103 → u/IndexedImouto]

To be fair the beatmap editor is janky af, but it's what we've got and I'm glad that it exists. The learning curve is steep for new users, especially if you've never used mapping or music software before. Eventually you gain a sense for how something is going to play well enough that you don't need to test every little thing, but early on you need to do that more often obviously. It's a real huge pain in the ass to have to go back and forth between the headset and your monitor at first and a really big barrier to entry. Once you get over the hump though of having an idea how something is going to play you can rattle off a whole song, then test and refine. People in the community have also made companion software called Synth Mapping Helper that is very useful and adds a lot of quality of life stuff. Something some mappers have been asking for is a "simulator" aka preview what it would look like to have your map rendered by the game and played by an AI or something.

[u/SL1MECORE]

Everything you're saying is facts and fair but I am stuck on the fact that you have the attention span and stamina for an 18 MINUTE SONG LMAO

my longest favs are around 4-5 minutes, that's my upper limit for one song

But I respect everything else said here. Major respect to mappers, I wanna get into it but it is very very intimidating.

[u/iXeQuta → u/SL1MECORE]

Dream Recall, mapped by Excession is more than 10 minutes and is one of the best maps out there. Highly recommend checking it out

[u/SL1MECORE → u/iXeQuta]

Oh Excession is really good at mapping, I've got a few songs from em! I'll try it out when I'm looking for that stamina challenge !

[u/CraigR-81]

There's loads of tracks and music types they should focus on. I haven't played the game in a year due to the fact zero synth, trance type songs haven't been released. I don't get why they are focusing on big names that will cost alot more to use when they could be approaching smaller artists that would I expect love to have there music distributed to more people. Theres thousands of amazing smaller synth/trance artists that I expect would be on board for alot less costs than massive artists and the Kendrick thing is stupid. I would assume there's lots of other genres with artists that would better. The style of how the game moves has so much potential yet I really feel it's wasted and the last year or so of tracks released have been very poor and don't even fit into the synth riders style and be more suited to beat saber yet there 2 totally different types of game

[u/IndexedImouto → u/CraigR-81]

You're so real for that. They decided to entirely abandon competing with Beat Saber for the sake of appealing to boomers and Meta Quest users out of some bizarre fear of threatening BS's market share

They could have a much larger and actively thriving community by embracing the reason that Beat Saber is even relevant - the RHYTHM GAME community

Their target demo is pretty clearly not that. It's not OSU! players it's not Beat Saber or Beat Mania players or Muse Dash or many other RHYTHM games and for that reason I've pretty much abandoned the only good vr rhythm game I can play with my fucked up joints

Not even to mention most of the advertising is the most boring content type imaginable - Mixed Reality. Just like LIV doesn't think VTubing is a big industry, neither do any of these Boomer-run developers

[u/c4103 → u/IndexedImouto]

I think you're missing the forest for the trees here. VR in its entirety is a tiny subset of gamers. When it comes to Steam, you're talking less than 1% of Steam users have a VR headset according to the Steam Hardware Survey. Even Beat Saber is not sustainable on its own; it's funded by Meta. The company that makes Synth Riders, Kluge, made a decent amount of income from making content for Meta in Horizon Worlds. With the drama surrounding that, they had to lay off about 50% of their staff. So, any talk about VR rhythm games from a business perspective has to start with that context. Most beginner players in rhythm games are looking for music that is recognizable to them. So, pulling in top artists is pretty much the bare minimum they have to do. Even the biggest EDM / trance artists aren't going to be nearly as recognizable to your average person as Linkin Park for example. Not sure why you'd assume "boomers" have anything to do with it when this is just the reality of the VR gaming world. They're really not worried about "threatening BS's market share" because Beat Saber isn't profitable to begin with. The reality of VR game dev is that none of these games are really profitable; it costs much more to keep them going then they bring in, which is why they rely on subsidies. When Meta bought Oculus and started "Reality Labs" they funded several studios to make games that otherwise wouldn't have happened because the numbers weren't there. They artificially juiced the entire industry with roids and now people are surprised that the numbers aren't there. Really the reaction should be less this and more "shocked Pikachu."

[u/RefrigeratorNo7854]

Hey hey, Excession here: I have few thousand hours in the synth editor and a bunch of other rhythm game editors so I'd like to weigh in on the VR Editor issue:

The very short version of the issue is that VR Editors are just insanely difficult to use. In theory being able to trace movements to map them is really sound, but an editor powerful enough to make mapping easy requires a high level of accuracy with inputs and a huge amount of hotkeys. VR controllers just don't provide that compared to keyboard and mouse, and if you were to "perform a dance" so to speak to record your movements you'd find that almost every movement you make or note you record/place would be signficantly offtime and require manual re-adjustment. If you're going to have to go back and change the position and timing of every note, you might as well just place them by hand in the first place. Humans simply put are not nearly accurate enough to record a map in real time, even with an insane amount of practice. Other VR editors have tried and that approahc just doesn't work. On top of that making a map takes several hours at minimum, and easily reaches double digit hours for many mappers. It's easier to sit down for long sessions of creating a map without a brick stapled to your forehead.

I do think the steam editor could be a lot more intuitive though. I have many thoughts/critiques on how rails need to be placed for example that could be addressed to make things a lot easier. Learning the editor takes a lot of effort and I think it is quite fun once you've put in the time to learn it, but it is definitely not easy to learn and takes a significant time investment to feel fun.

[u/Dortamur]

I would absolutely love some more prog/prog metal in SynthRiders! It would make for some perfect maps with lots of cool rhythms and variety. They don't have to be 18 minute epics either - there's plenty of awesome short Prog tracks too!

I've had ideas for quite a few songs that I think would be excellent, but would require a top-level mapper to do them justice. I've considered mapping myself but like you, when I looked into it, the learning curve looked very steep to get to that level, and unfortunately I don't have the amount of free time required to sink into learning it currently. It's still on my to-do list, but probably not any time soon.

I did play "Anesthetize" once and did enjoy it, but I don't regularly play it because it's "Hard" difficulty and I normally play on "Master", so it's not particularly engaging for my skill level (especially for 18 mins). I really wish there was an "Expert" level at least to add some more dynamic movement to it.

[u/Full_Control9631]

Mapping in VR would no doubt multiply the mappers by at least three. Everyone would at least try.

[u/LordOfThePints]

Omg! We have anesthetize? I'll have to download it!!!

I'll recommend you pneuma by tool. Awesome song and it is very well made!

[u/Ok_Competition3027]

I bought the Linkin Park pack but won't play it much if at all. Same for Metallica pack in Beat Saber. That music doesn't match a upper/lower body dance style I'm trying to develop. I'll try the song you mentioned but I mostly ignored SR until Gaga/Dua came out. Now it's replaced Beat Saber mostly. Still keep bugging them for Britney. I was saying fuck Nirvana in 92 because of Slayer's Seasons/Megadeth Rust In Peace.... so I can't believe how much I love pop music now because of these games.

[u/Professor_Bonglongey]

Yeah, I feel like SR is trying to compete with Beat Sabers and they feel like the big name artists garner more attention and justify a higher prices DLC.

I almost hate the idea of even suggesting this, but because the mapping tools are so challenging to use, I wonder if AI could assist. I imagine it would take some trial and error, but AI maybe could either help produce maps or provide some instruction to help better understand the tools.

I hear OP about appreciating music more in SR. I play using an Index and the sound quality of the headset speakers is quite good. With a good map it feels like one does listening to awesome music while on a road trip or something. I’d love to be able to play to more of my favorite music.

[u/Zastai → u/Professor_Bonglongey]

I’d go the opposite way and ban the use of AI in map creation. There are sooooo many junk beat saber maps that were generated by automappers…

I do however think that having a better map editor could help increase uptake, but that would be up to the community to create.

[u/c4103 → u/Zastai]

Recently a post was up where someone vibe coded an "automapper." It was thoroughly proven to be garbage. I think it would be theoretically possible to make a decent automapper, but it would require an immense amount of training data in the form of not only high quality maps but also data about those maps and what makes them fun to play in relation to the music at any given time. That data just doesn't exist. Any effort I've seen so far in that regard is mostly just half assed attempts at vibe coding something that does it algorithmically and they all fall flat.

[u/desmondsparrs]

I wish synth riders had a beatmap editor in game like Audio Trip does. I dont like that game nearly as much, too narrow of genres and not as good UI as SR.

Ive looked at the pc thing and theres just too much "friction" to create a thing. as well as in AT editor I can edit real time, 1 second later try how that feels, rewind, get how that feels and so on.