Simfile creation Tutorial

[TougaKiryuu]

Writing this because I saw we needed one, first off your going to open either notepad or wordpad, and your going to paste the following into it:

#TITLE:;
#SUBTITLE:;
#ARTIST:;
#TITLETRANSLIT:;
#SUBTITLETRANSLIT:;
#ARTISTTRANSLIT:;
#CREDIT:;
#BANNER:;
#BACKGROUND:;
#CDTITLE:;
#MUSIC:;
#MUSICBYTES:0;
#MUSICLENGTH:;
#OFFSET:;
#SAMPLESTART:;
#SAMPLELENGTH:;
#SELECTABLE:YES;
#BPMS:0.000=;
#STOPS:;
#BGCHANGES:;

go on and save the document as all types and save the extension as .sm... now your going to go fill in the following between the : and ; of all those captions

#TITLE:;
the name of the song goes here

#SUBTITLE:;
anything you want written between the songname or arist goes here

#ARTIST:;
artist name goes here

#TITLETRANSLIT:;
if you used japanese for the title, english goes here

#SUBTITLETRANSLIT:;
same if you used a jp subtitle

#ARTISTTRANSLIT:;
aaand once again same if you used a jp artist

#CREDIT:;
you go here.

#BANNER:;
the filename of your banner goes here (ex: banner.png)

#BACKGROUND:;
same as banner, but whatever you have for the bgimage

#CDTITLE:;

#MUSIC:;
the name of the MP3 your using goes here (ex:song.mp3)

#OFFSET:;
#SAMPLESTART:;
#SAMPLELENGTH:;
dont worry with these just yet

#SELECTABLE:YES;
do NOT change this unless your writing it for a course :<

#BPMS:0.000=;
song bpm goes after 0.000 (ex 0.000=120.000; this is for a BPM of 120)

#STOPS:;
#BGCHANGES:;
don't worry with these either

from here, you can take the .sm file you created and plop it into a folder with the MP3, the banner, and the background, and if you choose a video file that will play in the background.. move this folder into the stepmania/songs directory and place it in a group folder. After that boot stepman up and go to the edit songs option, from here you can create new stepcharts with ease using the stepmaker. A couple other things you can know

#SELECTABLE:ROULETTE;
If you want the song to only come up when you pick the roulette option, you can place this in the place of #SELECTABLE:YES; ..but for it to work you need the Hidden Songs option in the operator to be set to yes.

for those of you who have trouble making the basic file OR your just lazy: have a template you can just edit in notepad/wordpad:

http://www.pumpcore.com/tougakiryuu/template.sm

[Patashu]

ACTUALLY STEPPING THE SONG

Once you've got the .sm file set up and everything, start up Stepmania, go to Edit/Sync songs and create a difficulty for the song to edit. The very first thing you should do is hit esc, go to song options, turn assist tick and auto play ON and lower the rate to 0.6x or less. (This slows the song down to make accurate stepping easier.)

BEAT 0 OFFSET

Once you've done this, place a single note on the first measure and play. Does the single arrow's clap go at the same time the first beat does? It probably won't. If it doesn't, you can use F11 and F12 to move the first beat along (F11 makes the first beat happen later, F12 makes it happen sooner), and hold down alt while pressing the F-keys for greater accuracy. Once you've got it spot on, you can either go back into song options and lower the rate to 0.3x to make sure it's perfect or you can save it and move on.

BPM

If the song has a nice, constant BPM through it, simply google search for Mixmeister and download it. Put the song in, get the bpm and use F7 and F8 to adjust the bpm to match that. (Again, hold alt for small increments.) And to make sure, put 16 red arrows ahead of you and play the song to make sure it syncs up right. If Mixmeister fails to find the bpm, you can find it yourself by putting down several measures of red arrows, with assist tick on, and playing. If the claps fall behind the beat, the BPM is too low. If the claps go ahead of the beat, the BPM is too high. Adjust and re-play again and again to make sure you've got it, and if it goes off later on in the song just adjust it again. And if it just doesn't fit no matter how hard you try, your song may have a varying BPM, in which case you may want to try a helpful program at http://www.geocities.com/jyris1 known as DDReam.

PLACING THE ARROWS
First thing first, hold ctrl and push down to expand the measures. You'll need the visual aid if you go any finer then 8th notes. The controls are all listed when you push F1. The most important rule of all is make sure every arrow is going to an sound in the song. People hate, hate, hate it when arrows are poorly placed or BSed. And make sure you can recognize the difference between triplets (purple arrows) and yellow arrows; they're placed quite close together. Finally: Save early, save often and include as many difficulty levels as you think you can do and the song can work with (if it's not a song suited for anything below heavy, don't put anything below heavy)

[TougaKiryuu]

something else you can use that has a fairly good BPM calculator in it is xstep (that's the only reason I have it around).

[Patashu]

BPM CHANGES AND STOPS
Bpm tricks are cool. Often songs will have a point in them where noise dramatically drops or nothing at all is playing; these are good places to put pauses. Figure out the length the pause lasts for in beats, then subtract anywhere from half of that to a beat or two (since arrows can't come instantaneously after a pause ends). Multiply this number by 60 then divide it by the song's BPM; this is how long the pause will be. Raise and lower the pause's value with F9 and F10 (again, hold Alt for smaller increments) and you're done. If you insert a pause after stepping after it, the arrows will be too far away now; go just after the pause and use the Delete key to remove blank bars until they're at the right distance.

It's possible that a complete pause in a song may last for a duration that isn't a number of beats; if so, just fine-tune the stop's length until the arrows that come after it are on-beat once more, and lower the rate to 0.3x afterwards with assist tick on just to make perfectly sure.

Bpm changes are simple: Find a point where the song sounds faster/slower, use F7/F8 to bring the BPM to double or half of what it originally was, then go to the end of this fast/slow portion and raise/lower the BPM back to what it should be. If it gets reaallly slow or fast you could even resort to a quartered or quadrupled bpm. And whatever you do, don't insert a bpm change that looks bad/unneccesary when playing the song, and make sure it actually syncs up with the song well.

[Akira]

I approve! *sticks*

[Juub005]

Originally Posted by TougaKiryuu

something else you can use that has a fairly good BPM calculator in it is xstep (that's the only reason I have it around).

It's not accurate enough; at least not the version I have. Not even XStep's creator likes XStep anyways.

[Fox83]

Hello,

I just wanted to say thank you for all the info. I was the one that posted the "Please Help" thread yesterday. I just wanted to say MixMeister was exactly what I was looking for. It was easy to use and was compatible with my poor excuse for a PC.

So again.. Thank you for the info and I'm sure this new thread will help many people with their simfile troubles. I look forward to posting more songs in the weeks to come.

Sincerely,

Fox83

[jyris1]

Originally Posted by Patashu

BPM

...And if it just doesn't fit no matter how hard you try, your song may have a varying BPM, in which case you should leave it until later; syncing a song where the BPM isn't constant is a very trickly job.

Syncing such songs can be very easy and straightforward. For those hard to sync songs (there are lots of them, especially pop/rock/jazz songs), dont just quit, feeling frustrated at tools that can't do the job right (*cough* mixmeister *cough* xstep*)...Instead...use something that's made to attack what others cannot.

Download below.

[Patashu]

Ah, yes. Post edited for shameless advertising.

[Elvis_Maximus]

Since most guides only cover one aspect of creation, I decided to write one that would cover all the individual aspects of creation, not just syncing or tags or the like. This will only cover Windows for the use of DancingMonkeys 1.02; as most of you *nix users probably already know how to use command line interfaces.


Firstly, though my profile would lead you to believe otherwise (curse the database wipe!) I am not new to making simfiles, I have been creating them for about a year now, and have a had a number of fairly large successes that I'm proud of; I've also had a number of absolutely crap simfiles that to this day I still dream of and wake up sweating from the sheer terror of their craptacular-ness.

The first (and one of the most important aspects) of simfile creation is picking a song. This also determines how many downloads your simfile will potentially get. For your first simfile, you're going to want to pick something easy, stick with a trance-esque song, something that either a) doesn't change BPM or b) only changes by a linear amount (i.e - only doubles, or halves, the BPM). For those new to Bemanistyle, here is a list of amount of downloads you can expect (in descending, by music style; clearly only approximate and subject to exceptions):

Anime OP Theme (Popular anime)
Videogame Music (RPG or Popular/Classic game, OST only)
Anime OP Theme (Non-pop anime)
Eurodance
Trance
Rock
Pop
Other

Part I: Beginning Creation
Now that you have a target song, you have to have a target idea. Start off by listening to this song almost obsessively for a few days; it sounds strange to say but the more you listen to this song, the better you will be able to visualize each step and have an idea of what you want. Once you have an idea in your head, you must begin the process of despair that we like to call initial creation and syncing.


There are any number of programs out there to aid in this task, my personal favorite is "Dancing Monkeys," though the latest version (1.02) is consistently off by a sixteenth on its delay in my experience. We will use this program for the creation of this stepfile, we will be using the newest version for command line options (and it is good practice to have to finish the syncing by hand, comes in handy when you're attempting a variety of more difficult songs):

1. Download the program from the location here
2. Copy the music that you want to do to the C: drive (your main drive, though you should know that already)
3. Install (aka unzip) the program to the location "C:" and rename the resulting folder (Will be Dancing Monkeys 1.02) to Dancing Monkeys
4. Now, go to the start menu, click run, then type in cmd and press enter; you will now be looking at a DOS-esque screen
5. Type (without the quotes) "cd C:/Dancing Monkeys/bin/win32" and hit return, you should now see "C:/Dancing Monkeys/bin/win32>" before the type bar
6. If you are new to Dancing Monkeys 1.02, you probably don't know about the command line options; well, we're going to make extensive use of them to make life slightly easier for us. But to understand what we're going to be doing, we'll require a bit more background then we have right now (You can skip to the next step if you don't wish to know why we're doing what we do, but its not reccommended as you may wish to tweek some settings).
   
   Its primarily important to understand how DM deals with a changing BPM. Namely that it has no idea how to handle it, instead it places a "stop" in to prevent itself from getting off beat. We call these "Error Stops." By default, if more than 5 of these happen, DM fails to find the BPM or Gap and will exit with an error, however, while thats great.. it doesn't help us immediatly (and anything with 5 error stops is going to be a really, really bad stepfile anyway, but we're primarily looking for the "gap" out of this, as its the easiest way to find it). By adjusting the amount of error stops we can modify DM to fail earlier, to prevent it from setting us up wrong. We can also modify many more options that previously were completely unavailable to us, such as beats per measure and search range. But I'll leave that for a more advanced tutorial
   
   
7. Now that we're armed with a better understanding of how DM works, we'll attempt to have it sync the song for us using the string 'DancingMonkeys "C:/<name of your song here with file extension>" -onc -ob -ons -l 999' (without the 's but using the "s) each of the -<text> is an option; onc means no credit added, ob means don't generate steps (saves a small amount of time, but mainly saves us having to go in and delete them after), ons means don't generate any error stops (they're still checked, but don't put them in, once again saves us the trouble of having to go in and delete them by hand), and finally l is length which we set high so it checks the ENTIRE song, not just the standard 90 seconds it would normally do (it takes longer, but I find it results in a better file)
8. Go get some popcorn and/or beer, maybe watch some TV or read a book, this is going to take anywhere from 3 to 10 minutes depending on song variation and processor speed, etc.

Once this process is completed, you will see a "confidence" value, for the most part the BPM of the song will always be right, but the GAP value is where the most trouble is, if this confidence value is really low (less than .5 or 50%) you're in for a rough time getting it synched right (for the most part). Now find the Dancing Monkeys output folder in there, inside is your newly created stepfile, blank and ready for you to work your magic on it. Copy this to your stepmania folder, just like you would any other song you downloaded.

Enter Stepmania and head for the editor, open it up and on the very first beat press space to start a selection, now hold page down until the second meter is about 400; this will make sure you do the entire song for syncing in one step rather than having to constantly reselect; press space again to select that range. Now, make sure the colors beside the selection point are "Blue" for 8th notes, if it is red press to the right once to get it blue, if its anything other than red or blue, press left to get back to the blue. Press ctrl+r to start recording steps at the beginning of the song. This is monotonus, but do a nonstop stream of 8th notes for now, this will not be your final product, its just a handy way of checking sync. Press escape to stop recording once your song is over.


Now, press escape and go to song options, turn on Assist Tick and go back to the editor. Go to play whole song and don't touch anything, just close your eyes and listen to the ticks. If they are NOT on the beat, you have a syncing problem, if they are, great, you can skip the next section and move on to making steps.

Re-Syncing a Bad Song
First and foremost, your beats will sound either a) too fast or b) too slow. THIS IS MOST LIKELY NOT A BPM PROBLEM. This is caused by the gap being slightly off, resulting in every note coming fast or slow, believe me, it will DEFINITLY sound like a BPM problem though.

The first thing you should do is save your current steps. Next press "play whole song" once more then just press escape, this selects the entire song on its own, handy. Press enter, then go to clear all steps, do this now. Now press right until you get to the yellow tab, this is to create sixteenth notes, and that is what we will be using here.

Next press escape and go to song options once more. Look at "song speed" and turn it down to about 0.7 or 0.6 and go back to the main edit screen. This slows down the song, so that you can more accurately place your notes. For the next recording of notes, it helps to keep your eyes closed and focus solely on the song. Begin recording the steps and close your eyes, place a step at EVERY 8th note in the song, and only every 8th note, your objective is to have a steady stream of onbeat notes that you can use to adjust your syncing. Once this has completed check your notes, if they all look like sixteenths, you had a syncing problem, if they're scattered around you either screwed up or there is a deeper problem such as BPM. This tutorial assumes that its a problem with syncing.

Now play the entire song using the assist tick again, each click should be on beat now, great! Now we need to get it to not be all sixteenths, this is easily accomplished when you know the trick. First, look at every sixteenth note (starting at the beginning especially): Do they all come JUST after the numbered beat, i.e after each beat line there is a sixteenth note (and in the middle after the 8th note), if so we need to move the gap FORWARD by the calculated value (below). If its the opposite we need to move it BACK. The easy way to see this is think of the notes as not moving ever (which they don't). By moving the gap forward or backwards we "Slide" the note bar forward or back, but the notes stay in place, so we're looking for the direction we have to slide it to get them all to be on their proper beat.

A little math background here before I give you the formula, we have 4 sixteenths in one beat, and x BPM, our objective is to get the number of sixteenths per second, so we can from there get how long each sixteenth takes, we can use that number to adjust the gap value to fix our syncing, here is the completed formula:


1 / ( (BPM * 4)/60 ) = y where y is the number we will use to adjust the gap.

Remember what I mentioned earlier? About sliding the note chart? Well its time, save your stepfile and exit the program, navigate to your Stepmania folder and inside the song folder, in here delete all the files that aren't either the song or the .sm file for it, we don't need the others (and they'll be regenerated) and it saves us time this way. Open the .sm file in notepad and replace the original gap with you new gap (find the new one by adding y to the gap value to move the note sheet FORWARD or subtracting it from the gap value to move the note sheet BACKWARDS). Save the .sm file and open stepmania once more, IMPORTANT: GO TO OPTIONS AND RELOAD ALL SONGS, ELSE YOU WILL *NOT* GET THE NEW VERSION OF YOUR SONG.

Go back into the editor and verify that the Gap changed, if it did not, exit and reload the songs again, it should work then.

Make sure you have the yellow tab up and go to the first note that you made, select it by pressing space, then press the "end" button on your keyboard to be taken to the end of the song, press space again to select it. Press home to return to the top of the step file, then move down to that first note. Move the cursor to the new location of that first note and press enter, Select "Cut" then press enter again, select "Paste at Current Beat."

Now once again, play the song with assist tick on, it should sound perfectly on beat. Hooray, your stepfile is correctly synced now, and it took almost no time at all.

Editing your Stepfile:
Now save your simfile and go to the top once more, select the entire song using the method I described first (pressing play whole song and then escaping out). Turn the bar to blue once more and clear the steps, you're now ready to record your REAL steps (if you want sixteenths in the song, find out where you want them and redo ONLY those sections by selecting just them and recording in those places only, else you may have to edit the steps of the ENTIRE song, and it takes hours, believe me).

Press ctrl+r to begin recording once more; after this you must play your song, possibly hundreds of times. Turn on assist tick so you can make sure the rhythm of steps is exactly as you want it. As you come across an error in the song, press escape and manually correct the error (the 1-4 keys correspond to adding or removing the arrow on the current location of the cursor, so place it over the wrong step and remove it or move it, etc.) then press escape and "Play from Current Beat." Each pass you make like this is basically editing your song and refining it. After you complete that, do the entire song once more, then again, and again. Each time you test it it will become more refined and fun to play. Keep in mind that not all players are as good (or.. possibly bad ) as you, so add in different difficulties, but I will remind you that you must edit those as well. Not to mention that if you attempt a keyboard level song, you must edit all those sixteenth notes and make sure none of them are placed wrong.

IMPORTANT: SAVE AFTER EACH PASS OR EVEN EACH CHANGE

Editing can take anywhere from 2-3 hours to (in the case of a complicated keyboard song) a few days or even a week. On average I find my editing of complex step charts to take at least double if not triple or even quadruple the initial step building.


Once you are happy with the steps, you can add in various after effects. Keep in mind that tempo changes should be added only using scalars (unless you're very advanced) such as compress 2x or 2/3x, etc. And should only be added when the song has ONE Difficulty to prevent the other stepcharts from getting off sync; in addition, they should only be added AFTER you have completed all the steps, it is easier to create and edit steps when there is only one tempo, multiple tempos makes it more complex to edit.

The final step (aside from adding the banner, background, and CD Title) is packaging, go to the song folder and delete the .old files, they aren't needed by the end user and can potentially complicate things. Back out one level of folder, to the category where you see your folder, compress that entire folder as a .zip file and upload it to Bemanistyle, completeing the necesary information. Boom, you're done.


Congratulations on your first step file, and have fun perfecting the art of step making, each step file you make will get better and better (well, hopefully anyway).

[stepxunit]

Ok question.. how do i use steps from another song into my own ??

I cant seem to find out how

[Patashu]

Open up the .sm files, copy from one file into another.

[Dark Coz]

HOW TO ADD ROLLS AND MINES (ROLLS ARE FOR STEPMANIA 4.0 ONLY)
Use Left-Shift to place a mine. If you use the method for holds, you turn it into a Roll.

[zioh]

I liked the guide, now i seem to have a fairly annoying problem. When i save a file in the stepmania 4.0 editor, exit the editor and then either go into the editor again with the song or try to play the song in the game, all the arrows are missplaced, totaly. Does anyone know what might be the problem?

[Elvis_Maximus]

Originally Posted by zioh

I liked the guide, now i seem to have a fairly annoying problem. When i save a file in the stepmania 4.0 editor, exit the editor and then either go into the editor again with the song or try to play the song in the game, all the arrows are missplaced, totaly. Does anyone know what might be the problem?

As phoenix wright would say: I object!


Its most likely a bug in the beta, Stepmania 4.0 is an intermediate build, not a final build. You can most likely expect some bugs, they'll get ironed out eventually.