Fitness/Workout Mode

Good evening,

I did a *little* bit of searching on this before creating an account to post this set of questions, so please let me know if it's been answered already.

The one thread that seemed most relevant was from 2014, so I figured I'd create a new post rather than necroposting. Here's the original question:http://www.stepmania.com/forums/general-questions/show/350?start=0

I picked up StepMania in order to lose weight. I've been playing each weeknight for about an hour in the hopes of doing so, and I'm getting better (I think). I have heard old versions of StepMania have a workout mode (with endless songs or a timer or something, a calorie counter, etc, etc). I have SM5 and SM3.95 downloaded presently, but I'm not seeing a workout mode in either.

Questions:

1) Am I missing something in the config for SM5 which would allow me to enable this mode?
2) Are there any themes for SM5 which feature a workout mode? If so, which ones?
3) If not, what version do I need to attain in order to utilize workout mode?

Thanks in advance.

Sincerely,
FWS

If you set the Calorie Calculation field on the profile editing screen, the default theme and Consensual will prompt you for your heart rate after every song.
I'm not aware of any themes that implement a full workout mode that picks songs for you until you hit some goal. I just configured my stepmania to allow 4 hours of play on a single credit and use that. Then pick Random in a group of known good songs until I'm done playing.
The default theme doesn't display a calorie counter during gameplay or on evaluation, but you can look at the total in your Stats.xml after a session.
Some DDR themes show a calorie counter, but they don't use the heart rate method, so it's less accurate. I seem to remember that the non-heart rate based method tends to give double the amount of calories, for my particular case. Play style makes a huge difference in actual effort expended, which should affect your heart rate, but the non-heart rate method can't detect play style at all.
Consensual doesn't show a calorie counter during gameplay because we don't have a method for getting the heart rate in the middle of a song. But the calorie amounts are shown in the profile info on the left.
For me, a session of ~50 minutes of game time (not counting menu time) typically comes out around 1000 calories using the heart rate method.

Hi Kyzentun!

Thanks so much for your reply. I apologize - I didn't see it until today. (I was expecting notifications! Oh well!)

Much obliged!

Question for you - I downloaded Consensual, and I feel like the pace at which the notes move is faster than they do with the standard theme. Is that just my imagination? If not, can I turn it off somehow?

Thanks in advance!

FWS

Notifications don't work and I wish shakesoda would remove that silly checkbox because they don't work.

If you set the same speed mod you use in the default theme, it's probably your imagination.
If you didn't set a speed mod, then the arrows seem faster because Consensual defaults to m250 speed mod, and the default theme defaults to 1x.
I picked m250 because at conventions I often had people asking how to make the arrows faster, but after I set m250 as the default nobody asked.
The speed mod is set through the options menu, just like in every theme. If you make a profile, your speed setting will be saved.

Rock on. Thanks again, Kyzentun!