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                                  (for osc4)

song: 冥 (mei) (for osc4)
    artist: amuro vs killer
          length: 1:38
                genre: human sequencer (drum & bass)
                     album: beatmania iidx 12 happy sky ost

steps by: xythar
        graphics by: xythar (with help from mazrim taim)
                   source images by: ta-k
                                   video by: ta-k
                                           song cut by: pkeruno
                                                      

author email: gmmazz@hotmail.com
            previous stepfiles: gotta get my groove on (tm5)
                                 collision chaos (osc3)
                                  born to be bone (tm6)
                                   taratta dance (cheesemix 2)
                                    ??? (vjamix: happy sky)
                              weird readme format not inspired by: hojo


so, here i am again for osc4. in this readme i will attempt to be both hip
*and* edgy by avoiding using uncool things like capital letters. well, maybe
i'm just bored.

i've actually had this planned since tournamix 6, rather than it being a last
minute attempt to jump on the "omg iidx songs have no penalty!" bandwagon. ;)
i was always intending to pick mei regardless of the penalty, because i had an
idea and wanted to carry through with it. for this, i wanted to do more than just
take a iidx song and add ddr steps to it - i wanted to make mei into a ddr song
(and hopefully be annoyingly pretentious in the process).

to this end, i have done certain reinterpretative things that may annoy people.
well, really just one thing - the whole start is now 100 bpm. with the excellent
song cut that pker made for me (he even repeated one bar of the song so that the
cut didn't feel too abrupt), the piano in the first part is now gone and so it
really does feel to me like it could easily be 100 bpm. in the end, i think this
works better - to me, the song flows better when it begins at 100 bpm for the
first ~30 seconds and then gradually speeds up to 200 (as opposed to starting at
200 and then abruptly dropping to 100 some time in the middle). furthermore, i did
this because i wanted to come up with what could be called the sequel to 'a' from
ddr extreme (and iidx, i know) - slow and easy first half, speedy second half with
8th streams. mei's gradual speedup is really cool and lets me make the transition
from slow to fast much more interesting than a simple speedup. people will probably
still complain because it's not exactly the same as iidx, but that's life.

getting this song synched correctly was a bit of a challenge. while i could copy
the tempo changes off the hibroad chart, i found that by fiddling with the gap i
could either sync the first part correctly or the second part, but not both. i
ruled out the cut as causing the problem because if i tweaked it to be on sync
with the first half, there was no loss of sync after the cut point, only later on
when the song reaches 200bpm. eventually i solved this accidentally by randomly
trying an 16th-length freeze during the final speedup - later research by 
platinumhawke into the song showed that the second measure after the song reaches
200bpm (the one with the crazy 32nds on another in iidx) is in fact 189.1 bpm on
the ost version, instead of 200 like on the game version. weird.

by a happy coincidence, one measure at 189.1 bpm takes about the same amount of
time as one measure at 200 bpm plus one extra 16th. in the end i decided to stick
with my accidental solution and simply made the freeze longer (it's 2.125 beats
now) so that it looked less weird and more a-like. it doesn't make the song any
harder as there's a sufficient gap around it, and everything seems to be on sync
now (several friends have had no problems with the sync on both stepmania and dwi)
so i shall leave it at that.

the bpm double on the freeze in the middle is just for effect. :) i bet half the
people who play won't even notice it.

to make the background, i took a screencap from the video which then needed tidying
up. it's from when the mei logo is displayed in white on a black background at the
start, as opposed to when it's shown on a 'tv static' background, because due to
the video compression the tv static looks like ass in a still image. the logo came
off the video rather well but the line around it looked a bit thin and ratty so the
good mazrim taim redrew it for me - and that's the background. it blends decently
into the beginning of the video, i think.

the banner is another frame from the video, shrunk by me and with the mei logo
added to it (after i isolated it from the black background with a bit of effort).
i added the artist name in some font which i don't even remember the name of now,
but which looks pretty cool. overall, i'm especially pleased with the banner.

the video is the arcade rip of the mei video after some editing by me in premiere
and virtualdub. firstly i found that rather than try and cram the iidx aspect ratio
into your screen and have the video look ugly and stretched, i could simply crop
the top and bottom of the frame and still have it look fine. i also had to edit out
part of the video to match the music edit, but i think i did a decent job of that
too (a crossfade was used to make it less noticeable). after doing that in premiere
and saving it as a raw avi, i used virtualdub to resize it to the correct 320x240
size and used two-pass xvid encoding to save it as an avi of the highest quality
i could make it while still staying under the size limit (no sound in order to fit
extra video quality in). the avi wound up being 9.43 mb. the video should play fine
in both stepmania and dwi, i think it actually looks a little better in dwi because
stepmania insists on showing the background (which isn't really necessary) at the
start and end.

and now for the steps, which as always i made in stepmania's editor.

beginner
        2 feet
              95 steps
                      104 combo

what is there to say? it's beginner. i did try to make it match the music as
much as i could, but there's only so much (or so little, rather) you can do
following konami's rules for beginner steps (one step every 2 beats at most,
except for steps on the same arrow, and only u+d or l+r jumps). so yeah.
rated 2 feet because of the relatively high max bpm, and speed changes.

              light
                   5 feet
                         158 steps
                                  159 combo

this is actually probably my favourite set of light steps i've done so far. i
guess they're a bit on the tough side for light, but i still kept to 4th arrows
only while attempting to match the music a bit and make it fun to play. you'll
have to be the judge as to whether i succeeded or not, however! by the end it is
4th notes at 200 bpm, hence the 5 feet rating (although they're not all in one
big stream or anything). i enjoyed playing this, anyway, and i'm especially proud
of the last part for whatever reason. as an extra bonus you also get one jump,
absolutely free! hells yeah.

                          standard
                                  7 feet
                                        247 steps
                                                 256 combo

here we have slightly watered down heavy. :) well, it may only be rated one foot
lower, but the difference is probably a bit greater than that would imply.
definitely not a 6 however. basically, the first part starts off a bit easier than
it does in heavy, and at the end is about as hard as heavy's is halfway through.
then the speedup part is a bit easier, and the last part is indeed 8ths at 200bpm
but much shorter streams than on heavy, mostly 3s and 5s. it's not too bad.
it's hard to find space for one extra difficulty between using all 4ths and using
all 8ths for a 200bpm part, but i tried my best. :)
                     
                                        heavy
                                             8 feet
                                                   298 steps
                                                            323 combo

as you can see, heavy has a few more steps than standard and significantly more
jumps (mostly at the start). this was the first of the four charts i made, as per
usual, and i like it the best of course (even if it's a bit tiring for me to play
on pad). it begins with steps following part of the rhythm that slowly add more
elements in until it gets to the middle, which is largely quarter notes and some
simple step-jump sequences. the last part is again 8ths at 200bpm, but with some
long streams, and then 4ths to wind it up.

none of the four charts contain any crossovers this time (yeah, that's something
of a first for me :p) and i've gone over them all on my feet to ensure the steps
flow and don't have double stepping.

i would do doubles, but i've ended up not really having time and it also doesn't
help that i've barely ever played doubles and have no idea how doubles steps are
meant to flow. seriously, how do you go from one pad to the other without double
stepping or doing some kind of crazy crossover/pivot? i don't get it at all. x_x
but barring the lack of doubles steps, i feel that i have achieved my goal of
making steps that feel like they could be the official ones if konami ever put
mei into ddr. of course, what really matters is whether *you* think that, and in
that respect i'm going to have to wait and see. hope you enjoy the stepfile!

until next ddrosc...
                    xythar

ps: i still think collision chaos was a good stepfile :/
