Ddr Stepmania
Leanna Perr
I've been playing stepmania in Linux since long time ago, and the dance pad always worked fine. After upgrading the system, it seems that something is wrong with Stepmania and my dance pad. I can use it (properly configurated) to navigate through menus, selecting options... everything seems to work fine, except that when playing a song, if trying to hit an arrow with the dance pad it results with a "Miss" always, and it works fine with the keyboard.
When it comes to Stepmania and the characters that we've made. It's a modder obligation to provide adequate instructions in how to install this so just about any person can follow throw and have dancing characters to go with their favorite game of rhythm. In this blog entry, you will find how to install not just our StepMania characters but practically almost any StepMania character that you so happen to find on the net. So without further delay let's begin!
In case you have no-script enabled or for some reason cannot see the title video on this website. We have provided direct links for these videos. For more information about the standards we use on this site click here if you would like to know more.
The next thing we will need is a collection of files called the Bones and Helper files to install. These files were not made by us as much as they were extracted out of an old DDR Konami game and transposed as un-jointed bone files operating on a global access plain. These files were made during the StepMania 3.x days as a quick and dirty approach to get as many of the arcade features crammed into this program as they could. This download is a .smzip file which means all you have to do after you install Stepmania is double-click on this file.
Upon the first splash screen that you see. It will report to you that "Success installing /@temp-os/Bone-and-Helper-Fines.smzip" is complete. You are not ready to play yet! You may now exit out of StepMania as we have only installed one half of what we need.
Assuming you may be on a different OS such as Linux or MAC the file association of .smzip may or may not work for you. This is fine as you can open any .smzip file with an archive utility such as zip or rar. The only difference between a straight-up .zip file and .smzip file is the "smzip.ctl" file that Stepmania reads to help determine where to install the packages within this archive.
You will need to extract all of the files and place them into the /Characters/ folder of wherever your StepMania directory resides at. All of the text and graphic files must be at the root of the /characters/ folder or else it will not work.
You may go to our downloads section to browse these files. However, for the sake of this guide I have placed a download link next to this paragraph for you to grab the Ukidig file that is used on our videos and tutorial. Dancer files contain the basic mesh object of the dancer as well as all of the texture files such as facial expression scripts and background images for character selection and loading/cool-down screens.
Just like the bones and helper files you simply double-click on the .smzip file. StepMania will report back that your first dancing character is installed with "Success installing /@temp-os/Ukidig.smzip". Do not play yet! We need to shut down the program one more time. The reason for this is StepMania caches its information about announcers, characters, and songs. It needs to re-scan upon startup in order for your characters to be seen by StepMania.
Just like the bone and helper files; You may be on a different OS such as Linux or MAC the file association of .smzip may or may not work for you. This is fine as you can open any .smzip file with an archive utility such as zip or rar. The only difference between a straight-up .zip file and .smzip file is the "smzip.ctl" file that StepMania reads to help determine where to install the packages within this archive.
Unlike the bone and helper files where the contents are placed into the root of /stepmania/Characters. Each dancing character must reside in its own directory so that StepMania can catalog them all. In this example we only downloaded the single dancer and thus Ukidig gets its own directory.
Upon the third launch of the StepMania program, your first character should be loaded and ready to go. Although the default settings are just fine we thought it's a good idea to show you the key points in the configuration that control your StepMania Character.
Under Options > Graphics and Sound Options > Cel-Shaded Models is a GL-technique where the program makes inversed vertices sizes them upwards a little and paints them pure black to emulate the look of it having to be drawn like a cartoon. A lot of your earlier DDR games did this on the PlayStation 1. It's a cool effect to have but not really needed
The very first thing you'll need is of course the program itself. StepMania 3.x which for reasons unknown you can only download from SourceForge instead of the developer's site. Since SourceForge is like traveling into click-bait advertisement hell we have set up a direct download link for this program. Please note that the application we are hosting for download is the windows version. Linux and Mac versions are available on the SourceForge website.
You may go to our downloads section to browse these files. However, for the sake of this guide, I have placed a download link next to this paragraph for you to grab the Ukidig file that is used on our videos and tutorial. Dancer files contain the basic mesh object of the dancer as well as all of the texture files such as facial expression scripts and background images for character selection and loading/cool-down screens.
Upon launching the StepMania executable within Windows you will be presented with the installation screen above. You may choose where you would like the game to go and click the "Install" button to continue. As an example, we charged out the directory to C:\games\stepmania3.9 during the video guide.
Unlike StepMania 5 where it barely tells you the smzip file is installed. StepMania 3.x has its own package manager that shows you exactly what it is installing and where. Click the "Finish" button to install the smzip file.
Sometimes package maintainers may leave comments about the smzip file that you are installing informing you of possible features and or their website. This is normal. Click the "OK" button to continue.
For reasons unknown the export package manager comes up after you install the smzip file. This is what people use to pack up their mods within StepMania 3.x for other people to download. StepMania 5.x doesn't even come with this package manager. Since we're not at the stage of exporting songs for other people to listen to. You may click the "Close" button to complete the installation of our Bone and Helper files.
If we look into Options > Graphics Options> Cel-shaded Models This tells StepMania to draw a black line along some of the models in StepMania giving them that Playstation 1 feel to them. This is only pointed out for players going for a specific aesthetic of gameplay.
If the above two preferred methods do not help you with installing characters we have written up some documentation on how to install StepMania mods the old fashioned way. The two things you will need is a way to extract the .smzip files. Such as 7-zip or WinRAR will do nicely in these scenarios. Finally, you will need to download the proper .SMZIP files which are in this very blog such as the following:
The next thing we will need is a collection of files called the Bones and Helper files to install. These files were not made by us as much as they were extracted out of an old DDR Konami game and transposed as un-jointed bone files operating on a global access plain. These files were made during the StepMania 3.x days as a quick and dirty approach to get as many of the arcade features crammed into this program as they could. This download is a .smzip file which means all you have to do after you install stepmania is double-click on this file.
In windows it's most likely that .SMZIP will not be associated to anything except the StepMania Package Manager so we're going to point it over to the 7-zip utility for file extraction. Right-Click on the file and click on Open with and then Choose default program.
Navigate to the extraction program that you would like to use for unzipping files. Make sure you select the 7zFM.exe file as selecting the 7zG.exe file gives an unexpected command error. Select the executable and click on the open button to proceed.
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