Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

[Dinglesberry]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

Lol I love some good drama, but like it just so happens that parser is public, so I used it.

If there's a better one, I'd use that. I can't see a better way to quickly approximate difficulty at the moment :/

Maybe if we parse a million files it'll time the site out Kappa

[SpaceGorilla]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

yo dingleberry i actually like your difficulty thing
something open-source that does its own file parsing would be amazing (good luck finding out how to do that lmao) because it would give people the ability to make their own difficulty scales for each pack

[Dinglesberry]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

yo dingleberry i actually like your difficulty thing
something open-source that does its own file parsing would be amazing (good luck finding out how to do that lmao) because it would give people the ability to make their own difficulty scales for each pack

Writing the parser for sm files to simply read them is peanuts, the problem is actually analyzing the patterns to determine difficulties. You can view a sm file as plaintext, just open it in notepad - the data for notes is 0s and 1s and you can understand it just by looking at it.

What's incredibly hard is determining what makes it difficult, like say a you take two same speed jumpstream, how do you judge which one is harder if the jumps are different, or the notes between the jumps are different?

There are alot of ways to judge difficulties, I've seen posts on the FFR difficulty forums where people cite the number of AAAs relative to plays. In my opinion, the best way to determine difficulties would be where stepmania syncs online and auto records scores, and difficulty would be machine learning where the parser learns to analyze songs with data from how individual players perform relative to their current skill and dynamically adjusts the difficulties, but I'm dumb and can't implement something like that lol, and it would require online integration with stepmania, and obviously it's not so easy to control the development of stepmania.

[SpaceGorilla]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

What's incredibly hard is determining what makes it difficult, like say a you take two same speed jumpstream, how do you judge which one is harder if the jumps are different, or the notes between the jumps are different?

one thing sml does (and i believe this is a good approach, in theory) is counts jack density and per-hand stamina

when i made my adjustments to the algorithm i improved jack density by counting not only the note directly before the "current" one, but also the one before that. you'd probably need some sort of exponential formula for jacks by bpm, because obviously an 8th jack at 200 bpm isn't going to make a big difference for most people, but if it's 400 bpm, that same jack can cause a big cbrush (ofc depending on context, but that should have be to analyzed as well)

[tosh]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

just a reminder that TLD .8 is still rated 28

Also, Drop It! Yoko! 1.0 is somehow a 29.24

[Dinglesberry]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

I'm just sitting here trying figure out how to build a tree of the directory structure, and I realize I just need to compare a given songs parent folder to the root, and recursively create a tree of that, then do the same for the next level.... Shit

Maybe another day, before my head and the program explodes.

[Gruzzly_Bear]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

thanks so much for this! i mean it obviously has issues considering it's pulling diffs from randomnumbergenerator.com and it doesn't take into account higher difficulties, but it's a lot better than nothing

[Dinglesberry]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

Dang from my logs theres a bunch of downloads already, glad people are making use of it.

If anyone is interested in the source code or how it works feel free to pm me and I'll send you the code/explain it. The only thing interesting about it is my use of custom data structures and the way I make use of objects for storing folders/specific songs, but most of it is pretty basic stuff. I'm glad I used java though, ez

[hi19hi19]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

Okay honestly this is a really good idea, and it's what I was hoping Mina's difficulty calculator would eventually become. Because if you pair it with a decent algorithm it actually gives the community the ability to patch their entire song folder and be talking about the same difficulty scale. This is something the SM community has been sorely needing for what like, a decade and a half now?

So I really hope you aren't discouraged by people bashing on the algorithm, because that's unrelated to what you've made and the piece you worked on actually looks quite nice.

That said I stand by my statement: SML's algorithm is garbage and until that changes I will prefer relying on pack authors to at least made the difficulties consistent with each other within each specific pack. I hope you can find someone with a better algorithm (read: Mina, but maybe there's some other ones out there too idk) and pair this tool up with their work, because I'd use it in a heartbeat if that was the case.

[Mad Matt]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

Writing an accurate difficulty algorithm is pretty hard, although I imagine it's not as bad for keyboard/spread since you don't have to deal with fingers changing location in the pattern analysis.

[YoshL]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

Okay honestly this is a really good idea, and it's what I was hoping Mina's difficulty calculator would eventually become. Because if you pair it with a decent algorithm it actually gives the community the ability to patch their entire song folder and be talking about the same difficulty scale. This is something the SM community has been sorely needing for what like, a decade and a half now?

So I really hope you aren't discouraged by people bashing on the algorithm, because that's unrelated to what you've made and the piece you worked on actually looks quite nice.

That said I stand by my statement: SML's algorithm is garbage and until that changes I will prefer relying on pack authors to at least made the difficulties consistent with each other within each specific pack. I hope you can find someone with a better algorithm (read: Mina, but maybe there's some other ones out there too idk) and pair this tool up with their work, because I'd use it in a heartbeat if that was the case.

bolded emphasis part

[MinaciousGrace]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

you know it's a testament to the quality of my work that it still holds up reasonable results at a first glance

[MinaciousGrace]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

Writing an accurate difficulty algorithm is pretty hard, although I imagine it's not as bad for keyboard/spread since you don't have to deal with fingers changing location in the pattern analysis.

I disagree.

I feel like pad charts have a more "sterile" pattern environment and the variation and more importantly the differential contributions to difficulty thereof makes keyboard analysis much more difficult. The hard part I've found isn't accounting for any singular physical reality of the game, it's accounting for many different ones that may present similarly to each other without being either redundant or too explicit.

An extremely fast burst might lead into a fast stream, and whether or not it's "super cbrushable" and very difficult or just "mashy then streamy" might depend on the transition point being 30 ms closer or further. Or it might depend on how the ending sequence of the burst forces you to manipulate it relative to which fingers the beginning patterns of the stream focus on. Or it could depend on both, or neither. Or it could depend on the length of the burst, or any of these things. And that's just consideration for whether or not a single frame of time lasting maybe a half second might drastically increase the difficulty of the file or be a negligible factor.

And that's assuming you get far enough juggling all the more macro pattern analysis to even get to something localized within half a second. More importantly it's entirely possible that the half second in question is only relevant factor in the file's difficulty. See linus' dengeki tube edit in odi3 for the perfect example of this.

Anyway, some time ago there was a pad pack released here. Apocalypse something, I think. I ran it through one of the very early iterations of my kb oriented difficulty calculator and I from what I remember more than 90% of the results lay within +-1 of the values provided by the pack organizers after scaling. That's better accuracy than I get on most keyboard packs by a longshot.

But neither of us is going to try to build a calculator for the other and admittedly I know next to nothing about pad, so we can agree to disagree.

[Leo137]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

i wouldn't recommend changing the difficulty number because of SMO side effects. The scorelists wont work right and also those numbers are likely to change in the future. Better would be to take the difficulty numbers from files and display them in-game using lua theming. It also frees everyone from requesting sml to calculate the same files repeated times, as you could just share the files with the values.

As it takes a while to process, i'm afraid it might be too consuming for the server to keep replying those massive requests, so it helps for it too.

[Callipygian]

Re: Stepmania Difficulity Correcter [WIP]

Good initiative. Mfw Ice Candy Pop is rated 21 and Chipstream 10 though. Can this be a problem of averaging difficulty over a file? Because Chipstream is really easy for most of the file and then has a few speed-ups that make the ending hard. You should try your algorithm on something like Aragorn. Of course, even if it rates something like Aragorn as a low difficulty file, it can be argued whether that is necessarily a bad thing, since it depends to what extent difficulty should reflect how easy a file is to FC or AAA or how hard it feels on average. Anyway, good luck tweaking it!