How to create a Simfile.

[BarX]

Hello. I have been noticing alot of people from FlashFlashRevolution and BemaniStyle coming onto these forums alot, I also have been noticing the ammount of questions posted on here so I am going to post a Tutorial on making a Simfile for StepMania.

I will be explaining both the hard way [for computer junkies or for people that already know what they're doing] and the easy way using the smpackage.exe found in your StepMania program folder.

The Hard but easy way first.

First of all, please add your desired song into the folowing folder

C:\Program Files\StepMania\Songs\Your Song Group\Your Song

IT must have the following in order for StepMania to read it properly.

Song.mp3 OR Song.ogg
Steps.sm*
Background.png [optional]
Banner.png [optional]
CDTitle.png [optional]
Movie.avi [optional]

Please right click anywhere in the folder [the folder that you're putting your simfile into] and select "New", then select "Text Document". If it shows up as New Text Document.txt, change the .txt to a .sm. If it just says New Text Document with no extention at the end, please enable "Show extentions for known file types" in Folder Options, after that, change .txt to a .sm. This is how you create a Steps.sm file. Simple eh? It will take a while to get used to it.

Second, i highly suggest on downloading the free BPM analyzer found here. It will automatically detect the "base BPM" of a song. Example shown in the screenshot in the link.

http://mixmeister.com/bpmanalyzer/bpmanalyzer.asp

Once you have that installed, you may drag any song if your choice into the program, as long as it is in mp3 format. Other formats like OGG, do not work in here. After dragging a song into MixMeister BPM Analyzer it'll take about 3 to 30 seconds to determine the BPM of a song depending on the length.

Please Note: This program is only good for songs that have a stright forward BPM or a consistant BPM, such as 1998 - Naoki, stright 150 all the way though. Some rock songs and long trance remixes will not be calculated properly due to "Multiple BPM's" of that song. Please be aware of this. A good example is Six - All That Remains, which is 190 - 200 BPM.

Should have something like this for example.


After that you open stepmania, prefer it in Window Mode, just incase you forget the BPM. and go into "EDIT/SYNC SONGS"

Should bring you to here


Choose your difficulty and press enter, this will generate random steps and will bring you to here.


See that red number at the top there? That's the BPM, of the blank step pattern that StepMania randomly generated for you. Change that number to the BPM displayed in MixMesiter [Press F7 to lower the BPM and F8 to increase it]. Wala! You have the correct BPM of the song.

Another Note; The displayed BPM on MixMeister may look slow after inputting it into stepmania. You may change it to Double the BPM, Quadruple the BPM, Half the BPM or even a quarter of the displayed BPM and it still will appear to be on sync depending on the songs cuts. This is where Offset comes into play. I'll explain this later.

Inputing Steps into the simfile is not hard at all, 1, 2, 3, and 4 are used for inputting the step direction into simfiles. [1 as in Left, 2 and in Down, 3as in Up and 4 as in right]. You may also change the Snap of the notes. All the snaps are 4th, 8th, 12th, 16th, 24th, 32nd, 48th and 64th notes. The 192nd snap is only used in StepMania 3.95 and StepMania 4.0. Hold Notes can be placed by dragging the selected number or numbers. Mines can be added by pressing Left Shift then a number or bnumbers. If you're using 3.9+ or other builds of StepMania, Rolls can be added by pressing shift then dragging the selected number or numbers.

May appear to be something like this.


As you can see, i have inputted 4th notes [Red], 8th notes [Blue] and 16th notes [yellow, green on an ITG theme]. The Yellow digits close to the BPM number are "Stops".. and i'll explain this also later.

Offset of songs can be extremely tricky. If you have good timing on In The Groove, or Stepmania, you'll beable to notice the "offsyncness" on the offsets of songs. This is usually used to make your steps Earier or Later depending on how off the simfile is [F11 decreases the offset by 0.020, while F12 increases it by 0.020. Holding Alt while pressing wither the F11 or the F12 keys will make it a smaller increment, ehich is 0.001]. Usually -0.020 anyone can notice in a simfile, 0.010 a more advanced player can notice this with decent trained ear, 0.005 a well trained ear will notice it, and 0.001 an extremely well trained ear will notice this. Becareful while finding out the correct offset of the song of your simfile.

Usually your first simfile takes about 8 hours to finish, well, i'm not really saying that as a fact, i'm just saying that's how long it took for me to create my first simfile from scratch.

I made this tutorial because i saw StepMania's Create a song tutorial, and it looked like ****, improper grammar and such. plus no images, an idiot could have typed that. No offence to StepMania and all, but ****.

If this isnt in the right place, please move it. took me an hour to type all of this out, lol. Hope this helps out some people. [Especially, the people who like making songs with steps but 60bpm thats completely offsync using Ctrl + R, i know all of you can do better!]

Any other Questions, feel free to PM me about them.



Download Empty Steps.sm file
http://www.mediafire.com/?y2kqihhtlgd

If the file doesn't exist anymore, let me know.

[ILIKEWATER58]

Originally Posted by BarX

...I made this tutorial because i saw StepMania's Create a song tutorial, and it looked like ****, IMPROPER GRAMMAR AND SUCH. plus no images, an idiot could have typed that. No offence to StepMania and all, but ****....
...Took me an HOUIR to type...

Really now?

[darkoscillator]

Theres another way to make a simfile a quicker way by using the stepmania tools and package exporter under "create song" it'll automatically create a .SM file and a copy of your MP3/OGG etc.

[BarX]

WATER, lol. Stop trolling, they were just typos.

[ILIKEWATER58]

I'm just pointing that out. Don't critisize someone else's grammar until yours is perfect. Also, If you didn't notice, i gave you + rep.

[BarX]

I have noticed. Thanks for the Rep.

Seriously dude, trolling is not needed, you could have PM'd me about it.

[ILIKEWATER58]

I didn't think it would be considered trolling, but sure.

[shakesoda]

Originally Posted by ILIKEWATER58

I didn't think it would be considered trolling, but sure.

pointing out typos in gigantic text and making no comment about the actual post is generally considered trolling.

[ILIKEWATER58]

Whatever.

[Marsh Lance]

Good guide BarX, very informative ^^ just downloading the BPM thing now, looks awesome :D also, I think you deserve 1 "+ rep", whatever that is. How can I give you one (if I can give you one?)

Edit: Don't worry I found out how to do it ^^