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StepMania is a free, open source rhythm video game for Windows, Mac, and Linux created by Chris Danford. It was originally developed as a simulator of Konami's popular arcade and console video game series, Dance Dance Revolution, and has since evolved into an extensible rhythm game engine capable of supporting a wide variety of rhythm-based game types.

Gameplay

The primary gametype features the following gameplay: as arrows scroll upwards on the screen, they will meet with a stationary set of target arrows. When they meet the targets, the player should press the corresponding arrow on his keyboard or dance mat. The moving arrows will meet the targets based on the beat of the song, so the player's sense of rhythm plays a great role in the gameplay. The game is scored based upon how accurately the player can trigger the arrows in time to the beat of the song. The player's efforts are awarded by letter grades that tell him/her how well the player has done; AAAA is the highest award and E is total failure (although there are two types of E grades, one that registers scores and one that doesn't - probably denoting the difference between pass and fail). StepMania allows for several input options. The keyboard can be used to tap out the rhythms using the arrow keys, or specialized adapters that connect console peripherals like PS2 and Xbox controllers or dance pads to one's computer can be used.

Keyboard

Some enjoy playing Stepmania on the keyboard. Many people found on Stepmania Online servers are able to pass songs otherwise impossible to pass on the pad. There are three common techniques to playing Stepmania.

• Index: Players press the arrow keys using their index fingers. This technique best emulates dancing on a pad. Players are reported to get superior timing using this technique.
• Spread: Players press keys with the index and middle fingers of both hands. Unlike index, the arm and wrist need not move, as one specific finger is assigned to one specific key. Players often change the key configuration of Stepmania to have a more comfortable "spread pattern", such as a-s-k-l, and q-w-o-p instead of the arrow keys. They keys in spread patterns are usually congruent to the positions of arrow columns on the screen. Players are reported to get superior speed and ability to pass harder songs using this technique.
• One Hand: Playing one handed bears no technical advantage other than impressiveness. Tapping keys with one hand in rapid succession quickly wears out that hand.

System requirements

These requirements are only the minimum needed to run the game, and having just the minimum does not necessarily result in smooth operation.

• Windows 98, Windows Me, Windows 2000, Windows XP, Linux, Mac OS X, has been tested with Windows Vista RC2 and works.
• Pentium II or higher, Celeron, Athlon, or compatible processor, 266MHz minimum (400 MHz recommended)
• 64 MB of memory
• Video card that supports High Color (16-bit color) and has 8MB video RAM and OpenGL or Direct3D drivers.
• DirectX 7.0 compatible sound card with drivers

Features

Owing to its open-source development, StepMania has a number of features, both based upon various rhythm games and introduced in StepMania. Some of these include:

• Custom Songs ("Stepfiles"): StepMania allows users to create their own custom dance patterns to their favorite songs. The program includes a comprehensive Step Editor to aid the creation of these stepfiles. Note that while stepfiles can be shared and copied, it is a violation of copyright law in some localities to distribute a stepfile package with copyrighted songs if one does not own their copyrights and/or have a license to distribute them.
• Background Animations: Support for many types of animations behind the arrows onscreen, including sprite-based animation sequences, a single full-motion video or multiple FMV visualization overlays.
• Modifiers: Visual mods that affect the scroll of arrows and either increase or decrease difficulty. StepMania includes multiple modifiers featured in Dance Dance Revolution as well as dozens of additional modifiers created exclusively for StepMania.
• Mines: An object that scrolls onto the screen along with the arrows. The player must avoid triggering the mines on the screen or have his dance gauge penalised by having it reduced. This step type was developed for the StepMania-based arcade game In The Groove, and was ported into StepMania itself during development of that title.
• Rolls: A special freeze arrow (colored Purple by default) which requires a rapid tap on to keep alive. This step type was developed for the sequel to In The Groove - In the Groove 2, and was ported into StepMania 3.95 CVS builds.(Now Stepmania 4.00 CVS.)
• Multiple game types, including partial simulation of other dance games like Pump It Up, ParaParaParadise and EZ2Dancer.
• Real-time lyrics, which display on the lower half of the screen for stepfiles that include the .LRC filetype.
• Custom themes: users or create their own skins for Stepmania.
• Dancing characters: 3-dimensional character models that dance in the background according to a pre-defined routine.
• Network play: support for lobby-based online play, dubbed StepMania Online. Typically, users connect through a centralized server at http://stepmaniaonline.com/

Availability

StepMania has been used as the base engine in a variety of commercial and non-commercial products. It has also been ported to several platforms including Xbox.

There have been many arcade dance game cabinets retrofitted with a PC running StepMania.

In The Groove (ITG) is an arcade dance game developed by the core StepMania developers. To prevent unauthorized copying, StepMania was re-licensed under a less restrictive license (changed from GPL to the MIT License with the agreement of all coders, in exchange for their names appearing on the ITG credits screen), not requiring source code to be published on derivative works, and thus allowing ITG's copy protection to remain closed source.

See also

• Dance With Intensity
• In The Groove
• Dance Dance Revolution
• Pump It Up

External links

• StepMania Homepage
• SourceForge Stepmania Project Page
• Stepmania Online integrates competitive online play.

• Articles lacking sources from December 2006
• Dance video games
• Mac OS X games
• Linux games
• Windows games
• SourceForge games
• Fanmade computer game remakes and sequels
• Computer and video games with custom soundtrack support