A Stepmania 5 theme mod which replaces music selection with an auto song picker. Stop stressing over which song and level to pick, and just play.
- Selects steps by player score with some variation in target score.
- Prefers songs by inverse play count to maximize variety.
The problem for me was I tended to run through songs in the same order every time. Since I usually to do a kind of warm up/warm down, this also meant I would play the same songs on lower and higher levels in each group. I found the random options to be inconvenient to use and/or restrictive. I tried drunken-shame, but found the challenge adjustment stayed too easy for my taste.
This module picks songs by score independently of fixed orders to mix up the easy/hard ones, and tries to introduce some variation within a session, both for warm up/down, and for difficulty spikes and relaxes. Beyond that it prefers least played songs for variety, with some random noise to prevent it from cycling the same order over and over.
If you use Flow-DJ, you don't have to think about which song to play. Once you find score ranges that work for you, you usually don't have to think about what level to play, though you can tweak the settings as needed. (My range seems to be 60s-80s.) Unlike drunken shame, it pauses between every song, which works for me to monitor how things are going and take a drink.
Most limits up for discussion if there is sufficient interest. This is built around the way I play and there are probably a lot of issues I have never run into.
- Single player only.
- Stacks on
defaulttheme only, unlikely to work on all other themes. - Development started on Stepmania 5.0, and is now on Stepmania 5.1. It should still work with 5.0 and the old default (now legacy) theme, but I'm not running it regularly.
- No means to filter songs. There is currently a hard-coded exclusion of a song group named
Muted(which I use for songs muted by Twitch) - Score estimation assumes a single player set the high scores. However you can still request songs based on any target score, even if you won't get that score yourself.
- I play in event mode, and have not tested other modes.
- I play FailOff; providing scores, even bad ones, will help improve the model for estimating scores.
- Runs for a set (but easily configurable) number of songs.
- Always pauses on pick screen (time on this screen is also used to improve the estimated score model.)
Functionally a theme since that is the only extension mechanism available, Flow-DJ uses the fallback mechanism on the default theme. Install in your Themes folder and select it as the active theme.
The select music screen is effectively replaced with a screen that performs the picks and shows the current queue. The initial view will be a report on the model for estimating scores. It will switch to the normal screen when the model has improved a bit.
- Top left: current options
- Top center: Stage number
- Upper left: Song title image
- Lower Left: Score distribution graph, this is intended to show where the next song sits within your overall range of scores.
- Center/Right: song list each item has:
- Grey box: score selection range
- White mark: actual high score
- Blue mark: estimated score
- First line: meter, song name, song group
- Second line: notes-per-second, song artist, steps author
- START starts the song.
- BACK exits to the title screen.
- SELECT Cycles control modes for the arrow buttons. A short help line is shown on the bottom of the screen, long description follows:
- LEFT/RIGHT adjust the target score used to select songs. One confusing thing is there are only two score numbers: the start/end target used for warm-up/cool-down, and main target. Adjustments will be made to those numbers based on how they influence the current item.
- UP Enables you to go to the standard select music screen to manually pick a song. The song will receive the highest priority for use in the flow, but must still match the score selection conditions.
- DOWN allows you to review the last song's score screen. It is skipped by default.
- LEFT/RIGHT adjust the amount of wiggle or variation in the target scores.
- UP/DOWN adjust the number of stages.
- LEFT toggles playing the music sample from the current song
- UP toggles the view to the model display
The model for estimating scores of unplayed steps is a linear regression over the basic stats and groove-radar values available about each set of steps.
The left side shows the relative size of the weights for each factor.
Right shows a plot of the actual versus estimated scores. A perfect model would be a flat diagonal line. Below the plot, the overall model error is shown.
The model for estimating scores relies on high scores. If there are no scores on the current profile (or machine profile if no profile is selected), there is a bootstrapping mode that runs successively higher meters until a sufficiently low score is seen. However, you may wish to simply play a selection of songs in normal play mode to provide startup data.
The code was made with reference both to Stepmania code, and the Consensual theme in particular. It incorporates pieces of code from both upstream Stepmania (MIT) and Consensual (BSD 3-Clause), especially around saving settings. The remainder of the original work is Apache License 2.0.
- @wondible
- flow-dj on Github
- Gameplay and development sometimes at wondible on Twitch