@Cypher: Creating a new game is the point. You'd have to create a new Stepmania entirely to get anywhere.
I don't think this can currently be done on a volunteer basis. It was able to happen in the past because of the fanbase created by DDR, but DDR is dead now. You would need some kind of startup capital to allow people to work on this sort of thing full-time, and good luck with that.
@danceguy: I agree with Platform -- that's something I should have included, thanks for mentioning it. Platform is extremely important, and you don't want to go on any technology that will be old hat five years from now. This is why I suggested the USB option, because tablets are increasingly becoming a dominant market area.
I also completely forgot how bizarre the idea of adding songs is to non-Stepmania players, thank you for reminding me. smzip should have been mandatory and folders are a terrible idea; tags work a lot better.
Finally,
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I agree with a more centralized, structured style guide.
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Don't get hung up on this point.
The only reason I mentioned that is because it allows the game to establish what their "style" of charting is, since all games tend to have one. My initial charting of Gaussian Blur had to be revised, for example, for being "too IIDX-like." Port something from O2Jam in IIDX and it's equally weird.
But file theories like
- pitch relevance
- key designation (not sure if this has another name -- the idea that one instrument should stay on one key, or a set of keys)
- note proportioning (again, not sure if this has a name, but it's the idea that if you have a single note in the song, you should use a single note in the chart, not two-at-once, even if it "sounds" big.)
- instrument consistency (making a name up for this, but the idea that you cannot switch what instruments you are following arbitrarily, which SKoR's files do sometimes)
- note realism / rhythm realism (again, really just making shit up here, but the idea that you can only use rhythms or notes that actually exist in the song)
and are arbitrary judgment calls. Which is to say, there isn't really any indisputable reason why files which do some or all of these things are preferable to files that don't do any of these things. Mostly it's because you've become accustomed to one technique or another. I personally cannot stand files that use "instrument consistency" to any great degree. SKoR's files were ADHD as hell in this sense and I loved it.
but I mean, "note/rhythm realism" seems to be the most essential of all the above, and even that's up for debate. If you've played Guitar Hero you may be familiar with the
red snake, which is a string of very fast notes that don't actually exist in the song. How many people complained about this? Not any amount that would matter -- in fact, the "cultural" value (in the sense that it became a known thing to players and discussed extensively) was greater than what it would have been if they never used it.
If I were a game creator I probably would not place much importance on these things, because these have zero effect on how popular the game becomes. So the purpose of a style guide is just to say "these are broad guidelines for what we want, but you are not limited by them." Stepchart minutiae is one of my least favorite aspects of the Stepmania community because of how much of a drag on output it is.