Guidance for Difficulty/Meter levels

[jjaquinta]

Hey Folks,
I'm working on a stepfile generator. Like the old Dancing Gorilla, but just for MIDI files. The last time I tried this a few year ago I found a guide that had suggested ranges for the different difficulty levels. But now I can't seem to find it.
Has anyone seen something like that? Right now I'm trying to backward engineer it by computing averages and ranges from a corpus of stepfiles. But I'd rather use official guidelines if there are any.
Cheers,
Jo

[Dinglesberry]

depends what you want to generate the files for I suppose, most would say that pad, index, keyboard etc all have different difficulty levels

if you mean keyboard files, then i guess the etterna difficulty levels would be a good place to start https://etternaonline.com/pack (shows packs and their ratings n stuff)

if you mean pad files then the ITG scale probably http://r21freak.com/phpbb3/viewtopic.php?f=6&t=27135

[jjaquinta]

Thanks for pointing me in this direction. What I'll do is make those presets. I've added issues into my backlog to support those.

My family plays Stepmania on a pad, is young, and trends towards the easier skills. I've done all the songs in the "Disney Rave" pack so many times I want to gouge my eyes out. So I resurrected my generator and have been re-tooling it to work with MIDI files. The sound may suck, but beat detection doesn't require a doctoral thesis. Also, since I get note detection for free, I'm even able to pick out repeated patterns from the music and match up dance steps to repeated refrains.

I made a breakthrough yesterday and got my BPMs working right, so it now produces playable output. Difficulty isn't consistent though. And I'm piling up issues in the trackers to extend it beyond quarter notes, add double steps, hold, mines, etc. It's all up in gitHub (in Java) for anyone who is interested. My a/c here is too new to post links, but if you search for "jjaquinta" you'll find it.

Anyway, if you want to post a URL to a MIDI file here (or attach it, since they're small) I'll run it through what I've got and you can make suggestions/report bugs/etc.

Cheers,
Jo

[jjaquinta]

Thanks for the help. I'm now getting workable output from my program. It's never going to be as good as hand edited stuff, but I think it will be fine for bulk work, or for at least doing the hard work of aligning BPM to beats as a pre-cursor to hand editing.

There's a sample below. Many thanks for any comments or suggestions.

(My account is too new to post URLs. Let's try spelling it out...)

www dot ocean dash of dash storms dot com slash vote4joe slash HallOfTheMountainKing.zip