Advice on Stepfiles

[ddr_f4n]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

First and foremost, try not to double/triple/quad post, use the edit button on your last response if no one posted after you :V

And yeah, use dropbox. I really don't like Mediafire now especially since they recently enforced download limits for free users only =/

[stargroup100]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

seems like you're new to forums

you made the thread like a couple of hours ago be patient

[icontrolyourworld]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

let me be the one to introduce you to the edit button! at the bottom right of all your posts is an edit button, if you see that you're about to double post edit your previous one and add whatever information you wish to it. everyone else follows this rule, so i thought i would just help out. cheers!

[TheSilentLord]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

I'll play them later today and try to say something about them. Though I'm also a beginner myself so the veterans might disagree.

[stargroup100]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

k i skimmed through the charts and as i suspected these dont look very promising compared to modern chart standards

to summarize, your charts all have the same issue that a lot of amateur/inexperienced notecharters have: you don't really understand what you're doing

i dont mean it like "oh you're dumb you have no clue", i say it like that because if i were to go into the chart and ask you why you put this here, or why you chose this particular pattern, the answers you give me will pretty much be the same: either you don't know or you did it arbitrarily. any other answer would pretty much be wrong

when you're making a chart, there are core fundamentals to keep in mind:
1. does it follow the music accurately
2. how does it flow, does the file feel smooth to play
3. is it consistent and fitting to the song

there are countless things in these charts that dont follow the music or follow it poorly, and a lot of your charts have really awkward patterns that dont flow well. remember that whenever you make a chart, you need to constantly be playtesting everything

-----------------------------

we'll look at the very beginning of beyond the core. i dont wanna go through all of the difficulties so im only gonna look at the challenge chart

m1-4
you seem to understand the accenting of the intro section up to measure 5. however, note the following: the first 2 measures repeat at measure 3, at least the beginning of it anyways. however, in measure 1 you have 2 single notes, where in measure 3 you have a double hold, and there's no justification for this, so it's inconsistent.
secondly, there's no justification to the holds either. at the end of measure 4 there's a fill, so that double hold can be justified, but the others are held for no particular reason, and if there was, it wouldn't be consistent
thirdly, these patterns aren't particularly fitting for the piece either. while your accenting is right, given the difficulty of the chart, it would be very appropriate to follow the pulsing 8ths you hear in the background

m5-12
clearly you didn't playtest this, or your judgment regarding it is poor, because that pattern is extremely annoying to hit, especially repeating for 8 whole measures.
in addition, it's extremely bland because it doesn't follow anything but the drums, and even then it ignores a lot of patterns that would add rich variation, like the 16th fill at the end of measure 8.
also note that at m11-12, the drum pattern completely changes, but your patterns don't, and it feels awkward to play

the following section gets trickier since there is a melody line, so i'd have much more to say if i were going into detail, but you get the basic idea behind my points. just make sure you're paying attention to why you're placing each note. for example, in these following sections, sometimes you have 8th notes that repeat on columns, and other times you don't, but there's no consistent rule for this. remember that repeating notes on columns and changing columns result in very different feeling, so there should be justification when going between the two



so in summary, if you want your pack to be even remotely successful and have a lot of plays, you're gonna have to do some serious overhauls of most, if not all, of your charts, which i can imagine might be disheartening to hear, considering how much work you've already done. however, being honest i can tell you that if these charts were released as such, none of them would be getting more than 1 or 2 plays when major packs chock full of quality charts exist. so if you really want your pack to get some attention, you're gonna have work to do. whether or not it compares to the modern packs is one thing, but having charts at least be playable or fun at a basic level is another

my recommendation is that you find and download smg2, odi, and odi2 packs, play them, and look to those as examples to emulate. i picked these packs because they are somewhat oldschool in style, which you might be able to follow and enjoy more, but at the same time they are good quality charts to reference and learn from

[poe15]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

Thanks for the criticism. I guess what you're saying is more or less what it boils down to: I need more experience and need to put more thought into how to make the charts more interesting and give them better design. I'll give those packs you suggested a look and see what I can learn from them.

[stargroup100]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

glad to be of help

always nice to see new aspiring keyboard notecharters

[TheSilentLord]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

Because I'm tired and because stargroup pretty much nailed it, I'll give you just some quick impressions on the files. These are just my personal opinions so dont take them too seriously. They are based on sightread play anyway. Also, if i sound negative, please assume that I liked everything i didnt complain about.

Beyond the core (challenge):

So the start is pretty basic and then comes this weird pattern of hand-hand-jump-hand-hand-jump etc. It could be ok if accenting a special part but it just continues... so I ended up mashing all the four keys in the rhythm of the song resulting in a 150 note combo. Then comes a (IMO) decent part where you have this jumpstream containing a few hands. I can't say if the placement of the hands was appropriate but at least it didnt bug me too much. Next come the short holds which was okay except the length of the holds seemed a bit odd to me. All good until the guitar melody comes out with almost constand quad hold (???). I think a better way would be to cut down the holds a bit so you could bring out accents better. Now it felt to me that I would get the best result by again holding all the four keys down and re-tapping them whenever the rhythm of the song so required. The mine part was okay but maybe you could have done some variation to the pattern and not just have a ton of hands with a mine after each other? The rest of the song didn't leave me with any special feelings. All in all, I didn't really like this song because of the (IMO) way overused hands and quads.

Septette (standard):

This is a prime example where you should cut a song. You have only a few patterns (I'd say 3 or 4 which get repeated again and again throughout the song) and that Isn't IMO enough to step a song as long as this one is. In the start I was actually thinking: "really, hasn't this pattern come now over 10 times in a row?". Even if the difficulty isn't high, that doesn't mean you can get lazy and copypasta the same thing over and over. The middle part was enjoyable for me and I don't have any complaints about it. But then we come to the end part which has again the same big problem as the beginning. This could have been an enjoyable easy chart if you had cut the song to about half and made some variation in the repeating parts. I actually had the feeling this chart wasn't ready and was thinking if the repeats were some sort of placeholder.

Jeux Interdits (Challenge):

Unfortunately the song is WAY offsync which made playing it somewhat a pain. The beginning was okay but I must admit that I wasn't a huge fan of the trills-while-hold stuff (but this is only my opinion). The placement of the patterns remained ambigous as I couldn't point out any reason you would have a steady line of 4th jumps on one part and a stream of 16ths in another part where the music was almost the same. The biggest weakness was the inconsistency of patterns which seemed to come almost randomly depending on what you decided to step each time. I think it would be better to think up a pattern for each part of the music and then use it every time a similar part comes up, of course making slight variation to avoid too much repetition. Remember that fixing the sync should be #1 priority because (sadly) most people won't even bother to play an off-sync song to the end.

Judgment star (Challenge):

Just some quick notes - my stepmania crashed 5 times during my play of this file for god-knows-what reason. I liked the pattern you used in the start. The mines were okay too. However, later on the placement of the mines became extremely annoying for me (or then i'm just bad, you should wait for a second opinion on the mines before doing anything to them). This file suffered again from the same problems as the previous ones: inconsistent patterning with trills appearing pretty randomly in places where you had room. The hand/quad holds were a bit overused IMO. In the end, this file had a few good patterns in the start and somewhere in the middle.

Hardstyle colony (Heavy):

This was the one I enjoyed the most out of these 5 files. The patterns were swingy and i thought the went pretty well alongside the music. The beginning was questionable, though. Like before, some patterns were repeated way too many times which took it's toll on the enjoyability of the file. Also, I thought I noticed quite a few misplaced notes and missing ones. Cutting the song could again do wonders here. At least I don't like to play very long songs with parts which are repeated multiple times. Anyway, this wasn't half bad.


Okay, it became longer than I thought and also more negative than intended. I can't really call these good files but at least they have some merit in them. I hope you don't get discouraged by my harsh criticism, and remember that these are just opinions some might and WILL disagree with. I know the amount of effort you must have made to the step the files is large, but at least this is a good starting point to move forward. Good luck stepping!

[poe15]

Re: Advice on Stepfiles

It's fine. Regarding the trills/streams, I think part of the reason I avoided patterns a lot is because I, personally, felt that the more predictable patterns were a little easy. Since I started playing I've played a LOT of songs with predictable patterns, and the more time passed, the easier they became. This is not excluded to streams only(though they are probably the most prominent; probably not as good at jumps/hands/quads); I wanted to try things that seemed unlike things I'd seen as yet. For example, I very rarely see lifts used in songs, and I've basically never seen the "holds streams" parts of certain songs that I'd put in.

I think what I wanted to do with these songs was make them less predictable and try patterns I've not seen much and see how they turned out. Perhaps not quite as well as I'd hoped... all I can do, really, is take the good I've garnered from this and discard the bad.

Also, yes, Hardstyle Colony is probably one of my favorites that I've done so far, too.

Edit: Now that I think about it, there's a possibility that your crash may be related to the music file. As I have been told, there are some music files that cause SM to have problems syncing the chart properly while editing them. What this problem basically does is, for whatever reason, causes offset to go off the wire as you change your position in the song; basically meaning I have to constantly try to change the song's offset to edit the song every time I change position and try to demplay, and it is still a time consuming process; I have to choose whether to change position and edit the offset to sync the chart or let the demoplay bring me to the point I wish to get to; both time consuming processes. I decided that after I finished this song(because by the point I figured out that this was a problem I couldn't fix, I had already completed easy and medium and some of hard and decided it wasn't worth discarding the effort I'd already put in), I decided never to do it again.

There is strong possibility that I uploaded a version of the song that has the offset entirely wrong; when last saving the song(which was a while ago)I had likely set the offset to something which is NOT correct but still synced the chart to the song correctly at the given point I was trying to demo play at. The proper offset is -0.05. This should correct your problem. But I can't say for sure...