RB3 Drums Paths, + Possible Multi-Instrument Pathing (eg. full band)

[JarheadHME]

With the recent update, Drums are parsed again in the RB3 engine, which allows you to run CHOpt through them. I assume this in and of itself is a bug, but that does raise the question: Why not path drums too? There is the slight complication of covered fills don't net points, but that doesn't seem like a huge hurdle to me? Personally I would assume the bigger problem would be whether or not you're playing on BNS, since whether a fill spot is visible when you gain the prior SP phrase can affect whether you're skipping a fill or it just not showing up, affecting your score. But I feel there should be a way to work this out, no?

Similarly, personally I'd really like to be able to do paths for full band. The issue would also lie with vocals+harmonies in that case, but overall i think that should be relatively fine? I believe YARG should have a similar scoring method to RB3 for vox, though exact handling might be a little different.
But full band pathing can be a LITTLE complex to do by hand, which is why CHOpt being able to do it would be a very nice boon.

For a quick breakdown of stuff you kind of have to consider in RB3 just for the sake of it:

• Each individual instrument being on Overdrive at the same adds a global x2 multiplier. When all four activate at the same time, this results in x8. The slightly complicated part of this comes from:
• Not all instruments gain OD at the same time, are always ready, or sometimes just don't get as much. This happens with vox a lot, as they often just don't have as many OD phrases as the other instruments. Despite this, vocals also has a tendency to score quite well, given that one full phrase is worth 40 notes on other (non-pro) instruments.
• The main thing to note is that, for any given activation, if only a single instrument is activated, you're only getting +100% for every note, but every subsequent instrument under the same act will give +200%. So generally, obviously, you want everyone to be activated together as much as possible to maximize +200%s. The problem then comes in from the second note above, not everyone being able to activate at the same time.
• There's also the minor note of, in base RB3, vocals are bugged and don't actually properly give 32,000 points when under x8 at max multi. It actually ends up giving 20,000 points instead. x6 still gives the appropriate 24,000. **Correction on this part. It looks like when vocals are activated, their total multiplier becomes an additive. So with vocals at max combo (x4) each phrase gives a baseline 4,000. With 3 instruments activated, (x6) they give 24,000. With 2 instruments and vocals activated (also x6), they get 16,000, and with 3 instruments and vocals all together they get 20,000 per phrase. This could use further investigation to be 100% sure, that's what current evidence seems to suggest though.

Vocals pathing can get even more complicated with harmonies and squeezing, so idk how much it'd be worth going too too into that.

[GenericMadScientist]

If you can get CHOpt to attempt to path RB3 drums then yes that's a bug. Right now it does show drums so you can draw blank paths, but if you try to path it you get a message saying it's unsupported and get a blank path.

The two main problems with adding drum support for RB3 are:

1. Covered fills taking away points
2. I'm not a drummer making it a lower priority for me

1 is solvable but I'd like to do it in a way that uses the same core optimiser logic as everything else in CHOpt (which would be necessary for full band pathing). Do note it's a bit more subtle than you might think because nobody said you had to reach 4x before covered fills start appearing, so you have to keep track of your combo (up to 4x) too. BNS and video cal shenanigans are trivial to deal with.

It'd be nice to add but I've been saying that for years at this point so temper your expectations. I'll keep the issue open as it would be nice and it means other people can see where things are at. For the record fixing outstanding issues with CH drums and adding five fret support for YARG are higher priorities for me.

Vocals has the additional problem that I have absolutely no clue about any of it, at least drums I have some passing familiarity with (enough to get started, although I don't understand drum squeezing). Similarity with YARG would be nice but worst case scenario I could attempt to play it on Xenia and figure it out myself. But I am atrocious at keeping a tune so in practice I'd probably watch some videos and then find a vocalist and pick their brain.

Full band I'm not sure how to even reasonably handle because you get a gross combinatorial explosion. While it's a useful rule-of-thumb that you get people to activate simultaneously (and then you're constrained by drums and vocals), for an optimiser that doesn't help because there's no reason a path has to be so simple. But until all the constituent instruments are supported it doesn't matter.

Back in the day there was something called The Rocktimizer which did automatic full band pathing, not looked into how it worked or how good it was. Maybe there's some useful ideas to be found from chasing that lead?