Oldloading18

• You can find the songs in a smzip at my website so, enjoy! You have to remove the space before songs if you copy and paste. You might want to have a high spe.
• These will move songs outside the StepMania 'Songs' directory so that the games doesn't see them anymore. Custom Song Pack. Folder inside the 'Songs' directory that will look like just another song pack. To define a folder, click inside the 'Folder Name' combo-box and replace the 'Add New' text with the name of the folder you want to create.

In order to play Dance Dance Revolution on a computer, PC or Mac, you need a software which reproduces the arcade game. Stepmania is the reference, it has regular updates and an active communauty. A great thing about Stepmania is that you can play online or LAN; I tell you, eight players DDR is a real blast!
Stepmania is a freeware developed by a team of DDR enthousiasts, Chris Danford being the main programmer (though less involved now). This page is full of info to let you get the best out of Stepmania.

Which version of Stepmania?

Web Server: 6% Database: 4% Server Time: 2020-12-07 17:45:43 This page took 0.115 seconds to execute. In The Groove (ITG) is an arcade dance game series developed by the core StepMania developers, and is based on 3.9 and a CVS build of StepMania often known as version 3.95. To prevent unauthorized copying, StepMania was re-licensed under a more permissive license (changed from GPL to the MIT License with the agreement of all coders, in exchange.

The Stepmania 3.9 release of 2005 remained the reference version many years. There used to be numerous versions struggling to become an accepted Stepmania 4, but people sticked to 3.9. Fortunately, the sm-ssc fork ended up convincing everyone and became officially Stepmania 5, the best version to date. Stepmania 5 is regularly updated, you download the latest version here. With an earliest version (beta 2), I have encountered a problem to run the program: I was told some dll is missing. I have installed this Microsoft pack to fix the problem.

Others derivates from 3.9 can still be useful sometimes. There is especially a version enabling 4 players simultaneously with split screen. The game remains 100% readable thanks to the large TVs we have today and it is a blast with an overhead projector. I hope we will find this soon in Stepmania 5! Until then, download it there.

There is also the famous version 3.95 CVS and its integrated local network play. This one was much useful to me when I organized DDR events up to 8 players. You can do the same with Stepmania 5, but there is a little trick. I explain this in the section network play.

Stepmania's set up

Let us proceed with the set up. The title screen indicates the number of songs installed on its upper right corner. Bottom right corner, the version of the game. Go to options where parameters falls under different submenus.

System Directions:
This screen gathers the most commonly used options from More Options. I will explain all the options in details later by going through all the screens of More Options. First let us configure the dance mat.

Config Key/Joy Mappings
This is where you map the buttons of your mat to the game functions. Good news is, most recent mats are automatically mapped. The left part of the screen is for player 1, right for player 2. You can assign up to three different buttons to each function, so you can control the game with both mat and keayboard. Mind to assign a button to the second player's Start function.
You will notice that first are the functions MenuLeft, MenuRight,... then later the functions Left/MenuLeft, Right/MenuRight and so on. The first are menu dedicated, meaning they are only used to navigate in the menu, not for game play. You should assign them to keys on the keyboard. The seconds should be assigned to the mat. They can control the menus and the game, but if the option Menu dedicated is activated in Advanced Options, they will be used only in the game. This way you navigate the menus with the keyboard and you play with the mat. This is very useful when you play with other people because they always tend to walk on the mats, randomly activating special options as you strive to select a song. Four and more players play is impossible to manage without this option.
Look below a correct setting for two players.

Select Game
With Stepmania you can play other games than DDR! You should try the Pump it up mode, it is a blast in Stepmania 5. Similar to Dance Dance Revolution, but you have four diagonals arrows plus a center button. Very nice to play, and every musics are compatible (the arrows succession is automatically generated from the DDR one). On the other hand, few mats have a pressure captor in their center to do the center button. You will have to replace it by the top arrow for instance. When you switch to Pump it up mode, the screen Config Key/Joy Mappings is modified so that you can configure the diagonal arrows.
There are 2 more game modes: keyboard 7 is closer to Guitar Hero with seven buttons to tap. It is intended to be played on the keyboard, so it did not catch my attention. I could not even launch the last mode, lights!

Network Options
Here you join multiplayer games. More about that in the Network Stepmania section.

Profiles
You can create profiles here to keep the score booking separated among the different people playing Stepmania on your PC. It is a bit like the Windows accounts. Just before starting the game, you will be asked to identify yourself with your profile. If an usb drive is inserted, Stepmania looks there for player 1 data and you won't be able to load 1P profile.

Reload Songs/Courses
This rebuilds the songs database. Only useful if you add something in your Songs directory without restarting Stepmania.

Stepmania credits
Pay tribute to the contributors of this great software!

All the following is in More Options.

Test Input
This screen allows to check if your mats are correctly mapped. Just walk on the mat and confirm the screen writes the corresponding button.

Calibrate audio sync
This tool works well since Stepmania Preview 4, and is used to calibrate your audio configuration. Namely, it evaluates the mismatch between the mats input and the audio output. You should try it if you doubt you DDR configuration, or want to maximize your scores.
A sample music plays continously, it is some kind of rythmbox. You have to play an infinite succession of left/rigth arrows on this song. Just try to focus on the timing as you hear it. Stepmania will determine if you are consistently ahead or behind in term of timing, and will propose accordingly to delay the arrows by a certain offset. It never ends until you tap escape to accept (or not) the last offset value calculated.
This value will be stocked in line GlobalOffsetSeconds= in the Preferences.ini file, located in the folder Appdata/Roaming/Stepmania 5/Save (for Windows 7, on XP look at Documents and Settings/Application Data).
When I tried this tool the offset value proposed ranged from 10 and 50 milliseconds. I stopped at 30ms and maybe it helped improve my scores but it is hard to tell !

Appearance options:
Announcer : Stepmania comes with no announcer included. If you want one, you have to download it for instance on this website. Nice guy as I am, I propose you the announcer from Dance With Intensity, I find him great. Gift! In any case, put the announcer pack in the folder Stepmania/announcer. Then, activate it in this option screen.
Theme lets you change deeply the looks of Stepmania with downloadable skins. Right now few are available for Stepmania 5, best source is here. More on that later.
Noteskin is about the look of the arrows. I find the default one very good, and the others less easily playable. Only my opinion! The important thing about the noteskin is to differenciate normal arrows and half timed or quarter timed arrows. It really helps for the standard and heavy levels of play. In the picture below, you can see a blue half timed arrow between two normal red ones.
Percentage Scoring: This option is much more important than it seems and is not an appearance option after all. It deeply affects how your score is computed, thus how you will be able to monitor your progress. I invite you to put this option to On, I will explain more precisely the matter of scoring later.
After that you have options about the background of the dance screen. You can activate 3D dancing characters, but I think they will only please kids because they are NOT AT ALL in the good rythm. I just keep everything to default.

UI options:
Center one player: Centers the display when you play alone. I put this on.
Menu timer: Off! Take your time to choose your title.
Danger: Hide! It is an annoying screen showing up when you are losing.
Instructions: Skip, this screen is quite useless.
The remaining is not very important I think.

Input options:
Menu Buttons: activate the menu dedicated to navigate through the menus with specific buttons, different from those used to play. As I explained in Config key/Joy mappings, it is useful to prevent the other players from unsetting everything with their mats.

Graphic/Sound options:
Here you define the game graphic resolution, details, or whether it should run full screen or window mode. Unless your PC is a bit tired, just max all the options out.

Arcade options:
Coin mode: Beware, keep this on Home: you could switch to the arcade behaviour, requiring to insert credits in order to play... you have no access to the menus in this mode, and you can seek a very long time the keyboard shortcut to cancel this. Just as you know, it's F3 then 1 :)
Event mode: this removes the three songs limitation before returning to the main screen: you can play as long as you want.

Advanced Options:
Switch default fail type to Off, this will let you play even if your life bar goes empty. Apart from this I keep everything to default.
Stepmania 5 have a lot of scoring types, all of them quite complicated and changing across the different versions of Stepmania. I devote a little section to these scoring matters later.

Theme options:
The options available here depend on the theme you chose in appearance options. A word about combo under field. If you keep it off, the combo counter will appear above the arrows, so it is easy to read but hides the arrows a bit. That is why some choose on for this option. Finally You should put Show score on.

Stepmania Game Modes

StepMania is a cross-platformrhythm video game and engine. It was originally developed as a simulator of Konami's arcade game series Dance Dance Revolution, and has since evolved into an extensible rhythm game engine capable of supporting a variety of rhythm-based game types. Released under the MIT License, StepMania is open-sourcefree software.^[3]

Several video game series, including In the Groove and Pump It Up Pro, use StepMania as their game engines. StepMania was included in a video game exhibition at New York's Museum of the Moving Image in 2005.^[4][5]

Development[edit]

StepMania was originally developed as an open source clone of Konami's arcade game series Dance Dance Revolution (DDR). During the first three major versions, the Interface was based heavily on DDR's. New versions were released relatively quickly at first, culminating in version 3.9 in 2005. In 2010, after almost 5 years of work without a stable release, StepMania creator Chris Danford forked a 2006 build of StepMania,^[6] paused development on the bleeding edge branch, and labeled the new branch StepMania 4 beta. A separate development team called the Spinal Shark Collective forked the bleeding edge branch and continued work on it, branding it sm-ssc. On 30 May 2011, sm-ssc gained official status and was renamed StepMania 5.0. StepMania 5.3 is currently in closed-source alpha phase.

Gameplay[edit]

The primary game type features the following game play: as arrows scroll upwards on the screen, they meet a normally stationary set of target arrows. When they do, the player presses the corresponding arrows on their keyboard or dance mat. The moving arrows meet the targets based on the beat of the song. The game is scored based upon how accurately the player can trigger the arrows in time to the beat of the song. The player's efforts are given a letter grade and a number score that tell how well they have done. An award of AAA+ (triple A plus, formerly AAAA or quadruple A) is the highest possible award available on a standard installation and indicates that a player has triggered all arrows with 'Flawless' timing (within 0.0225 seconds under official settings) and avoided all mines and completed all hold (freeze) arrows. An E indicates failure for a player to survive the length of the song without completely draining their life gauge. Default scoring and grading for StepMania is similar to scoring in Dance Dance Revolution; however, timing and scoring settings can easily be changed.

During a song, if the player successfully triggers all arrows with 'great' or better timing, the player will receive the message 'Full combo' alongside their grade. Players can also achieve 'Full perfect combo' for completing a song with all arrows triggered with perfect timing or better, and a 'Full flawless combo' if all arrows are triggered with 'flawless' timing.

StepMania 5.3 adds 'Truly Flawless' timing (formerly known as 'Ridiculous' or 'Blue Fantastic', within 0.01125 seconds under default settings). The development team has referred to a full combo with this timing as a 'Truly Flawless full combo'.^[7]

StepMania allows for several input options. Specialized adapters that connect console peripherals like PS2 and Xbox controllers or dance pads to one's computer can be used. Alternatively, the keyboard can be used to tap out the rhythms using arrow or other keys. Many song charts designed for keyboard are unable to be passed using a pad. In addition, the game possesses the capability to emulate other music games, such as Beatmania itself, o2Jam and DJMax's 7-key arrangement, Pump It Up and TechnoMotion - scoring however, remains similar to old DDR-style play by default (i.e. more weight is given for later notes).

Features[edit]

• Custom Songs ('Stepfiles') also known as 'Simfiles': StepMania allows users to create their own custom dance patterns to any song in .ogg or .mp3 format. The program includes a comprehensive Step editor to aid the creation of these stepfiles. Many Simfile websites exist where users share and distributed Simfiles for songs. Additionally, official DDR and In The Groove songs with their original steps are commonly available for StepMania.
• Background animations: Support for many types of animations behind the arrows onscreen, including sprite-based animation sequences, a single full-motion video or multiple FMV visualization overlays but are disabled if the song contains exclusive video.
• Modifiers: Visual mods that affect the scroll of arrows and either increase or decrease difficulty. StepMania includes multiple modifiers featured in Dance Dance Revolution as well as dozens of additional modifiers created exclusively for StepMania, including custom SPEED options.
• Multiple arrow types:
  • Mines ('Shock' arrows in DDR X): An object that scrolls onto the screen along with the arrows. If a player triggers the mines, they will be penalized by having their dance gauge reduced and, customizing a theme, breaks the current combo chain that the player had going. However, the mines in StepMania are different from the Shock Arrows in DDR X in that the latter also turns the notes invisible for a brief period of time and breaks the current combo chain that the player had going. This step type was developed for the StepMania-based arcade game In The Groove, and was ported into StepMania itself during development of that title. There are several variations of these objects that effect scoring in different ways.
  • Holds (also called Freeze Arrows): A long arrow that requires you to keep your feet or finger on the corresponding panel for its duration.
  • Rolls: A special hold arrow which requires a rapid tap on to keep alive. This step type was developed for the sequel to In The Groove, In the Groove 2.
  • Lift: a special type of arrow (colored Gray by default) which requires the key (or panel) to be held down before the note passes and released when the note passes the target arrows. This is different from freeze arrows in that the timing of the press is not important, only when the note is released.
• Multiple game types, including partial simulation of other rhythm games like Pump It Up, ParaParaParadise and beatmania IIDX.
• Real-time lyrics, which display on the opposite side of the screen for stepfiles that have accompanying lyric data.
• Custom themes: users can create their own skins for StepMania. Themes can vary from simple replacement of images to drastic changes that can be implemented by scripting its Lua backend.
• Dancing characters: 2-dimensional and 3-dimensional character models that dance in the background according to a pre-defined routine.
• Infinite BPMs: an official implementation in StepMania 4 of a bug in the 3.9 series that could be exploited to create 'warps' in stepcharts using negative speeds.
• Network play: support for lobby-based online play, dubbed StepMania Online. Typically, users connect through the StepMania Online^[8] centralized server. Support for network play was added to the StepMania tree in 2005 and is available in all later builds. All players must have a copy of the song chosen by the host in order to play.

Availability[edit]

Some versions of StepMania will run on most common operating systems (Microsoft Windows98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/7/8, Linux, FreeBSD, Mac OS X), as well as the Xbox console. It has also been used as the base engine in a variety of free software and proprietary products for various platforms.

Use in products[edit]

Several StepMania-based commercial games have been released due to its open nature:

• In The Groove (ITG) is an arcade dance game series developed by the core StepMania developers, and is based on 3.9 and a CVS build of StepMania often known as version 3.95. To prevent unauthorized copying, StepMania was re-licensed under a more permissive license (changed from GPL to the MIT License with the agreement of all coders, in exchange for their names appearing on the ITG credits screen), not requiring source code to be published on derivative works, and thus allowing ITG's copy control to remain proprietary and closed source.
• Pump it Up Pro is a spinoff of the Pump it Up series headed by former ITG developers and musicians. The game utilizes a build of StepMania 4 for its engine, which also led to improved Pump support in StepMania itself.
• Pump it Up Infinity is another spinoff of the Pump it Up series aimed primarily at North American audiences. Unlike the Pro series, however, it is managed directly by Andamiro. The game is based on StepMania 5.

StepMix[edit]

Stepmania Video Game Songs

StepMania developers conducted StepMix contest for step builders to create stepcharts/stepfiles that can be played using StepMania. StepMix 1, 2, 3, and 4 were run successfully. Participants need to have a song to be used in the stepchart/stepfile. The song must be under a compatible license for distribution or be authorized for use in StepMix 4, or the entry is automatically disqualified.^[9] Additionally, if the graphics used in the entry are found to have been copied from another artist and used without their authorization (as happened once in StepMix 2^[10][11]), the entry may be disqualified.

The scoring is determined by the overall quality of the song, steps and graphics.^[12]

Reception[edit]

Stepmania Online Game

StepMania became a quite popular free software game; the game was downloaded alone over Sourceforge between 2001 and May 2017 over 6.3 million times.^[13]

See also[edit]

Stepmania 4 Download

References[edit]

1. ^'StepMania 5.0.12 released'. StepMania. holo. 30 Aug 2016. Retrieved 1 September 2016.
2. ^https://projectmoon.dance/index.php?id=2
3. ^'Rock Bands, Guitar Heroes, Recriminations and Comedy Litigation'. Sprong. 2007-04-04. Retrieved 2008-11-02.
4. ^Museum of the Moving Image article
5. ^'Museum of the Moving Image'. 2005-10-24. Archived from the original on 2005-10-24. Retrieved 2017-05-11.CS1 maint: BOT: original-url status unknown (link)
6. ^Danford, Chris. 'StepMania project reboot: opinions wanted'. StepMania.com. Archived from the original on 22 February 2011. Retrieved 15 August 2010.
7. ^https://projectmoon.dance/index.php?id=16
8. ^StepMania Online official website
9. ^StepMix 4 Contest Entry requirementsArchived 2008-08-19 at the Wayback Machine
10. ^My art is in a song...but I dont know who took it! - StepMania ForumsArchived 2007-10-13 at the Wayback Machine
11. ^StepMania Forums - View Single Post - 20070310|Dokodemo KawaiiArchived 2008-12-16 at the Wayback Machine
12. ^StepMix 4 Contest JudgingArchived 2008-08-19 at the Wayback Machine
13. ^stats 2000-05-12+to+2017-05-18 on sourceforge.net

External links[edit]

• Official website

Stepmania Online