Just visited Acme for the first time today. Wish I had known about this machine sooner!!

We've still been adding packs. Turnaround is not instantaneous because adding packs still requires Tony's assistance. All of the packs you requested should be going on the machine at Sakuracon.

To reiterate a previous policy: Pack requests must follow the format of forum PM which includes links to the packs in question. When somebody PMs me a list of packs, I get an e-mail and a reminder every time I log into the forums, whereas if you try to contact me some other way, I may be busy when I see your message and then it will fall off my radar. We'll try to have packs added within a month of them being requested.

We also recently added BemaniBeats, which is a really cool new pack of technical charts from Bemani games!

How are those E-Amuse readers working?

they are not lol

Hi fellas. I am new to the area and looking to join the dance game scene around here. I used to play hardcore for a good bit about 3 years ago so im gonna be very rusty. When are some good times to go play at this location? Anyone going to be there this week or weekend?

Hey. Welcome!
I usually visit on Saturday evenings around 8pm, once a month. Not sure I can make it this week though.

I don't know if there's an optimal time to go per say, but if you head there in the mid/late afternoon I think there are more children, who sometimes have the habit of yelling (during the Cyclone game nearby) or running across the pads.

Cheers,
Zach

FYI, The ITG cabinet is at our shop after Sakuracon.  it's getting a more permanent mounting of it's new monitor.  It should be back at Acme Wednesday early afternoon.  :-)

Yay, a new monitor!!

Also, any new song packs added yet? There's like nothing new to play since I've gone.

Is the machine back at ACME yet?  I stopped by yesterday to play and was dissapointed that it was still gone.  Guess I should have checked here before I drove down 

I'm curious whether the new ("permanent") monitor for ITG will be the same flat screen one that was used during Sakuracon o.o

Don't think it was confirmed at the time whether it would continue to be used after the weekend.

It's back, and has the new LCD monitor.

I need to address a few things. Since coming back from probably a month or more of avoiding ACME, I've discovered this:

• The new screen has this weird video sync delay. Notes come up "earlier" but you still should be hitting the same way you always do.
• The global offset feels off. I tried to step along to the song and not following the video, but I cannot score over 80%. I've failed to score anything well even with 12s. Barely passed 13s.
• In my opinion (and only my opinion, I do not claim that this is a major issue), the pads need some reworking. It seems a bit... less flushed, and it's totally fine that it's not flushed as that rat from Flushed Away, but it's really difficult for me to score well on even easy songs. I played a 9 and didn't do too well but I thought it was just me. I tried in both shoes and socks. I forgot to take pictures but the next time I feel like going I'll do it.
• But hey, the upside is - we got a new brighter screen (albeit a bit smaller in size) and a few new packs... only 2 out of 5 that I had requested months ago, and then of course SakuraCon and some animu & mango packs.

I figure I'd be the one to say this so something can be done sooner.

Hey everyone!

Met up with KLOC today and we completely reworked the modding since we'd gotten a bunch of complains about the pads. We're going back to tweak them more on Monday so this weekend I'd really appreciate it if people went to ACME and gave me their feedback.

The pads are currently more flush than stock pads but less flush than they had been, to hopefully give old-school and stamina players both some kind of happy medium. Please play this weekend and let us know how it goes!

Yeah, Laura and I were working on them.

What I've diagnosed is that the P1 side is much harder to mod in anyway. Currently, footswitches/jacks are especially difficult on the up arrow on that side. The rest of the pads seems normal. We'll definitely have to come back another day to continue fixing.

P2 is doing great, and surprisingly good enough for even hard songs, and they're not even that flushed. Up arrow has half the intensity of the problem stated above
I passed a few 15s on them. They just demand quite a bit of energy because they're still "crater-like" but they are not impossible to stream on.

I played some sets of doubles as well and I was able to nearly FC although with a few misses, but they were just me.

Laura and I both tested each pad, but because we're probably the lightest out of all of the usual players, we can't tell if the pads may be too sensitive for heavier set people.

Plus, to clarify, I am just a kid that really enjoys playing ITG quite a lot, but I am in no way claiming the methods I used to mod the pads are correct. It's all a matter of me experimenting until it feels right. I hope, with my best intentions, that the pads will work for anyone - people new to the game - people who play no-bar 9s - people who play 6969bpm streams - and people who play doubles.

We're going to come back on Monday noon after some more people have played.
In the meantime, please feel free to report any issues you notice, no matter how little it seems. Whether it's hard to bracket or that you notice misfires or you wish it were less flushed, please do inform us!

ATTN guys: I unfortunately had some stuff came up for today and I won't be able to mod the pads! I have a job interview at 2 and another job to go to starting at 4 so I will be pretty busy today.
So sorry about this guys.
Laura and I will try to find another day to do some pad work!

Oh hey, I just saw this now.

OK, in that case, can you meet me there on Thursday around 1 PM? And anybody else who would like to test?

OK how about this. Does anyone want to do a Thursday night meetup to test the pads? I can get there around 8.

I'm visiting Seattle (leaving Tuesday), and got to play twice Thursdays at Acme. (I also met Laura and Ben briefly; always nice to meet new players.)

I haven't really played since 2003–2004, so there are a lot of things that are new to me; a lot of them (like the general increase in level, ubiquitous use of the bar and speedmods, or hands/mines) I knew about, but some of the special effects in songs came as a complete surprise to me. So I got curious; does anyone know how much of this is programmable in newer versions of the machine software (I was told it's OpenITG) and how much is just clever hacks?

The special couples steps with different-looking notes for the players are obviously “just” a hack: Make all notes freezes or rolls, and that's it. There's also stuff like “Party Rock Anthem” that scrolls a lot of stuff over the screen to mess with you, but I suppose that could also be done with some pretty basic graphics stuff. But then I saw a song like “Pi”, and I'm having problems trying to understand how that could have been done with a classic StepMania engine from that era. Perhaps the notes themselves could have been done by allowing the song to have a separate skin for the arrows (although the 0s would have given a problem; perhaps you could just make every arrow invisible and then just scroll the entire thing as a video?), but the score in binary would be very tricky without some programming; unless it's just BCD, in which case maybe you could do it with skinning.

But something like “Link” (the Zelda theme), which is seemingly part of a larger pack where every pad hit make a sound, I cannot imagine being done just as a hack. Either the engine has to directly support that (and I don't think the original ones did), or you need a pretty flexible scripting layer available to the stepfile. I read somewhere that Stepmania 5 themes are scriptable in Lua (and perhaps the simfile could specify a specific theme?), but OpenITG is a 3.9 fork, right?

Going to try to tackle all of this in a logical order and without going on too long, but there's a good handful to cover.

At the most general level, if you see it working, it is accurate to say it is programmable - it just might not be nice to work with. As for what you can do in Lua, there are only a few things that you really can't do, though you do still have to get clever sometimes.

First off, regarding Stepmania versioning, you do seem to have things right. Here are the main relevant versions that I'll be mentioning:
- 3.9 (SMMAX theme)
- 3.95 and branches (real ITG and OpenITG)
- SM5 (4 branched as SSC, SSC officially became 5, the main point of SSC, as you mentioned, was originally a theme engine overhaul - 3.9+5 themes will not work and vice versa; introduced the new .ssc file format because there are new step types and other chart features that .sm and .dwi don't support)
I'm just going to work my way up the hierarchy of Stepmania hackery.

Without Lua, you get the following:
1. Chart Level
- Doubles as "Couples"
-> Pump Pro 2 (SM4-branched, IIRC? I don't remember) had proper engine support (Red/Blue per player) added. It may be possible to do the same in ITG with Lua and mods, but I don't know for sure.
- BPM tricks (double BPM with a short stop after each step to stutter, etc.)
-> Go fast enough and arrows appear to jump, since the game renders one frame every 16.6 milliseconds and they technically do "jump", you just can't see it until the arrows are really fast; mix with stops for more fun.
- Negative BPM Glitch (3.9+5 only; SM5 fixed the underlying bug)
-> If at the 60 second mark you flip to a negative BPM and 20 seconds "earlier afterward" (the editor will count time backwards as you scroll through measures) go back to the normal BPM, then 40 seconds in, the arrows on screen clear and it immediately thinks you're at the later 40 second mark, so it loads what would be on screen then and continues playing.
-> It more or less started with Monotune Respect (foonmix) back in the 3.9 days: https://youtu.be/b6nLOcpU4iQ?t=40s
-> SM's DDR scoring works fine, ITG scoring breaks (Monotune is AAAable, but a "quad" is about 76%, since the unused steps are simply 0's, equivalent to goods/decents)

2. Song Level
- BPM changes are constant across difficulties for a song, and technically should be listed here; SM5 may have or may not have or may in the future change to per-chart BPM stuff being allowed a la Pump
- BGAnimations supports placing graphics in the foreground that cover everything under them. There are charts like Sweet Doughnuts (Gay4Gimmix Again), Jayce's Still Alive, or the infamous Box (https://youtu.be/FCdx1bjGGRY) that do just cover the screen in something that tells you what to hit (as a conventional chart or otherwise), with the actual chart hidden underneath, others just use graphics to block the screen randomly (like Party Rock).
-> Full screen animations cover judgement, life bar, and score completely
- Mod scripts - you give a list of times to apply mods (turning them off is a matter of setting stuff back to normal).
-> I believe there's a non-Lua way to do this for a song, but am not 100% on that.
-> This is the way ITG courses do mods - the course definition supports mod scripting (the previous unknown is whether this exact format is available for songs as well)
-> The format translates to a very simple "at time X:XX, apply mod Y" with no way to do anything dependent on the current players nor any way to do something different to each player.
-> I know you can have arrows under different mods on screen if they're before/after the mod change, I don't know if you can set mods per-column or per-individual-arrow with a mod script.
-> Spergin2's Sweet Doughtnuts changes the chart (to left-right-left-right-...), but not the video overlay that displays the original G4G chart, so you have to know the pattern and when to start (and whether left or right) and get no judgment feedback.
-> Mod scripts support percentages, -50% mini makes the arrows bigger, various percentages (<50%) of reverse can be used to move the casings up and down without flipping the arrow direction, 10000% dizzy for a split second is a common flourish, etc.

Lua has been a core part of Stepmania for a long time, the engine overhaul for SM5 was basically a way to move more of the theme definition into Lua for simplicity, since theming via metrics.ini is kind of awkward and confusing even without a lot of Lua. The Lua execution environment offers access to anything the theme should need and more, regardless of what context Stepmania is trying to use Lua in, which is why the discovery that Lua can be called from within a song led to almost anything being fair game in OpenITG. For the most part, if you can do it without Lua, you probably can do it with Lua, too.

The rules of thumb on whether it takes Lua or not:
- Chart oddities and simple "display this image/video here" directives don't need Lua
- Unless they are dynamic somehow (selectively displaying an image, picking from a set conditionally, anything else that isn't always exactly the same)
- Everything else is probably Lua

Some actual Lua uses in game:
- Defining the flashing and display angle (ITG: great and lower are tilted) of judgement graphics in your theme's metrics.ini (and overriding it in song)
- Telling GAMEPREFSMAN that the Marvelous window (everything's DDR names internally still) is now 20 seconds wide
-> GAMEPREFSMAN persists changes, so this would actually stick, even across reboots
- WinDEU has used some combo of Lua and BGAnims to 3D render giant spinning ITG arrows that bounce around the screen as a foreground overlay
- Overriding your chart selection with a random pick for that song (the chart is actually immutable once picked, so you have to write Lua that edits it - which will apply on next load - and then exits/reenters the play screen, but it has been made to work)
- Scripting minigames into breaks between actual steps
-> Lose the minigame? You get random mods for awhile
-> WinDEU has a marathon where 1p plays a chart while 2p has to try to stop mods from being applied via various minigames as well as one where 1p plays a chart on a Taiko-style stripe at the top while 2p has to dodge TouHou-style bullet-hell by moving an unarmed character around the screen the whole time
- Alternate judgement graphics, including support for what seems to be a super-fantastic (displayed, not counted for scoring purposes): https://youtu.be/wBluMojRiO0
- Making the life bar, score, and any other standard objects spin, disappear, change colors, etc
- Among the many things in Party Rock ~bathtub mix~ is a text alert bar that goes very rarely used otherwise (certain operator actions trigger it IIRC) and "press GREEN to add even more crap": https://youtu.be/LnwnogQKfJw
- WinDEU has also managed to make a marathon jump to a Megaman-style stage select once started and between songs, so you can play the songs in any order you want before a final boss song. WinDEU has done a lot of things that Stepmania would rather not have had done to it, though.

I haven't seen Pi, but what you described sounds trivial from a non-graphics perspective at least - the score display is a function of the actual backing score, so removing it, then creating a separate one that plays by different rules (e.g. binary) should be easy in Lua. Translating bases is an absurdly common computer operation, so that should basically be a builtin in any language (and if not, it's dirt simple code). Having never done any SM Lua work beyond adding a little flicker to Chromatic's judgments (to differentiate steps, since the graphics don't move or bounce or anything).

Triggering sounds from Lua should also be reasonable (NOTE: have not seen Link or any that do it myself, so I'm just extrapolating from what I know), since there are already triggered sounds elsewhere in the engine (scrolling through the menu wheel, for example). There was a historical attempt to add full keysounding support, since 3.9 (and presumably later) could read .bms simfiles (beatmania charts) and remap them to 4/5/6/8/10 panel, it just wasn't able to play sounds on each key press a la most of the Bemani series.

Thanks for the very detailed explanation! So apparently you can really embed programs in stepcharts. Better make sure you're not loading a stepchart with an infinite loop, then…

Here's a video showing a short excerpt of Pi, for the reference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JFT_ngfdlxw

Slight correction: SM5 has per-chart timings since the first preview, that's why we bumped the version to 5, actually.

Routine mode was added for Pro 2 and should be thoroughly impossible pre-SM4, it involved a lot of changes in the engine. Pro 2 is approximately equivalent to mid-late 2009 SM4 (+ early 2008 SM4 more or less matches Pro 1).

There's not really a lot of cool gimmick charts around for 5 (but all 3.95 ones *can* be converted with a little work), but anything 3.95 could do is only the tip of the iceberg compared to what can be done on modern versions of the game. A lot changes in a decade.

So, folks, in its still very basic level of modification - I was still able to pass a 16, albeit with a very low score and horrible great attacking. but this was like my 5th song so i think i'd be really unprepared for this

And this was a sightread too:

Hopefully we're getting somewhere

ITG's P1 left felt like it needed an abnormal amount of force to trigger relative to everything else (played wednesday). I don't think it was bad enough to need immediate attention, but maybe worth a look at.

Also, <3 the super secret pack and all the easy (7-9) stuff in it.

What is JudgeScale?

Yeah, P1 is actually in a horrible condition.
It's "great" for DDR standards. However, go anywhere past 9-footers and consider your lifebar fucked. P2 is meh but acceptable for non-streamers. P1 can't even play techie 10s.

Laura/Tony and I will be down to do maintenance sometime soon, hopefully. We actually haven't finished modding and the pads were still a WIP.

Please keep letting us know of any other issues you may discover - this greatly helps us diagnose and fix! Thanks!