I came across them when trying to get beatmania to work with two players. When I enter the song selection screen with auto set style set to 1 and then press the other player's start button, the game crashes with a message to the effect of "error: no style matches steps type bm-single7 with two players". Picking versus from the select style menu results in no songs being available, even with autogen turned on. So I tried making a sample note chart with the bm-versus7 steps type in the editor and to my astonishment the game crashed when I pressed enter on "Create New", with the message "You can't use this style in the editor!"
So I poked around in the source code and found out that since whenever the BMS loader finds a BMS which uses 14 keys it automatically makes it a doubles chart, which means there is in fact no way at all to make a beatmania versus chart in Stepmania apart from manually writing it in Notepad.
Curiously, I edited a couple of things in the source code. Looking at the dance-versus style, I changed the steps type used for the versus7 style to single7, and set "lock difficulties" to true, which forces both players to play on the same difficulty - this will avoid any horrendous cacophony from two players playing a song on different-sounding difficulties. I went into the song selection screen, pressed the other player's start button (it didn't crash this time), picked a song and the game worked exactly as expected - the notes even played out of the left speaker for player 1 and the right speaker for player 2, just like arcade IIDX.
So this raises the question, what even are the bm-versus5 and bm-versus7 styles doing there? I'd assume they were left over from earlier plans to implement 2 player couple-style play, but then how come there's no mention of them at all in NotesLoaderBMS and we're forbidden from making stepcharts for them in the editor?
So I poked around in the source code and found out that since whenever the BMS loader finds a BMS which uses 14 keys it automatically makes it a doubles chart, which means there is in fact no way at all to make a beatmania versus chart in Stepmania apart from manually writing it in Notepad.
Curiously, I edited a couple of things in the source code. Looking at the dance-versus style, I changed the steps type used for the versus7 style to single7, and set "lock difficulties" to true, which forces both players to play on the same difficulty - this will avoid any horrendous cacophony from two players playing a song on different-sounding difficulties. I went into the song selection screen, pressed the other player's start button (it didn't crash this time), picked a song and the game worked exactly as expected - the notes even played out of the left speaker for player 1 and the right speaker for player 2, just like arcade IIDX.
So this raises the question, what even are the bm-versus5 and bm-versus7 styles doing there? I'd assume they were left over from earlier plans to implement 2 player couple-style play, but then how come there's no mention of them at all in NotesLoaderBMS and we're forbidden from making stepcharts for them in the editor?
