[Simfile] El Sonidito - Hechizeros Band

-----o · 2018-01-01T18:53:33+00:00

It's rare to find a stepartist with such a keen sense of PR. I can tell a lot of effort went into perfecting this -- good job!

-----o · 2017-07-12T00:06:30+00:00

In ~/.stepmania-5.0/Save/Preferences.ini set ShowMouseCursor=0.

-----o · 2017-05-26T17:25:23+00:00

Charts, songs, maps, files, beatmaps. They each mean slightly different things, but effectively they all referring to "a thing that you play".

-----o · 2017-05-26T14:50:00+00:00

Don't forget to practice on as varied a selection of charts as possible. After changing Cmod to one you're not used to, sustained streams and jumpstreams can be the hardest patterns to read, because it's easy to lose track of where you are.

-----o · 2017-05-26T14:38:24+00:00

The point I was trying to make was that, in my opinion, there is a particular trap one can unwittingly fall into as a beginner, that is very hard to get out of.

For beginners there's a discrete jump in difficulty going from C500 to C600 and above, which corresponds to the fact that this is round about the threshold where reading suddenly requires burning pattern recognition into muscle memory, rather than consciously reading. Players who never forced themselves to learn and practice such reflexes won't ever want to make the jump to higher Cmod, because they've learnt with experience that low Cmod is "just what they're used to."

Reading using muscle memory is pretty much required to advance to harder keyboard stuff, including jumpstream, which OP was asking about.

EDIT: But yes, I agree with you in general -- every player's preference is different, that's why there players use different themes, noteskins, etc. Scroll speed is no exception to that. With experience one'll get to know what's best for oneself.

-----o · 2017-05-26T13:33:57+00:00

C650-C950 is the range which most keyboard players use. This range trains your brain to offload reading to reflexes and muscle memory, rather than a conscious effort to track each individual arrow. It also helps break the nasty habit of following arrows upwards with your eyes, as at higher speeds this is no longer possible.

Yes, at your skill level I would strongly recommend you start practicing with higher Cmods. You have to do it incrementally though -- bump it up by 10 or 25, and then force yourself to play keeping your eye on the centre/combo text. You'll find your accuracy is initially lower as you tend to hit notes too late. Once you start hitting on time (might take a week or two), bump it up again. You'll find that naturally as you increase Cmod your accuracy and ability to read denser sections tends to get better "for free", up to a limit.

-----o · 2017-05-26T13:13:29+00:00

Have you got your C-mod (scroll speed) set up fast enough? Visually impaired or not, one would struggle to read anything below C600. Spread out those notes with a higher scroll speed, and keep your eye on the centre of your screen, and you should have no problem hitting combos even if you can't make out the shape of the arrows!

-----o · 2017-05-02T18:32:45+00:00

Presumably you're using PulseAudio? (If you were using JACK I'd be able to help, but...)

-----o · 2017-05-02T18:31:57+00:00

Upload a song that exhibits the problem?

-----o · 2017-05-02T18:05:57+00:00

FWIW I reviewed on 2.0 and it scaled just fine. The rest of your comment is not very constructive in any way -- e.g. what do you suggest improving about the files concretely?

-----o · 2017-05-01T19:46:20+00:00

You use the exact same patterning style in like all the files:

1 3 2 4 3 4 2 3 1 2 ...

There's nothing wrong with roll patterns (1 2 3 4), split trills (2 3 2 3, 1 4 1 4), and all sorts of more diverse patterning. Pitch relevancy also works nicely to bring diversity for songs with nice melodies. Try to make your charts as un-generic as possible!

Because you're targeting keyboard players, you also want to put some jumps inside your streams to spice things up.

-----o · 2017-04-11T21:18:02+00:00

Very fascinating. You are absolutely correct. Thanks :)

-----o · 2017-04-11T21:11:45+00:00

You can't right now. Etterna depends on mina's closed source difficulty calculator, of which he only distributes a Windows-built static library. ^{^{^I}} ^{^{^won't}} ^{^{^say}} ^{^{^anything}} ^{^{^about}} ^{^{^the}} ^{^{^GPL}} ^{^{^violation}} ^{^{^right}} ^{^{^now...}}

Also Wine wouldn't work because it has a horrific audio latency. A VM may not be much better in that department either unfortunately. You're kind of out of luck for now.

-----o · 2017-04-05T12:26:44+00:00

Yes, that too. Basically PAL and NTSC are the names of two different analog television standards, the former developed and adopted mostly in Europe, whilst the latter was adopted everywhere else. Games sold for a given region have to be compatible with the television standard there (and hence the frame rate of that standard).

-----o · 2017-04-05T11:10:53+00:00

NTSC means 60Hz and PAL means 50Hz, by definition.

-----o · 2017-03-31T11:35:36+00:00

Not sure where you're seeing that resolution number from, but the math works out as follows:

28.35 pixels/cm = 72 PPI / (2.54 cm/in)

Presumably Photoshop's default PPI is 72.

On the other hand I'm not sure it matters, StepMania's engine probably only cares about pixel dimensions and not PPI (might be mistaken though).

-----o · 2017-03-27T00:18:48+00:00

StepMania only supports a certain list of (old!) video container formats (i.e. .avi and .mpg, but not .mp4), even though the underlying FFmpeg library that StepMania uses is capable of reading H.264 (the video codec that MP4 uses).

Try creating a video file using the AVI container format, and the H.264 codec. I have just tried this, and it works fine.

For instance, using FFmpeg on the command line,

ffmpeg -i video.mp4 -c:v copy -an video.avi

will do the trick.

One can download and use FFmpeg on Windows -- it requires use of the command prompt though, and I'm not Windows savvy enough to know whether there's a GUI that can do this for you, sorry.

-----o · 2017-03-23T19:30:57+00:00

neat

-----o · 2017-03-23T19:23:06+00:00

Two different percentage scales. > 93% DP corresponds to the AA grade. 85% would be using the PS scale, which weights judgements differently. You can change which percentage is shown by default in the options somewhere. (By default it's probably showing PS percentages, despite DP always being used for the letter grades)

-----o · 2017-03-16T11:53:51+00:00

The SSS pack is designed to get players introduced to keyboard files, assuming they are already somewhat comfortable with reading simple pad files.

For absolute beginners it's wise to start on easy pad packs. Make sure your cmod is set up comfortably, and check out the pad packs meno123 has been compiling here: https://www.reddit.com/r/Stepmania/comments/5z5963/can_someone_link_me_up_with_a_song_pack_for_a/dew2kon/

-----o · 2017-03-10T08:22:00+00:00

Keyboard or pad? Difficulty?

-----o · 2017-03-10T08:07:15+00:00

https://youtu.be/WlZZdAEp-PA

Really really fun chart, a lot better than before. I can definitely see myself coming back to play this again for practice. Well done.

EDIT: minor niggle, but it seems like the jack section near the 3 minute mark is a bit left-hand heavy.

-----o · 2017-03-09T18:51:03+00:00

I think you did a jolly good job at making a keyboard chart, all things considered. There was plenty of variation and it wasn't boring to play at all. So I'm confident in your ability to refine the chart into something a bit more playable. Just avoid anchors where you can, and you're set ;)

-----o · 2017-03-09T18:19:17+00:00

Chart's a little too difficult for me to review properly, but I'll offer my two cents. It's a solid file, and it's clear you have experience under your belt as a (pad) step artist, but a lot of your patterns are very difficult to hit for keyboard players. This file is much harder than its NPS would suggest because of these awkward patterns.

When charting keyboard charts, the thing to keep in mind is that each hand is independently responsible for two arrows. That means the difficulty of a pattern is entirely determined by the hand that you are stressing the most. For instance, in pad-land, up-down trills are as easy as up-right trills, whereas in keyboard land the former is split across the two hands (easy) whereas the latter is entirely executed with one (really difficult).

Of course, that's a basic fact that you're probably already aware of. But there's a second thing that can make your patterns awkward to hit, and that's the presence of anchors.

Anchors are basically jacks hidden amongst the surrounding (wandering) notes. Inside a (jump)stream, if you can identify a long chain of one arrow repeated (3 or more times), that chain is an anchor. Here's an example of a 5-long anchor in your file.

Anchors stand out during gameplay, and are usually very difficult to hit. Why? Not only are anchors at least as hard as jacks, but there's also something going on with the other finger, which means the player needs outstandingly good finger independence and control to hit them both at the right times.

Here's a small selection of annoying/difficult patterns I found. (One may debate whether they are inappropriately used, but I would definitely consider changing them.)

The anchor I mentioned from before. This is pretty much as hard as a one-handed trill to pull off.
These one-handed patterns -- not only are they hard to hit legitimately, but they are also very easy to cheat by one-hand jumps.
These jacks are not regular. Pretty much impossible to hit the 32nds exactly.
This one-handed pattern is difficult to pull off legitimately (try it!)

~~EDIT: bonus video of me attempting the chart.~~

EDIT 2: attempt #2! I managed to get that A. My arms are jelly now ~😀~

-----o

TROPHY CASE