StepMania

StepMania
StepMania 5.0 playing Rave mode.
Version	3.9 (stable), 5.0 Alpha 1 (under active development)
Platform(s)	Cross-platform
Release date(s)	1 November 2005
Genre(s)	Rhythm video game

StepMania is a cross-platform rhythm 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 wide variety of rhythm-based game types. Released under the MIT License, StepMania is open source free software.

Video game series In the Groove and Pump It Up Pro, among others, use StepMania as their game engine. StepMania was included in a video game exhibition at New York's Museum of the Moving Image in 2005.

Development

StepMania was originally developed as an open source port of Konami's arcade game series Dance Dance Revolution that was able to play DDR PC's file format. During the first three major versions, the graphics were based heavily on DDR's graphics. Development of StepMania branched out in Version 4.0, with two versions being developed concurrently. The CVS version is based on a 2006 build of StepMania, better known as 3.95. StepMania creator Chris Danford later forked the CVS build and called it StepMania 4 beta. Beginning with the announcement of this beta, StepMania's CVS/SVN fork has been unofficially branded by the StepMania community as version 5.0. A separate development team called the Spinal Shark Collective forked Stepmania 4 Alpha, calling it sm-ssc. sm-ssc added more features and made many bug fixes. In Mid-2011 sm-ssc merged into official branch of StepMania and thus, the development of version 4 beta was discontinued in favor of an official Version 5.

Gameplay

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 his or her keyboard or dance mat. The moving arrows meet the targets based on the beat of the song. Stepmania strongly utilizes a player's sense of rhythm in its game play. 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 awarded by letter grades and a number score that tell him/her how well they have done. An award of AAAA (quadruple A) is the highest possible award available on a standard installation and indicates that a player has triggered all arrows with "marvelous" timing (within 0.0225 seconds under official settings) and avoided all mines and completed all hold arrows. However, a patch is available that provides "ridiculous" timing (within a window of 0.01125 seconds, or half the timing of marvelous) and a top grade of AAAAA (quintuple A). An E indicates failure for a player to survive the length of the song without completely draining his/her life bar. Default scoring and grading for Stepmania is almost identical to scoring in Dance Dance Revolution; however, timing and scoring settings can easily be changed.

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, and most popularly, 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 Techno Motion - but scoring however, remains identical to DDR-style play, although some have found a way to change the scoring method to a Pump it Up style.

Features

• 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. Despite copyright concerns, many Simfile websites exist where users share and distributed Simfiles for copyrighted 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.

• 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.

• Multiple arrow types:

• Mines: 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. 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. A derivative of these mines, known as "Attack Mines" or "Mod Bombs", force a modifier change on the player when triggered instead of diminishing the dance gauge.

• Holds: A long arrow that requires you to keep your feet on the corresponding panel for its duration to pass.

• 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, and was ported into the StepMania 4.0 development builds.

• 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 dance games like Pump It Up, ParaParaParadise and EZ2Dancer.

• 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. 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 centralized server. Network Play is only available with StepMania 5.0 builds or alphas. All players must have a copy of the song chosen by the host in order to play.

Availability

StepMania-based arcade machine in a Chinese amusement park

StepMania runs on most common operating systems (Microsoft Windows 98/Me/2000/XP/Vista/7, GNU/Linux, Mac OS X), and has also been used as the base engine in a variety of free software and proprietary products. It has also been ported to several platforms including the Xbox, iPod (running Linux) and cell phones.

Use in products

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.

StepMix

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. 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), the entry may be disqualified.

The scoring is determined by the overall quality of the song, steps and graphics.

See also

• Frets on Fire
• Osu!
• UltraStar

External links

• StepMania Homepage
• SourceForge Stepmania Project Page
• Stepmaniaonline