Well, as always happens when I make big changes, a lot of new bugs cropped up when I released revision 48 yesterday. This update squashes all the bugs I found, including one which has been lurking since long before yesterday but which I only just discovered. Also, a little countdown to the end of the music is now shown at the bottom of the main playback view if “Allow music to finish” is ticked and the step chart has finished, but the music still hasn’t finished. Quite a lot of things in total are fixed/changed (even more than in revision 48).
Shortly after making the newest version of StepMania Player, I wanted to try it out on my brother’s computer, which runs Vista (mine runs XP), and it wouldn’t run. More worryingly, though, the “Fix DLL OCX.exe” which I include in the download, designed to fix problems just like this, also failed! So, I’ve fixed the “Fix”.
One of these “Fix” programs is included in my Bleeper Music Maker program too, and so, if anyone has been having trouble getting either that or StepMania Player to run on Vista, this may well have been the problem all along. To those people, I suggest grabbing the latest versions of the programs from their download pages [SMP/BMM] and running “Fix DLL OCX.exe” again (right-click, “Run as administrator”). I haven’t added 1 to the version numbers of the programs because it’s not actually SMP or BMM themselves which have been updated (it’s just the “Fix” programs).
Well, this is a massive update, the main 2 features of which are the proper support for “dance-double” type step charts (2 pads), and the fact that music doesn’t have to be cut off at the end of playback any more (this new option to allow music to finish fully is enabled by default)! Note: The scrolling arrows view, for now, still only shows PAD 1’s arrows (if I mention pads any more, a knife will mysteriously find its way into my skull).
Wow! It’s been a long time since my last video of my Bleeper Music Maker program playing music. This time I DIDN’T make the music - it’s just playing a MIDI which someone else has made and released here.
This is the theme for when you’re fighting Satori (stage 4’s boss) in the 11th Touhou game (Subterranean Animism). I’ve increased the tempo, though, to try to make it sound more lively (my program plays 1-bit music, which is as basic as a waveform can get, and so long notes can sound very boring/tedious/headache-inducing).
My Bleeper Music Maker program is freeware, and you can grab the latest version of it and see more info on it here.
Also, I think I’ll be using this LED display in a lot of videos… if I can find a way to make it look less unstable/juddery on the camcorder. =/
Here’s a second batch of high-resolution randomness. YouTube has made the sync absolutely ridiculously bad, this time, despite me making the video in the same way as the last one. It’s almost like you’re watching a video and listening to a different video’s audio in some clips. =/
This is me trying to play Caramelldansen as I’ve learnt it from memory, to a metronome at 165 BPM.
There are at least 4 very obvious and cringe-worthy mistakes which make me think I shouldn’t be uploading this, but after trying for quite a few hours over 2 days, this was the best I could do. Maybe someday after more practise I’ll try it on a real piano.
Also, my Remi plush fell onto the keys many times during failed attempts but didn’t during this “most successful” one, so I had to force her to. =P
Technical stuff: The keyboard is a Yamaha PSR-E313. Played music can be recorded onto internal memory. While playing this, it was recording, and later I played it back while its headphone output was connected to my soundcard, to have a nice clean recording of just the piano sound without the metronome, key presses, and my sniffing due to hayfever. xD
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.
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