u/Saltbearer — reddlx

StepMania Complete 1 CD-ROM — What were the rest of the songs?

haha I have to recreate this whole post after spending two hours gathering links and stuff because I accidentally pressed the ctrl key while typing and hit R and there was no dialog to confirm the reload like there was for when I almost accidentally closed the tab and I knew I should have been in markdown mode and I should have ctrl-A ctrl-Ced at some point and I could have saved a draft and I should have a form autosave extension installed aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa

Back in 2006, I ordered an official StepMania CD, and now I'm trying to remember which songs it had on it, exactly.

As pointed out in this thread by /u/Zowayix from 8 years ago, the disc had 39 songs, was said to include everything the official site's Songs page had up to a certain date, and the earliest Wayback archive of that page has 39 individual songs up for download. "So far so good."

Except many of the songs that were actually included were from the PlagueMix packs linked above the individual downloads, and many of the individuals there weren't included.

To jog my memory, I've been looking at many old videos of songs I'm certain were on the disc, and looking for what other songs people who had them also had. The songs I'm 100% certain were on the disc are, with videos:

Captain Jack - "1-2-3" (Plaguefox)
Y&Co. - "Attitude"
Porto Seguro - "Bailar de a Dos (The Re-Mix)"
Mindless Self Indulgence - "Bitches" (Plaguefox) [MSI]
μ-Ziq - "Bitches (μ-Ziq Remix)" (Plaguefox) [Mindless Self Indulgence]
Dj. Quetzal - "Csikospost (Double Drum Mix)" [Csiko's / Csikos POST]
SPASM - "Dan (Old Skool Mix)" (Plaguefox)
Hiroshi Ohkuba - "Eat 'Em Up!" (Plaguefox)
Dark Luke - "I Sawed The Demons (E2M1 from Doom)" [Saw]
Melanie C - "I Turn to You (Hex Hector Vocal Mix)" (Plaguefox)
House of Pain - "Jump Around" (Plaguefox)
Graeme Norgate - "KI Feeling" (Plaguefox)
Apollo 440 - "Krupa" (Plaguefox) [four forty]
長沼英樹 - "Let Mom Sleep" (Plaguefox) [Hideki Naganuma]
Namco "R4" Sound Team - "lucid rhythms" (Plaguefox)
DM Ashura - "MAX Forever"
DM Ashura - "neoMAX"
They Might Be Giants - "No One Knows My Plan" (Plaguefox)
Theme of TITANIC - "Ocean of Memories (Trance Mix)"
PPK - "Resurrection" (Plaguefox)
Remy Zero - "Save Me (Smallville Opening Theme)"
Senser - "States of Mind" (Plaguefox)
A-Teens - "Super Trouper" (Plaguefox) [A*Teens, A★Teens]
DM Ashura - "Z" [The Legend continues]
Banzai - "Zodiac"

I'm not sure why I'd hesitate to outright confirm The Cynic Project - "Happy Theme (Trancebound Remix)" (Plaguefox), I think it was also included.

Silent Nick - "Palladio" (Plaguefox) seems Very Familiar, like it may have been included but wasn't a favorite of mine to play.

A few common PlagueMix files, like Touch of Joy - "Fox on the Run", aren't at all familiar to me. While it's possible they completely slipped from my memory, I think it's more likely that the disc just didn't include every single stepfile Plaguefox made around that time.

I remember there being One Other official ITG stepfile included, which I think was either Banzai - "Anubis", or KaW feat. ☺ - "Euphoria".

From StepMix 1:

Hypernov8 - "Tetrix (Type B Remix)" feels like something that was included, fairly high confidence.
e² - "Destiny -Eclipse Mix-" [Electronic Elation, remix of ☺ / Smiley] ... about as high confidence.
DJ Nebs - "For Not Trying" seems Very Familiar in name only, as though it was just there and I scrolled past it a lot without any interest in playing it.
I'm on the fence about whether KaW vs. ☺ vs. Inspector K - "Duality" feels more like something that was Included or something that was among the first stepfiles I ever Downloaded. DarkChao's simfiles for KaW's "Who" and "Legacy" sit in a similar spot.
DM Ashura - "MaxX AttaxX" ... I feel VERY unsure of. It seems vaguely familiar, it sits side-by-side with MAX Forever, but hmm. Feels like an odd one out. Unless it's not...

I remember having one or two different D.J.Amuro vs. DM Ashura - "AAA" files early on... do not remember if one was included.

I'm fairly certain Max Dragon - "OMEGA" [Ω] was not included. I think it was a popular file, but I don't think I personally had it.

That's the best I can do for now. As far as I saw, there wasn't even a partial actual List already posted somewhere. Hopefully this sparks a more complete memory if someone else searches for it.

u/Saltbearer — 9 days ago

▲ 4 r/Stepmania

Want pad pack recs featuring any of: Original music (esp. made-for-SM), Lifts, 6 Panel, Weird music, Oldschool music (+ noteskins with both lift quantization colors and 6 panel support)

I grew up playing DDR and ITG/2 at a local arcade that typically had DDR Extreme running alongside a rotating secondary machine, as well as at home with all non-Disney NTSC PS1/PS2 games, and I ordered StepMania on CD in 2006. I registered my first email account in 2007 to join the StepMania forums and share the mod courses I scripted for the Hopscotch Mixes when I was just a COPPA violation. Since 2009, I've been too physically disabled to play on a pad, and I had severe eyestrain issues for a while that made me fall out of the habit of playing rhythm games, especially anything flashy e.g. mod charts. I lightly touched StepMania between then and now, and kept up with DDR releases and events to some extent, and some of the more high-profile customs.

An unrealized essentially-lifelong dream of mine is to have organized or singlehandedly created a stepfile pack with all-original content, much like the Hopscotch Mixes. My young self thought it was The Coolest Thing that regular people could actually basically make their own DDR games like that from scratch, after growing up spilling fantasies of charts for songs that only existed in my head onto endless sheets of paper. The bug bit me a couple times over the years, but I failed to get others Excited about such projects, and I ran out of my own limited steam very quickly.

I would hope that Enough people with the right skills had the same dreams, such that within the past two decades, at least a few good packs of Original Content would have come to fruition. So, where are they?

Annoyingly, "Originals" in stepfilepackspeak has always just meant original Charts, and too rarely original Music. If you search the stepmaniaonline database, there are nearly 1,000 pack results for "original" — good luck finding any Fully Original material in that haystack.

Obviously, I know of the Hopscotch Mixes. I was a contributor to the FlightMixes. If I'm not mistaken, there's at least SOME original music in the StepMixes, D3MIXes, DDR XX, Club Fantastic, and the foonmixes... are there archives of Mantis's stepfiles? He made music...

Unfortunately, even if there are some newer packs of original music, actually Enjoying The Music and wanting to play the files more than once or twice is another matter. I assume much of what would have been made in recent years would fall under the broad umbrella of Modern EDM, the recurrent tropes and textures and structures of which I feel just don't Hit Right the way classic DDR music does. Classic DDR mixes were stylistically Diverse and the music was Layered and songs being condensed into ~1:30 meant they Developed Rapidly without dawdling on long stretches of lower energy, and I miss that Overall Feeling.

My general musical tastes these days skew toward the experimental, the lush, the dense, the flashy, the oddly-syncopated, and stuff that's just in some way Idiosyncratic. Some enduring DDR/BEMANI/ITG favorites As Music, to give you an idea, include AM-3P (+ remixes), If You Were Here, SP-Trip Machine ~Jungle Mix~, WILD RUSH (+ PCM Remix), DROP OUT, Orion.78 (both), INSERTiON, more deep (ver.2.1), L'amour et la liberté (DDR Ver.), Trip Machine Survivor, PARANOIA Survivor MAX, Scorching Moon, PARANOiA -Respect-, CHAOS, Trim, dazzle, S・A・G・A, Centaur, UZIEL, Hand Of Time, Solina, Turn It On, and most things by TaQ and ZigZag.

Another unfortunate thing here is that the skittery IDM regions of experimental™ are attractive to keyboard charters in particular, and my finger joints cannot withstand what they demand.

I also prefer pad charts because, even though I can't actually move my body to them, I have a phantom sense of what it should feel like, which gets tripped up when a chart doesn't flow well in that regard.

Having had Konamix as my first properly-Owned DDR game, I have fond memories of playing Solo mode, and I always thought it was a shame that the style has rarely been explored since. Having found a like-minded friend in recent times, and having found greater appreciation looking back at old Solo charts and the sorts of motions found in Them Uniquely among DDR officials, I'd like recs for... any solo charts anyone has ever dared to make? I see that according to SMO, foonmix 2 surprisingly has solo charts for everything, which I never knew about, but I also don't trust SMO's archived version to be entirely as it was originally, glancing at its formatting... the official site is still up, amazingly, but the download link there is dead.

I'm also very interested in anything featuring Lifts. They just seem like a natural thing to include in charts, and it's Sad and rather Confusing how they're so poorly supported and thus underutilized. It's a Noteskin thing, I reckon — if more noteskins actually represented lifts well, they'd see more use. SMEditor's default scalable Cel noteskin is pretty much Perfect as far as I can tell, representing lifts very readably to me as hollowed-out taps with their regular quantization colors, on top of supporting 6 panel, but I can't simply directly rip that noteskin out of the program, and other versions of the same noteskin even by the same author are functional downgrades for the time being. There are A Few noteskins that use quantization-colored lifts that look natural, it's clearly manageable in ~the same way as regular taps, so why do most noteskins have to just leave them as some static graphic that's at its worst borderline indistinguishable from a 64th or 192nd note, and sometimes literally impossible to make out at lower scroll speeds (when they look like just the tips of taps)?! Like, the lack of quantization colors is just Nonsense for a gameplay element that's judged exactly as tightly as taps are, and it seems like anyone who'd desire to make a Fully Functional noteskin wouldn't overlook that. Taking noteskin recs too.

s' yeh them's my wishes, how true may they come?

reddit.com

u/Saltbearer — 10 days ago

▲ 4 r/kdenlive

Text properly bold in clip monitor but not project monitor/render? (+ I'll take other help with this small project)

Just installed kdenlive 26.04.1 via Discover on my Steam Deck (SteamOS 3.7.19)

I added a Title and set the font to Inter-bold. It looks as it should in the clip monitor, but in the project monitor and upon rendering, it isn't as bold. What's eating all of my bold as it transitions from one reality to another? I'd appreciate help with at least making the devourer vomit the boldness back up and all over my text wherever books are sold, which is to say, in this reality.

I can totally cheese this business by adding a 2-thick-but-not-Too-thick white outline to my text that looks enough like the vomit would to fool predators, but doing that throws off my groove in a Disney way. Doing the right thing in a more direct and native intended behaviory correct way would feel less like harboring a fidgety cheese grater in my form-fitting soul.

I might also try using a static ttf instead of a variable, but, but look, it's right there, it looks good in the clip monitor, if I switch to a static and it works then that would be *cheating* and this would be an *unsolved mystery* and someone else would never be able to find this post when googling "kdenlive is doin' up the boldness of my title all funky, what gives? site:reddit.com"

While I'm forcing you to read this post in its entirety, I may as well ask for confirmation that I can totally do this business... thus, I bequeath my greatest treasure: The Scoop. This channel has been dormant for a year. I have been added as an editor. Prior videos that look the way they look were generated with a script I'll paste at the bottom, but going forward, I want the videos' elements to exist in a video editor thingy for me to play with, and I probably won't often make videos that look just like the old ones, but I'm making a template that looks like the old ones anyway Just In Case / for potential Shenanigans (hilarious). I'm not really experienced with using any video editor thingies, having only had to totally do the most straightforward of business with them in the past.

My assumption is that a Smart and Simple and Good Practice thing to do is set Zones as Destinations for an Image Asset to be Projected to, such as in the form of these Solid colors Of specific Sizes, and then separate sets Of Effects applied to them as layers Will be inherited By the projection Of thE image asset without having to duplicate iT. Is there indeed a simple function for such total image projecty business, auto-fitting to what's defined by Position and Zoom for these container elements? Perhaps something that goes at the top of a stack of effects preceding Gaussian Blur and Brightness?

And with that sea of green, might I accomplish the True Original flavor of blurry background effect? I dunno much about scripts or ImageMagick or adult life or interfacing with others, but my noggin sang a ditty of 60% brightness being like 60% colorization of black with no meaningful difference, but also one can probably just do black and do colorize when they do kdenlive, huh? And it's just that saaame ol' Gaussian Blur sigma, yeah? Same as this, such that I just pop that 25 from the 0x25 into the Gaussian Blur effect Sigma and Vertical Sigma and the result could never be more identical, huh, yeah? I'd like that.

Aforementioned script hailing from the beforetimes:

#!/bin/bash

if [ $# != 4 ]; then
  echo "Proper parameters: &lt;image file&gt; \"&lt;artist name&gt;\" \"&lt;song title&gt;\" &lt;audio file&gt;"
  exit 1
fi

image="$1"
author="$2"
title="$3"
audio="$4"

# Process the background
convert -fill black "$image" -colorize 60% -blur 0x25 -resize 2100x2100 -crop 1920x1080+90+510 +profile "*" ~/Documents/ImageMagick/bg.png

# Process the foreground
convert "$image" -resize 750x750 +profile "*" ~/Documents/ImageMagick/fg.png

# Process the text
convert -background none -fill white -font Inter-Bold -pointsize 70 label:"$author" +profile "*" ~/Documents/ImageMagick/author.png
convert -background none -fill white -font Inter-Bold -pointsize 85 label:"$title" +profile "*" ~/Documents/ImageMagick/title.png

# Combine it all
convert -page +0+0 ~/Documents/ImageMagick/bg.png -page +165+165 ~/Documents/ImageMagick/fg.png -page +1024+416 ~/Documents/ImageMagick/author.png -page +1024+506 ~/Documents/ImageMagick/title.png -layers merge +repage ~/Documents/ImageMagick/out.png

# Add audio
ffmpeg -loop 1 -i ~/Documents/ImageMagick/out.png -i "$audio" -c:v libx264 -tune stillimage -c:a aac -b:a 192k -pix_fmt yuv420p -shortest -y Sunvox.mp4

u/Saltbearer — 3 months ago