Post #1 · Posted at 2012-05-02 02:56:26am 12.5 years ago
 Daiz | |
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| Reg. 2008-10-29 | |
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| "TAKING IT TO THE PIE" | |
As you know I created "SimPhony", the Stepmania Sim -> DDR Edit converter that's a windows based application. One really cool idea I had was to turn the application into a web site based feature that worked as such:
The user uploads a simfile that contains just a .sm. The user select which "chart" is their edit (Beginner through Edit, Singles/Doubles). They can set other information such as difficulty, comment1, comment 2 (it's a set list, 1 to 10), and edit name (8 letters, ASCII characters I believe) and a "measure offset".
A quick explanation of measure offset. As you know the sync between official Konami files vs what's found here on the site can be off in sync and gap, but edits only contain step data. Because of this, a Konami file might have a gap set in such a way that the very first step of the chart begins on measure 3, which might actually be 6 measures into the song. However, the simfile for that song here might have a gap such that the first step happens on measure 6. Because of this, the simfile, when converted, will have basically 3 measures of "dead space". When converted and played, the chart will appear to be 3 measures too late. Because of this, you must strip out the first 3 measures of the simfile so that the beginning measure is aligned with what the Konami chart will be. Most songs I've tried match, but many songs are off and must be accounted for. I've done 70+ edits so far and I have quite a healthy list of offsets that we can use to tell the user "if you got the sim from this site, use this offset".
Anyways, once the user uploads the sim, the server would spoof a request to the Konami servers that generates the XML needed to get a .DAT file. The .DAT file is then stored with the sim. From here, users can download individual .DAT files and zip them and use Konami's existing tool to convert the edits, or we can provide a tool that does it for us. Unfortunately I have been unsuccessful at spoof the web request needed to send a proper zip file to get a .DAT back from Konami with multiple edits, but I think this is more of an issue of the Zip library I'm using for C#.
Finally, users can obviously rate edits and if someone modifies their edit, they can upload a new sim or changes the offset, they can upload/modify it and a new .DAT is generated.
This would allow people to preview edits on Stepmania and then download the edits to play on their local X/X2.
The heart of the development would be spoofing the web requests. I can work with you on how I did this as it requires several requests as I believe the server "tracks" the user as they go through the editor wizard.
Also, each edit requires the proper song id from a list I have (you've see it before, the master id list).
The user uploads a simfile that contains just a .sm. The user select which "chart" is their edit (Beginner through Edit, Singles/Doubles). They can set other information such as difficulty, comment1, comment 2 (it's a set list, 1 to 10), and edit name (8 letters, ASCII characters I believe) and a "measure offset".
A quick explanation of measure offset. As you know the sync between official Konami files vs what's found here on the site can be off in sync and gap, but edits only contain step data. Because of this, a Konami file might have a gap set in such a way that the very first step of the chart begins on measure 3, which might actually be 6 measures into the song. However, the simfile for that song here might have a gap such that the first step happens on measure 6. Because of this, the simfile, when converted, will have basically 3 measures of "dead space". When converted and played, the chart will appear to be 3 measures too late. Because of this, you must strip out the first 3 measures of the simfile so that the beginning measure is aligned with what the Konami chart will be. Most songs I've tried match, but many songs are off and must be accounted for. I've done 70+ edits so far and I have quite a healthy list of offsets that we can use to tell the user "if you got the sim from this site, use this offset".
Anyways, once the user uploads the sim, the server would spoof a request to the Konami servers that generates the XML needed to get a .DAT file. The .DAT file is then stored with the sim. From here, users can download individual .DAT files and zip them and use Konami's existing tool to convert the edits, or we can provide a tool that does it for us. Unfortunately I have been unsuccessful at spoof the web request needed to send a proper zip file to get a .DAT back from Konami with multiple edits, but I think this is more of an issue of the Zip library I'm using for C#.
Finally, users can obviously rate edits and if someone modifies their edit, they can upload a new sim or changes the offset, they can upload/modify it and a new .DAT is generated.
This would allow people to preview edits on Stepmania and then download the edits to play on their local X/X2.
The heart of the development would be spoofing the web requests. I can work with you on how I did this as it requires several requests as I believe the server "tracks" the user as they go through the editor wizard.
Also, each edit requires the proper song id from a list I have (you've see it before, the master id list).