DanceDanceRevolution A (AC)

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The Asian versions of DDR X to X3 also singled out Australia and New Zealand, but from then on until now there was no mention of them.

This is apply in MDX:A:y:A:~ and MDX:Y:y:A:~ versions.

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FEFEMZ got a 994k SDG on Over The "Period":

Remember when people couldn't PFC beginner? And now there's a fuggin SDG on challenge. Simply amazing.

Additionally...

[youtube]https://youtube.com/watch?=SmaNJ8n5Qq4[/youtube]

I mean just LOOK at 1:53

https://twitter.com/CHRS4LFE/status/956428273080090625

Chris PFC'd all 18's.

fixed

"How do we make Healing-D-Vision's crossovers harder? I know! Let's make them twice as wide!" In all seriousness, it's probably the best 19 just for how well it exploits something that Doubles alone can do.

Congratulations to FEFEMZ for the first AAA on a Doubles 19 ever. This also isn't the only Doubles 19 that FEFEMZ played:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tPo6vUuIV78 Valkyrie dimension D- WR (979k)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6a52TdStz8g Egoism 440 D- WR (908k)

Just let it sink in for a moment that we have a DDR chart so hard, we didn't get our first 900k on it until nearly two and a half years later, and its best player in the world still can't beat it without going into red lifebar on normal play.

I still remember back in 2010 when people were hopeful that everything in DDR Singles could be PFC'd one day (DEGRS was at 5 greats and Paranoia Hades was at 1 great). Then January 2011 arrived with its Pluto The First and that dream pretty much died on the spot. (Valkyrie dimension wouldn't come out for another month and a half.) Welp, turns out PTF got conquered before DEGRS, and considering that 18s were the hardest we had in 2010, dream accomplished.

Lol, it's ironic. It's extra evidence of how much DDR has become beginner friendly in terms of timing.

Some changes are agreeable but trying to make DDR like PIU on normal mode is a bad idea IMO. Example: Goods don't break combos, and changing the score rating system in such a bizarre way.

Not sure what you found ironic. As for the changes you think are bad, I have definitely seen that the same changes inspired newer players to play more and learn better, as opposed to give up and find the game impossible to learn. So what makes these necessarily bad, if I may ask?

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It attracts more new people to the game, and anything that gives konami more money is a good idea imo. That way, they can make more games.

Why would people be upset by Konami making the game more accessible. At the end of the day PFC's and MFC's are still things you can challenge yourself to get.

Yeah, goods don't break combos any more. The only effect I've seen from this change, besides allowing me to play more of my favorite songs during extra stage without stressing out, is seeing actual casual players get excited from actually finishing songs with a full combo. I don't see what's to be upset about unless you are upset by more people being able to see the full combo splash or not die on extra stage.

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They've made timing far too open and makes it too easy to get MFCs, as far as I've seen (because I have not play tested the game because... you know, Puerto Rico has no DDR A cabinets), something that I consider should be a much tougher feat, so the scores don't lockdown to MFCs considering the ease people get high scores.

As for the grading, it's unnecessarily confusing, I think if they kept the grades the same (except the only difference is that the only change needed is to make it the same for all levels, for simplicity), it would be very easy to understand the grades without looking at a webpage and know what grade do you get before the song results screen show up. They also lowered the bar for AAs way too low.

If I recall correctly, MFCs were so difficult before DDR A because of a timing glitch that made the effective timing window for Marvelous shift around on most BPMs.

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It's not so much that they made the timing "more open" but that they actually fixed timing and judgement issues that the previous games had in the past. There's a really detailed explanation that I can give you on this later if you'd like it, but the short version is that the game used to have something I've heard called "Judgement shaking" and in Ace they finally decided to fix that problem once and for all.

And the grading doesn't seem very confusing to me at all. What used to be the threshold for AA is now a "AA+". If anything, this grading system makes it much clearer for players to see when they've scored better on a song. Making them want to come back and do even better next time.

I've also never had to look at a webpage to know what grade I'm going to get before the song results screen. If anything when you get to a certain point, you start caring about the numbers more than the letter grade the game gives you. In the meantime though, when you're just starting out, it's going to be easier to know if you're improving or not when you see a big "A-" or "AA" on the screen.

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As in shift, how big of a change do you mean in timing? Because I have X3 and haven't really noticed anything like this so it must be a pro-X3 glitch, am I right?

But, they could also tighten the timing window for competitive mode like in PIU (just this once, I'd agree with the make DDR like PIU) and keep a beginner friendly mode like Happy Mode in X3, with leaderboards disabled.

Oh, as for the other one, I'd like a more detailed thing about the glitches. You can PM then to me unless you want everyone else to know in case someone else wonders about this problem as well.

The timing windows are fine. DDRA literally fixed the 15-year issue of Marvelouses being near-impossible to hit consistently, and you're saying that fixing that bug makes the game too easy?

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Alright. To put it simply, a few years ago people noticed that some specific BPMs were easier to MA than others. (This applied to the game from SuperNOVA 2 all the way to DDR 2014 until they fixed this in Ace. So no, it isn't a "Pro-X3 glitch"). When this was found out, people started calling them the "Magic BPMs" because of the easier ability to MA on these songs. Dr.D goes over this in his "Top 10 Hardest MFCs" video and I highly suggest watching it.

These BPMs ended up being 150, 180, 200 and any multiples of these numbers. (For example: 90 BPM, 300 BPM or 600 BPM). The reason this is wasn't found out until later. As it turns out, the game's judgment system polled at a rate that just so happened to line up perfectly with these BPMs. For any other BPM, the frame-window would drift early or late for a Marvelous (and other judgments for that matter) depending on the chart itself. Which meant it was entirely possible for you to hit exactly in-between the judgment window for say, a Perfect and a Great.

To "remedy" this, the game would give you one of the two judgments at random. Which meant that a bit of luck was involved if you hit in-between the windows and wanted to PFC or MFC a song. This is why the MFC feat was so unnecessarily difficult in the past. Because if you're playing a song whose BPM isn't one of those "Magic BPMs" then you had to hope you got lucky enough that the game decided to give you a Marvelous instead of a Perfect if you inevitably stepped between these timing windows. And remember, DDR's timing system is frame based and it runs at 60FPS. So this was more than likely to happen.

The changes that Ace introduced fixed these problems altogether. I'm not sure just how big the change is as I have yet to actually play anything past DDR 2014 myself, but from what I've heard, they've fixed these drifting timing windows with the new engine. So the judgment that you end up stepping on ends up being the one that you've actually earned.

I've also heard rumors/theories being thrown around that Konami changed the timing system off of frames and into milliseconds like ITG did, but I'm skeptical about this myself until I hear details from people who know about this sort of thing. As far as I'm concerned, the Marvelous window may still simply be a 1 frame window in a 60FPS game. They just finally fixed a long-standing issue and made it possible to have consistently good MAs if your timing is good. Which is honestly how rhythm and dance games should be in the first place.

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Unless fixed, the glitch occurs whenever a timing window is only 1 frame, so it's existed ever since DDR Extreme. Heck, it technically existed for Perfects as well in 1stMix - 4thMix thanks to those cabinets polling at 30 fps instead of 60.

Tightening timing windows for specific modes only would be bad for beginners, who now have an incentive to never enter that mode. It's similar to how grades being different on different difficulties used to disincentivize beginners from going up difficulties.

@playe I don't recall randomness having anything to do with it; what I remember is that the game basically has to round off timing windows to a whole number of frames, which is what causes the glitch. The hardware in the machine is only physically able to check the buttons on whole numbers of frames. (At frame 100, the hardware asks "which buttons are pressed right now?" At frame 101, the hardware asks "which buttons are pressed right now?" etc.)


Example 1:

Say you have a song with 4th notes at 150 BPM. The notes are 24 frames apart, so they should fall on frames 24, 48, 72, 96, etc.

The game should assign 2 frames to each Marvelous window (2 frames = 1/30th second), since the player can be up to 1/60th second early or 1/60th second late for a total width of 1/30th second.

For reasons that should become clear shortly, I'm guessing the game picks the exact frame as well as the frame after it (not the frame before). So frames 24, 25, 48, 49, 72, 73, 96, 97, etc. are Marvelous frames. A player making a step at frame 25 earns a Marvelous for that note. A player making a step at frame 26 earns a Perfect for that note instead.

But because of how the hardware works, the real Marvelous windows are something like 23.1-25.0, 47.1-49.0, 71.1-73.0, 95.1-97.0, etc. To see how this works, say someone makes a step at 47.2 frames. At frame 47, the hardware does not detect the step. At frame 48, the hardware detects the step (as long as the player holds the button down for at least 0.8 frames, which is all but guaranteed). Frame 48 is a Marvelous frame, so the player earns a Marvelous.

This makes everything work out exactly, since the player can be up to a frame late or up to almost a frame early on the music, and earn a Marvelous like they should.


Example 2:

Say you have a song with 4th notes at 160 BPM. The notes are 22.5 frames apart, so with exact math, they should fall on frames 22.5, 45, 67.5, 90, etc.

Again, the game assigns 2 frames to each Marvelous window, but since only whole numbers of frames can be assigned thanks to the hardware, the game is forced to round. So it reads the numbers as 23, 45, 68, 90, etc., then picks that frame as well as the frame after it. Frames 23, 24, 45, 46, 68, 69, 90, 91, etc. become Marvelous frames.

Now the hardware polling turns the real Marvelous windows into 22.1-24.0, 44.1-46.0, 67.1-69.0, 89.1-91.0, etc. The original numbers (22.5, etc.) are still inside the windows. But now on every odd note, the player will get a Perfect instead of a Marvelous for being only half a frame early.

In the context of a millisecond-based game like Stepmania, the Marvelous window is supposed to be -16/+16 (up to 16 ms early or 16 ms late). Instead, thanks to hardware limitations, every odd beat is -8/+24, and every even beat is -16/+16. A margin of error as little as 8 ms or 0.5 frames is prohibitively difficult.

(Rounding down instead of up doesn't fix the glitch either. Say you assign frames 22 and 23 as Marvelous frames instead. Hardware polling turns that into 21.1-23.0. Now the player will get a Perfect instead of a Marvelous for being more than half a frame late, and their margin of error is still 8 ms with a Marvelous window of -24/+8.)

As you'll probably notice, the glitch only disappears for songs where all the beats are a whole number of frames apart. This is any BPM that divides 3600 evenly, which would include BPMs of 100, 120, 144, 150, 180, 200, 225, etc.

I see

Thanks for taking a seemingly big lot of time to explain this in detail. That explains why did I get such a high score on Sexy Planet Max2 mix.

However, I think that the timing window could use some tightening up a bit. Although an MFC is hard to get, I do fear it might become too easy.

Probably Konami will reset leaderboards and nerf timing windows because of how things are narrowing down too much. Maybe add a Super Pro mode with much stricter timing windows for worldwide competition?

Not until 18s start to be MFCd on a regular basis by more than three people, no.

Maybe in the future they'll add a judgement beyond Marvellous. It'd be an easier thing to do than nerf high-scores just to tighten the timing windows at least.

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