Some Thoughts on Stepmania

Back in 2009 I even wrote a rant about Stepmania, and here's another one.

In my younger days I did a lot of Dance Dance Revolution, and every now and then I come back to it.

I'd like to play with some modern songs. Supposedly official games exist, but they have like 50 songs per game, plus a few "$5 for 3 songs" DLCs, and mostly only work on some weird-ass consoles.

Basically the only option for it is using Stepmania, and downloading some user-made songpacks.

So what's wrong with all this

The first problem is that music is totally free online on youtube and such, but Big Copyright would never allow a healthy ecosystem of dance games, because they just love the whale exploitation model of "$5 for 3 songs", and the market is too small for someone to force them to be reasonable.

Stepmania tries to avoid any direct entanglements with all those copyright issues, and unfortunately that means it avoids actually trying to solve the problems.

User-made song packs have mixed quality

So I got a bunch of random songpacks, basically keyword matching artists I might like.

The songpacks are basically whatever the author decided to throw there, so I'm generally only interested in very small portion of each, but let's say I keep them all, as at this stage I don't know if those songs are any good or not.

Most of user-made content is decent enough, but it's far too common that there's bullshit songs with ratings like 12-20, which are presumably meant for the keyboard, or maybe arcade machines with safety rail, since it would be unsafe to even try on a soft dance mat, regardless of one's skill level.

There's plenty of songs which are poorly synced. There's plenty of songs which have very questionable ratings, and are actually a lot harder than other songs at same ratings.

This wouldn't be a huge deal if there was a way to filter that out easily, but there isn't.

Stepmania UI is atrocious, especially when you have a lot of songs

All right let's say I have a few thousand songs now. Stepmania will take forever to actually start, like literally over 15 minutes. It seems latest version and SSD finally made it tolerable, but seriously, just checking that a few thousand tiny files didn't change shouldn't take this kind of crazy time.

The next problem is how to actually choose those songs. Stepmania decided to copy dance mat only UI from arcade machines, without any keyboard backup. So instead of taking 1 second to type song title or artist name, it takes literal minutes to scroll through thousands of songs to get there, even at highest speed.

The UI has other issues - like it seems that I end up triggering song options about 1 in 10 times when trying to just start a song, and it registers it as Start button being pressed twice for whichever reason.

There's a lot of weird combos to control the UI, but other than "difficulty up", "difficulty down", and "change sort order" I have no idea what they are, and there's nothing intuitive about it. There should just be goddamn menus and keyboard controls for those rarely used functionality.

Once song starts playing it's pretty much fine.

Ideas for solutions

So it seems I have the same complaints today I had a decade ago.

Anyway, let's talk possible solutions.

These days it's just easier to write cross-platform games in something civilized, with Electron or whatever. Stepmania isn't really a terribly complicated program, so if anyone felt like it, they'd probably have something kinda working in a few days, and it would probably have better performance and usability even at such early point.

Much more interesting is automated step files filtering and analysis. Step files are literally asking for a neural network analysis to flag broken ones, figure out correct difficulty, and so on. Prototypes to just generate step files outright exist, and filtering/analysis should be a lot easier. It just needs to be takes out of research paper and given to users.

A far more interesting idea is just taking songs from youtube or whenever, and doing everything automatically from that point, but that's quite questionable. Stepmania songs are generally ~100s remixes of ~200s songs, so that would already be a major difference. The whole step file process might be too computationally expensive.

How would it work in practice

I feel first step would be writing some parsers to take step files in variety of kinda documented custom formats and export them as some json. It's probably going to be quite tedious, but nothing difficult.

Then figuring out how to interact with dance mats. Most of them are just USB HID devices, so it shouldn't be too hard. In principle Electron supports WebUSB, so dance mat support should be quite straightforward, at least when everything goes right.

With these two, getting simple Stepmania-like program with Electron shouldn't be hard, and that could be a platform for all those crazy ideas.

I'm not hating here

Stepmania is still one of the most successful Open Source games ever. I just think something much better is possible.

EDIT - USB APIs in browser

Well, I tried to use WebUSB API and Gamepad API in Chrome, both supposedly supported, and they don't see my dance mat on Windows or on OSX.

It's possible I'd have more luck with Electron.

EDIT - Stepmania keyboard shortcuts

And it turns out Stepmania actually added some keyboard navigation recently. So if I have songs sorted by artist I can press Control-M to go to M etc. That's fine to reach Katy Perry, maybe less so for Avril Lavigne. Still, even that little change cuts scrolling time by more than half.