Rating Star System Idea

Hi all,
After spending time learning about LUA and Stepmania, I think I have an idea for a basic implementation of the rating star Extra Stage system. I just need to know a few things:

1. What language is metrics.ini written in?

2. Goes with question 1: In metrics.ini, I see some lines written like
if param.Parameter then \
Where "Parameter" is whatever parameter is specified (CustomDifficulty, Player, etc). What does the backslash mean?

3. Where is the code for displaying stage results stored, and can I reference it from a separate file?

1. metrics.ini is, as its name suggests, an INI file. StepMania 5's INI file format is slightly odd: for example, # is used as the comment character instead of a semicolon, and it lets you incorporate Lua expressions in many places in the file.

2. For multi-lined chunks of Lua in metrics.ini, you need to use a backslash at the end of the line to continue the expression. You do not need to, and in fact cannot, use backslashes in .lua files.

3. Some themes create their own version of ScreenEvaluation, but most themes use the version of ScreenEvaluation that StepMania provides built in, which is written in C++ and you can't access individual pieces of its code. It gets all its information from PlayerStageStats objects, which you can get in Lua.

So say I wrote a script to get the player stats from each played stage, add them together, and from there determine whether or not the Extra Stage is earned. Would I have the script run after the final stage grade is displayed, or is that already too late?

Also, is Stepmania written in a way that requires the Extra Stage to depend on the final stage's grade? (I assume it is, but I just want to make sure)

You could do it then.

It is written in a way that requires the Extra Stage to depend on the final stage's grade, but in the current WIP version of DDR SuperNOVA 3 (and also in some MadkaT themes I believe) some measures are taken to circumvent that basically by making SM give you an Extra Stage if you cleared the song by making the grade requirement that easy, and then having some other condition in a branch or somewhere that prevents the player from actually getting the Extra Stage if they didn't meet the "real" condition.

You can force event mode and ignore stepmania's stage system like I did, but that requires keeping track of the stages yourself and people don't like their game settings being changed.

If you do that, use a branch for the NextScreen for ScreenEvaluation, if they meet extra stage take them to song select (or an extra stage song select), if they don't take them to the game over screen.

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An alternative to forcing event mode is to use GAMESTATE:AddStageToPlayer() to add stages to each player as needed. GAMESTATE:GetNumStagesLeft() will return the number of stages a player has left, so you can make sure they stay at 1 or 2 or whatever you want.

(this is what I did for the timed sets and reward time system in my theme years ago)

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