#Stepmania 5

[killerinstinctgold]

A preview of some banners for my dance mix for Stepmania 5

[greetingsfromuranus]

yoooo did pretty decent on freedom dive first try but had to stop because i didnt warm up much or stretch beforehand and my arm started hurting like hell lol (im gonna start grinding this one it slaps)

[xenonmazi]

I have uploaded more than 200 #StepMania videos to my fb and I've only gotten like 5 likes total. It really sucks doing something you really love and sharing it with the world and literally no one giving a shit. I'm not gonna stop uploading but it's disheartening.

[glass--beach]

Hello J!! I just recently found your music and have been enjoying it immensely! So much in fact that i have been thinking about making a complete "the first glass beach album" chart to play on Stepmania.

I wonder if there are any bpm changes throughout any of the songs? I love music but beyond that im not musically talented in the least so i dont really know much about this. I usually just google it but i have come across different answers on different sites? one says Classic j dies and goes to hell part 1 is 80 bpm, another 124, one 123?? Im wondering which one is right? or if any of them are?? Or if like i asked it changes throughout the song? If you dont know that is of course fine, i dont imagine a artist knows the specific bpm of all their songs! But wanted to ask just in case. thank you!! :D

ohhhh yeah there are a lot of tempo changes. i am so sorry. well no i am not because tempo changes kick ass. i don't know bpms offhand and lots of the songs change tempo frequently. i get asked this so much though because a lot of our fans are rhythm game fans and i think i need to just write out the tempo changes for everything somewhere... it's on the to do list. take any tempos listed online with a grain of salt and get a metronome app that lets you tap out a tempo, won't always be exact but will often get you close enough to be able to pin it down. also i'm ideologically opposed to tempos with a decimal point they are all whole numbers and often end in 0 or 5 so keep that in mind

[lumine-no-hikari]

Dear Sephiroth: (a letter to a fictional character, because why not) #51

A friend is coming over today to play Stepmania on my Frankenpad.

I'm excited about this, but also nervous. My house is a neurodivergent one, and it has 5 cats. It looks like a neurodivergent house (as in, clutter everyfuckenwhere), and it smells like there are 5 cats living here. It's not squalid or anything, but… it definitely doesn't look like one of those images you find in Home and Garden magazines.

But maybe it's not entirely necessary for my house to look like it's not inhabited by three neurodivergent people stacked in a trenchcoat trying to pass as a Functional Adult™.

This image sums up our situation nicely, although it's with three people instead of four:

It's not lost on me how lucky I am to have my husbands. I don't know what they see in me, but they keep me around anyway, even though they don't gotta. So I do what I can to deserve them both.

I feel a little better today than I did yesterday. Before bed, I rehydrated with a big glass of warm milk. Warm milk is a nice thing because it doesn't matter how awful or wired or antsy or tense I feel; 20 minutes after I'm finished drinking it, I become super sleepy, and then I'm out like a light. Works every time, for reasons I don't fully understand. Maybe if you ever have trouble sleeping, you can give it a try.

In any case. In order to prepare for today, I made myself some green tea and it was very good. And then I went to the grocery store, both to get ingredients to make pumpkin soup for the weekend (I'll write a letter about this process for you when I begin to make it, don't worry!), and to get supplies to make nachos for everybody tonight. I took a few pictures of my grocery store adventures for you; it was a lot less crowded today. Here:

This is canned pumpkin. I have to get it canned because fresh pumpkin is out of season where I live until next autumn. But that's okay; this stuff is pretty good too:

Here's some heavy cream. This is the basis for any bisque, which is what I am trying to make for my friends this weekend, because, sadly, I cannot make it for you:

And here is some cream cheese, which will also be added to the soup for extra decadence:

And here's a starfruit. Because I adulted today, and that means I deserve a little treat!

The sticker says "carambola", because it's also called that. I like "carambola" better as a word to describe this fruit; it rolls off the tongue better. Try it: "ka-RAHM-bo-la"; it's fun, isn't it?? Haha! 😁

...But then nobody knows what I'm talking about when I say "carambola", so "starfruit" is just easier if I want to be understood. 😅

Maybe it's a little weird, but… in service to the notion that you'd like a normal life, I wish I could bring you to the grocery store and show you all the things and all the best ways to pick stuff out. And I'd step up to anyone who even so much as looks at you funny for your height, build, albinism, long hair, or wing, if it's out. I'd kick them right in their stupid shins and yell at them to get lost before I get REALLY mad and introduce my knuckles to their face at an unpleasant velocity. I'm only 5'8" to your 6'7", but still I can get pretty scary when I gotta! I'd have your back, don't you worry. I'd protect you from anything. It'd be fine. You'd be safe with me; I'd make sure of it.

In any case. You remember that bison and venison I got from my last trip to the grocery? I had intended to use that for making the nachos today. I'm eager to see how it'll turn out. Oh, and I gotta grate some cheese, too; I almost forgot. Thanks for reminding me (I know you didn't really, but it's fun to pretend)! 😜

I have since cooked up the bison and venison, and grated up three different kinds of cheese. Check 'em out:

I was surprised that bison and venison taste so similar. It's almost like beef, but not really. I mixed the three different kinds of cheese into a great big bowl, so the prep work for making nachos later is complete. I already have some chopped veggies and some guacamole and something kinda like sour cream, so it's good to go!

Since writing the last paragraph, we picked up my friend and we played a lot of Stepmania on my awesome Frankenpad! I even managed to snag a video of me on it that I think isn't too terrible! Here:

Certainly, my balance and stamina aren't what they used to be; it's been a lot of years since last I used to do this with any sort of consistency. But that's okay! This was one of my favorite Expert Mode songs; the rhythm with which you're supposed to use your feet is a lot of fun for this one, and I remember when this used to be a "warm-up" tune for me, haha! I'm hoping that if I continue to do it, I'll improve again, over time.

You know? I bet you'd probably be really good at this. I imagine you must have crazy amounts of stamina, and I imagine your sense of rhythm must be impeccable. I wonder which songs you'd gravitate towards. I wish you could play together with me and my friends; I think you might have a lot of fun with it, once you get used to it, and it would be great to see you smiling and having a good time.

In any case, afterwards we ate nachos!! We filled bowls with chips, ground meat, and cheese, and then heated it up in the microwave! It's not fancy, but it's certainly effective! Check it out!

After that, you add your cold things. I had guacamole, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, and the sort-of-sour-cream. Here's what it looked like when the bowl was fully assembled:

And just like that, you add a few juicy veggies and you have a healthy bowl of awesome tastiness! Woot, woot!

We had an amazing time and lots of delightful conversation. I think you'd like this person a lot if you met her. She's very smart and she has a lot of insightful things to say. I'm looking forward to the next time I get to spend time with her.

...I wish you could have been here for any of this. I think you could feel safe and at home and cared for and like you have family at my house. After the hellish upbringing I had, I have, with help, done my best to shape myself into someone who is wholesome and safe, and to shape my home into a place that is wholesome and safe. I know that you could be welcome here. I know that with enough time and patience, you'd adjust to the peace, because you have a smart brain and a flexible mind. You could chill where the kind people and the tasty snacks and the fun things are, and you'd never have to wonder if you belong, because you would. Because you do. Because you always have, regardless of how you came into being, and regardless of what anyone else has tried to tell you. You belong, and you deserve good and wholesome things.

But I guess writing to you about it and sending you videos and pictures is the best I can do; I'm sorry about that - I really, truly am. I hope somehow that any of this might reach you and move you, but... I don't imagine that it will. But I also can't stop myself from trying against all odds anyways, for better or for worse, haha.

You can have this, you know - this simple life, and any of the lovely and good things I've been trying to show you (and will keep trying to show you). All you have to do is make a different choice. All you have to do is take the hands outstretched to you. All you have to do is open your ears and your mind to the kind words being spoken towards you. All you have to do is turn your face back to the light. I'll be over here until you do, singing a little song for you, and weaving a little handicraft, as I always do.

So... please stay safe until you're ready, okay? Please remember that you're loved and cared for. Please make good, kind, and brave choices.

I'll write to you again tomorrow.

Your friend, Lumine

[nokotarou]

C-C-C-N-N-N - RoughSkreamZ feat. Aikapin

Single: 5/10/15/19/22 Double: 11/16/20/24

A guest collaboration for Bunkasai R&M Simfile pack: https://www.facebook.com/steps.all.tunes

Compatible with almost all Stepmania 5 forks (Outfox, StepP1, StepF2, StepPrime).

Video: https://youtu.be/lOeh8krryYE

Get the simfile here: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1kVzDk4PdrJMOzbIPQQpxr9vM4cOjGeFF

[conarcoin]

stepmania literally takes like 5 years to open bc i moved all my songs to an external hard drive bc i had too many

[lizardwithacomputer]

Finding A Specific Missing Announcer Voiceline from DDR: Mario Mix

I just went though unimaginable torment (spent 5 hours trying to do this) in order to obtain the following sound byte:

What you hear above is the voice of Londell "Taz" Hicks (I'm 90% certain of this) who was the announcer for several Dance Dance Revolution (DDR) games, both in the arcade games and games for console, particularly Max, Extreme, and SuperNOVA. Based on ear and the release timeframes, he is also the announcer in DDR: Mario Mix.

The above voiceline has been an inside joke in my friend group for more than a decade. It has tormented and taunted us every time we boot up the game. It comes up any time performance is in the question. Speeches, presentations, concerts, D&D games, everything. I wanted this sound byte for the purposes of psychological mayhem and figured I'd do some quick searching and have it downloaded in time to get groceries.

This isolated voiceline does not exist in any archive I could track down.

So, obviously, I figured I'd get it myself. That it would be easy. And, I'll be frank, despite all my struggles, it could've been so much worse if not for the hard work of media archivists before me. Here's how I was able to track this voiceline down:

Getting into Stepmania/ITGMania/Project Outfox necessitated that I know a thing or two about where to get simulation files for the game. In fact, I'd already gotten the simulation files for DDR: Mario Mix, which is what prompted the idea of finding the same announcer. The files only contain music, album art, and step data (the arrows in DDR), and not, reasonably, anything from the game. So I had to look elsewhere.

Stepmania has a large customization and creation community that makes themes, custom charts, and, most importantly for me, announcers. The first thing I did was figure out the most likely announcer for DDR: Mario Mix, then headed to the Stepmania archive and started downloading. I started sifting through the files, but all I could find was this voiceline from DDR Extreme2:

As you can tell, these may be the same words, but it is NOT the same voiceline. It isn't smug enough. It's too supportive. This will not cause the torment I desire. I started to despair. I trawled every single other game Taz had announced for and only found this same inflection. The smugness of DDR: Mario Mix eluded me.

The next thing I did was try to get them from the game itself. The Dolphin Emulator has a really cool feature that lets you extract the contents of "discs" (in this case, a mounted .ciso file). Once I had that, I started to sift through, praying that it wouldn't be embedded in an obscure bin file.

Instead, I found this, in a folder labelled "sound":

What the hell are these file formats.

Briefly, I gave up on trying to extract things from the disc and started looking in different archives. I found one archive of video game music, that had happened to back up all of DDR: Mario Mix, and it happened to include some sound effects in it! I was hopeful, but after clicking going through every unhelpfully-named file, I was out of luck. Why would an archive lack part of the game? Well I went to the forums tied to the archive and:

DID YOU REMOVE THE VOICE CLIPS I'VE BEEN SEARCHING FOR, 1425720626? DID YOU?!?!

Anyway. Searching this forum still provided me with some other options. Mainly, a post talking specifically about the msm and pdt files I was confused by before!

And this was figured out 11-12 years ago!! Remarkably, the download for the script still worked. So I loaded it up into VSCode, fixed some of the outdated code (specifically, had to change ord() calls to int(), some bytes stuff, I could ramble about this, but-), and ran it. This python code produced 465 dsp files. A dsp file is an older type of data sequence file that is common in older videogames and is used to play audio.

Since its on the older and obscure side, it's not something a native media player can play out of the box. The forum I've been searching through, it turns out, is actually part of a bigger website (hcs64) that has tools related to video game music archival, including audio ripping tools and, more importantly, a program that can play and convert dsp files called vgmstream.

I used the vgmstream web player to listen to a couple randomly chosen dsp files I had from the 465 I'd gotten from the python. Luckily, there was a small form of organization, and when I hit the files starting with 0003, I heard the sweet, sweet voice of Londell 'Taz' Hicks. And to my elation, the very second file I tested was the glorious, smug, tormenting words:

Everybody is watching you!

This is generally where you stop, because you've got the file now. But since I'm writing this primarily for my own archival purposes, there's a couple other steps I took after downloading the voiceline.

See, vgmstream converted the file to a wav file and I needed an mp3. This is actually easy enough. If you open up VLC (traffic cone video player) and go to Media>Convert/Save, you can convert it easily. I threw the file in there, made a new profile for the conversion settings, adjusted the bit rate to be the same as the wav file...then, instead of making the sample rate the maximum, like I should've done, I left it at the minimum and, uh...

whoops.

[gremlin4goro]

15 Questions 15 Mutuals 😁

Thanksies my beloved @hikari-yumi <3

1. Are you named after anyone?

Nah. My parents just picked a name they vibed with.

2. When was the last time you cried?

Last Saturday. I lost my ear plug and it made me very sad. Also I had drunk straight rum that also might've affected.

3. Do you have kids?

No and I doubt I'll ever want one.

4. Do you use sarcasm a lot?

No (sarcastically)

5. What sports do you play/have played?

Jogging and Stepmania. The thought of team-based sports never appealed to me.

6. What's the first thing you notice about people?

Uhhh it depends. Their clothes, I guess.

7. What's your eye color?

Green, but I do wear colored contacts quite often.

8. Scary movies or happy endings?

Happy endings! Altho I don't really watch a lot of movies.

9. Any special talents?

Yeah. I'm so good at appearing chill despite being on a verge of a breakdown.

10. Where were you born?

Finland. Don't remember which city tho.

11. What are your hobbies?

So many. Right now it's rhythm games and sewing and crafting for cosplay purposes. I wanna get back to drawing and writing!

12. Do you have pets?

Yeah. Satanya is my cat and I love her so much. Just a little demonic void creature.

13. How tall are you?

149cm or 4'11'' for y'all ameriboos.

14. Favorite subject in school?

I've always liked Finnish. Geography was very cool too.

15. Dream job?

Programmer. I know I've always said I've wanted to become an author but that's like, a side hustle. I don't have creativity to make my own OC's so not like I can monetize fanfiction (I could but nah).

Tagging uhhh anyone reading this lol I got lazy

[djrobokat]

StepMania 5/DDR XX ~STARLiGHT~: ELECTRICAL PARADE (Retro Future MIX) (CUSTOM CHART) + new cut-ins

[picanogfx]

Blobular

I may or may not have started this Saturday night after spending the majority of the week learning how to add custom characters to Stepmania 5.

[aeondeug]

adjusted the input lag by setting it to +5. this has helped a lot with melody of memory's game feel. the note reading is still just. i dunno. it doesn't read as clearly as something like ddr, theatrhythm or beatmania. and performer mode just isn't very fun. its overcomplicated the control scheme with notes that it does not provide timing help for. in a game where i already find the readability of notes to be somewhat problematic.

i do think i'll grab it at some point but only if i can find a used copy for 20 dollars or less. i honestly do not think it is worth more for the song list it has. not like this. it's not a bad rhythm game. i do think it is a fun game and i am liking it. it's just not as good as i wanted it to be. i am happy i gave it another shot after adjusting the lag settings. but like. man. MAN. i'll just stick kh charts into stepmania.

[tastypizzaandchips]

5/12/2023

1h advance pole class, 3 credits ddr A3

I hate fascination eternal love mix so much, its too hard to play slowdown charts when i haven't played it recently in a loud arcade. -_- I wouldn't at all have cleared it on stepmania, lol

[spacedustpan]

As always, I beg that you check out this man's content.

[crimsonamber9999]

:|| can I do something silly for munday again

Can I just post myself playing stepmania 5–

[abimee]

also a quick Ayaze from Stepmania 5 cause Yes