A few days ago I bought a nice LED message display, and after finding out what data to send to it to control it (without using the sucky software which it came with), I have something new to work with StepMania! ^^
My program controlling the display works by reading StepMania’s log file to see what you’re doing on StepMania. However, StepMania only updates its log file when it’s built up enough text to write (to avoid making the hard drive do unnecessary work), which means that my program sometimes doesn’t realise what’s happening (or doesn’t until it’s too late). At the end of a song (when StepMania shows “Failed” or “Cleared”) is when this happens the most. Unfortunately, detailed gameplay info (for example, how many “Great”s you got, or what your longest combo was) is not written to the log file. orz
The voice which announces the name of the song is just pre-recorded audio files, and I haven’t recorded files for all songs. As you will hear, only the first 2 songs have their names announced.
Also, I forgot to set my camcorder’s focus to manual, so the flashing of my StepMania lights messes up the autofocus a bit. Sorry xD
Here’s a much-needed compilation video using some of the many videos I recorded at London MCM Expo (May 2009). It mainly focuses around cute things because this video was originally going to be for the Touhou cosplayers, and… well, you know, I didn’t think soldier or Alien cosplays would fit in very well. I wonder if you can call a Dalek cute though.
The sudden song change is because Cirno’s Perfect Maths Class had so many different parts that it was too hard for me to be lazy while editing the video. I tried to at least change the song when it reached an appropriate place.
MCM Expo in London was held last Saturday and Sunday, and, quite awesomely, there was a group of people cosplaying as characters from Touhou Project! Here’s a bunch of pictures I took (some are screencaps from videos I recorded, so they generally don’t look as good). Please click an image to see a larger version of it.
In particular, the Suwako one is bad because that’s from the only video I ever got of her, from a distance while waiting in the ticket queue.
After seeing a box of doujinshi dedicated to the game series last October, but then not seeing a single piece of Touhou merchandise this May, I was disappointed, but these people more than made up for that. The group consisted of 3 guys cosplaying as Eirin, Yuyuko and Marisa, and 2 girls cosplaying as Sakuya and Iku (one of them was being Reimu on Saturday). There were also 2 other girls doing Suwako and Marisa, but they didn’t appear to be part of the group.
I may well upload some HD videos to YouTube, since videos just seem more realistic to me than photos, and I mentioned doing so on the Touhou Group thread on the MCM forum and no-one seems to be objecting to me doing so. However, that involves me not being lazy (at least cutting and joining the video files), so it will take me a while to do.
Oh, there were some cute Mikus too, which was cool to me, given that I’m pretty fond of her too.
Well, I know a few people recently noticed that my site (i.e. blog and downloads) was down. It had been down from the 23rd or 22nd of this month, until just a couple of minutes ago. This is because its hard drive’s master file table (the area responsible for storing the locations of all files on the drive) had become corrupted and Windows couldn’t even get to the desktop while booting without a bluescreen appearing (nor could the Windows recovery program run in DOS).
I’ve gone back to an old drive which I stopped using last year, but, extremely luckily, I was able to salvage the entire site and MySQL database (which is responsible for holding all posts on my blog) from the failing hard drive. Som theoretically, my site should now appear to be back to exactly how it was 4 days ago. If I hadn’t been able to do that then the most recent version I’d have would be a backup I made some time last year.
It will go down again very soon as I install all of the many updates to Windows, but hopefully this will only be temporary. After that, I’ll make a post, embedding HD videos which I recorded at London MCM last weekend, but until I make that post, you can have a look at the videos at my YouTube channel. There are more videos being uploaded as I type.
This fixes the nasty bug which causes the end of the config file to get corrupted after a while, which in turn caused the program to crash with “Invalid Property Value” the next time you ran it.
NOTE: If you have a corrupted config file (startup.cfg) left over from a previous version, you’ll need to delete that to allow the new version of SMP to run. If you don’t want to lose your settings and are feeling brave then you can open it up in Notepad and delete the last few lines which appear unusual (like several lines merged into one).
I made this this slowish techno remix of Komachi Onozuka’s theme (Higan Retour ~ Riverside View) on the spur of the moment, some time last year. “Electric” since it’s techno, “River” due to Komachi’s job of ferrying souls along a river… that, and the whole electricity/water thing worked out nicely, heh.
I’ve finally recorded a video of me playing the simfile (along with my SM lights responding to my keypresses, and a random scythe which I’ve had since some halloween before I even knew about Touhou), so I can finally upload the music with the video to YouTube. Background image by Yuuki Eishi.
It starts off sounding very electronic, but turns to techno with a few hints of rock (I guess). The ways in which I used the various melodies within Komachi’s theme is original (I didn’t base it on anything, unlike my Unlocked Girl re-make). Of course, there are some of my own fast harmonizing melodies in here too.
Simfile download link (Includes the same 320kbps MP3) (I’ll add a link on my own (slow) server for those without an account at Bemanistyle soon.)
I released a not-quite-finished version of this (here at my blog) near the end of last year, but I’ve improved on that version slightly (most significantly by changing a snare-like sound, and changing the volume levels of all of the instruments). The download link on the post for the old version now leads to this new version.
I’ve made a few minor changes to StepMania Player; you can download the new version from here, as usual. After the page break, there’s info on the changes.
I’m not intending on doing much right now due to excitement from and preparation for the upcoming MCM Expo in London! Yes, I do have a life outside of programming - albeit an otaku’s life… I’ll be going with a friend (who’ll be staying at my place) on both days, and I’ll be sure to get a ton of HD videos of the many, many cosplayers. By the way, there’s actually a group of people who will be cosplaying as Touhou characters, which I find pretty damn cool. Here’s to hoping that everyone beats the world record (for the number of people in one place cosplaying as characters from video games) which they, themselves, set last October (2008), and here’s to hoping that I can actually find them at the time when they line up outside as they aim to make that new record. >_<
Wow, this is the most blog-like post I’ve ever actually made
Now the program works again. =/ I can’t believe that since revision 42, I left a piece of code in which effectively stopped the program from working on anyone’s computer other than mine.
Just a tiny update which makes the high accuracy I introduced in revision 42 now apply when using “Realtime Light Control” too! (That is, instead of only when playing a simfile on SMP.)
After 4 months of not even touching this video, I realised I was never going to get it finished due to a massive lack of motivation. However, it is at least complete enough to cover the details of the circuits used in my Custom StepMania Lights, which you can then build into any cabinet you like, which I suppose is what most people who asked me for a tutorial actually wanted.
Please Watch in HD to be able to see more in the detailed images. Sorry in advance for the sucky quality of the photos though - I didn’t have my HD camcorder when I started making this video, so I just used my PSP’s camera.
My lights are designed to work with my own freely-downloadable program “StepMania Player”, which you can get here. As well as playing simfiles by itself, my program can also be used to control the lights while you play StepMania, each light being triggered by your keypresses in-game.
When configured correctly, StepMania version “3.9 Plus” can also control the lights directly. However, as you see in the video, it flashes all 4 bulb together, not separately. In the video, the leftmost bulb doesn’t light up because a motor is connected inside the box, in place of the bulb (I like messing around).
I hope this is at least of some use to someone. Sorry that I never finished it, but I’m releasing it now having started working on it over a year ago, which is just ridiculous considering how little material there actually is in it.
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