Sourcetrunk (Episode 024)
| This episode will get you off your seat, step to the beat, shake the meat and appreciate the effort that has been put in this beautiful rhythmic dancing game that is called Stepmania. Try it out. |
I. Games : Stepmania
StepMania is a free dance and rhythm game featuring 3D graphics, dance pad support, and a step editor.
Nearly all music games are based on the principle of notes floating up or down the screen; as the notes reach targets, the player presses a button corresponding to the target and is judged based on his timing - each note is then graded on the level of accuracy achieved, with the highest levels adding to a combo count that continues as long as successive note grades are at or above the combo level. A life bar measures whether or not your performance is sufficent to pass the song and continue play. At the end of the song, you recieve a score and overall grade.
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www.stepmania.com auto step generator |
music from Steffen Coonan on music.podshow.com
theme from Brand New Sin on music.podshow.com
beer on this episode : Kasteelbier Bruin 
mp3 feed
speeding up the podcast
I had to leave a comment about your mention on this episode regarding speeding up audio files to cram in as much info as possible. I often do this when listening to CBT's (Computer Based Training). For instance, when I listen to CISCO, MS SQL, .Net, etc. training, I find that my brain absorbes more content by speeding it up. Depending on the speaker, I can speed it up to 3X normal speed.
I have not done this for podcasts only because I have found that the natural conversational rythym is much more enjoyable. Even though most of my podcasts are tech related, I listen mostly for entertainment.
What I really wanted to comment on was your artful integration of an example of listening to your podcast in a speedy format. LOL :) Those little quirks in your podcast keep me coming back!
Thanks for all your hard work. You provide a unique experience to your listeners! Keep it comming.!
Hi, making the distinction
Hi,
making the distinction between real educational audio and information tech podcasts is something I haven't thought of yet. You are right, I wouldn't speed up the podcasts I enjoy listening to, but I know quite a few audio trainings where I should try this out on.
great idea. I think I'll share this in the next episode.
thanks for the nice feedback !
Dimi
Front page on StepMania.com
This podcast has been noticed by the head admin over at the stepmania site and is already set up to be featured on the front page of stepmania.com (it'll be on there tomorrow, the 16th of august.)
a quick comment: not every set of song data has background animations, most of them simply have a still image for the background. there's two reasons for this, the major one being that on some slower machines, even the simplest of background animations can slow the game down.
now, as far as contributing towards stepmania (beyond advertising), my suggestion is to go over there, get the most recent 4.0 CVS release, play with it a bit, and if you get any major issues (especially crashes - we don't like crashes happening), let us know on the forum. if you're a programmer with good knowledge of C++ and understand the basic structure of XML, you could try making small tweaks to the source code and seeing if you can make it better for the general community (or, at the very least, for yourself).
once again, we do appreciate this podcast.
-Megaman Z, StepMania forum moderator
Hi Megaman, I had some
Hi Megaman,
I had some problems with my comments setup and missed this feedback until now, I'll mention your feedback on episode 026.
I'm currently in the process of playing it on the keyboard to see what all the fuss is about.
Keep up the nice programming work.
regards,
Dimi.
Hi, the comments will be in
Hi,
the comments will be in episode 027 ... lost track of comments. my apologies.
Dimi