zhekTHEK Trance Machina for Stepmania

zhekTHEK
Trance Machina - Heavy Metal Machine, for Stepmania
11.11.03
public beta 3

Trance Machina is a Stepmania theme. Tested on Stepmania CVS Alpha 8. This theme is not designed to work with any other Alpha, complaining that you're having problems because you held back an update aren't my concern.

Included:
- Trance Machina Noteskin for Dance - This is the TM arrow set, currently only for 4-arrow DDR play.
- Trance Machina Announcer - This is the TM announcer, all known announcer calls have at least one file to be played.
- Trance Machina Heavy Metal Machine 'theme' - This is the theme created from wallpaper designed around the general TM look. My personal favorite.
- Trance Machina Spash Screen - This is the replacement splash screen that replaces the Stepmania logo during the loading stage.

Public Beta 1 09.10.03:
First version

Public Beta 2 10.18.03:
Changes:
- Fixed: combo numbers from increasing to gigantic proportions and leaking off the screen.
- Fixed: Music Scroll, Name Entry, and Ranking screen so that they display a proper background.
- Fixed: SelectStyle image positions, they now sit properly in the space they were designed to be in.
- Fixed: Common colors are now proper, Player one is blue, rather then teal, Player two is Red, rather then orange.
- Fixed: Possible difficulties that appear on the SelectMusic screen are now properly put into a place that looks like they should be there.
- Fixed: Long version text didn't have the "i"s highlighted. Gradient Glow, the filter I used, has a tendency to not highlight narrow sections, especially anti-aliased text...
- Fixed: Trance Machina arrows work again in Alpha7. Looks like someone broke SMs ability to read either a long noteskin file or the ability to read one with a space in the title, because the only thing I could do to get it to work was to rename it with a non-spaced title... It was working fine in A6 as Trance Machina, but whatever...
- Replaced: non-full lifebar with a brighter version.
- Replaced: StyleSelect pictures that were previously using black character pictures to white versions, this is so the already darker background used with SelectStyle wouldn't make the pictures hard to see.
- Replaced: SelectStyle warning picture with a snazzier more compact version.
- Replaced: SelectDifficulty is replaced with SelectMaster. Properly set to a style similar to EX (with an extra image that shows the info, rather then just the card). Everything's spaced out properly and in fully working order.
- Replaced: Kanji for difficulties is more "correct." However, I chopped off every character after the first, so their meanings are likely altered from what they're meant to be. They are however, infinitely more accurate then previous versions, which used kanji representing "Wow!" and "wrong."
- Replaced: Dance logo replaced with a better version (seen above at top.) It's got the subtitle added, the "techy" texture applied, and is more colorful then the original (in blue and red!)
- Replaced: Failure and Cleared images are more detailed and take up more space. w00! It does look a bit nicer though...
- Added: Banners for random, roulette, and alpha.
- Added: Necessary images to get SelectMaster to work.
- Added: New Intro sequence, lasts a whole minute. And it works too, only took me a few hours to figure out why I couldn't get the images to appear properly on the screen...
- Added: Character select screen, although it's not setup at all at the moment. It's using the default values entirely so as it is, things are a bit out of place.
- Added: New backgrounds are correctly associated with my own options screen rather then the default. Just new .redirs...
- Added: Background for the credits screen. Normally it's left flat black, but I had a few images lying around from DWI/SM projects I didn't finish and I really wanted to get that image in somehow, so it appears as an image basically covering half of the screen.
- Added: Song loop for menus. It's One T Featuring Cool T - The Magic Key. It's not perfect where I cut it, but it was as close as I could splice it.
- Added: Oni, Endless, and Nonstop song titles in case you're playing those modes. They'll now appear. I had no idea they were missing until I was reading the log and they were reported missing...
- Added: A Trance Machina Splash screen. If you want to use it, just move the splash.bmp into the data folder. It'll have to overwrite the existing one. Note, if there's a new version out, installing it will overwrite THIS version as well, so you might just want to copy it if you plan to keep it.
- Added: Incredibly unnecessary HTML document to hold changes and updates. w00...
Problems still present:
- The lifebar frame and the lifebar top don't line up properly, they're only one pixel off, but with scanlines on both of them it's noticeable. Stepmania somehow places the oddly numbered dimimensioned frame on a decimal value, so it can't be lined up properly until it's resized to a multiple of 64.
- Character screen doesn't look so hot at the moment.
Plans for next version:
- Realign lifebar.
- Try to fix Character select screen so it looks ok. I left it this way because I'm not quite sure how to fix it at the moment. It's kind of different from the way I normally have my backgrounds, so we'll see.
- Replace more sounds and whatnot with more appropriate ones.
- Expanded credits.

Public Beta 3 (xx.xx.03)
Changes:
- Fixed: All bugs pertaining to files missing from the previous version. Oops. I'd list them, but I don't care...
- Fixed: Missing 'i' in remaining. Oops again.
- Fixed: Inconsistency of difficulty naming conventions. Select Difficulty screen had a light difficulty marker, when all other images reference it as basic.
- Fixed: Endless description incorrectly referenced to having lives. Endless is in actuality just a really damn long regular DDR run with no stops.
- Fixed: Move On had another image appearing behind it, slightly visible around the corners of the image. I loaded up the PSD file and turned off the layer showing up behind it, and resaved.
- Fixed: Lifebar is now properly aligned with the lifebar frame, although it was a problem only I seemed to notice, it bothered me that it was off-centered by a single pixel ;)
- Changed: OK/NG judgment was previously green/red. Someone said the green from the OK threw off perfect attacking because it looked like a great. So, now it's blue.
- Changed: _moveon.png, _shared footer, _shared menu header.png, SelectDark1, SelectDark2, SelectLight, the opening Company animation, ready.png, go.png, howtoplayoni.png, SelectScreenMusicScrollBG, Ranking icons, Songselectbox.png, ScreenSelectMusicBG, and a number of other images are redone as a bluer theme. That's the Heavy Metal Machine part of the theme ;)
- Changed: Trance Machina arrows now has the receptors (the area you're trying to hit the arrows at) replaced with more appropriate ones. Like the freeze arrows, the left/right and up/down columns are appropriately colored, red for the up/downs, blue for the left/rights.
- Added: Extra Stage upside down lifebar/scorebar. It's not just an inverted version, I went and properly flipped all elements, and changed the null space on the scorebar so it looks different then the regular one. Not too big a change from the norm, but it's at least not just a mirror flip.
- Added: Added more options screens that were still using the default screens. Now they show up properly.
- Added: Stage indicators for Nonstop, Endless, and Oni.
- Added: A null image for player two's side. Since I have no idea to make it show up, it's not currently used anymore then player one's null image is. But I added it in the eventuality that it may be used later.
- Added: Redesigned from scratch all the Stage screens, all were redrawn keeping the fonts as font objects as much as possible, makes editing them a lot easier. They're more cleaned up and more consistently highlighted now. Also redid the sequence in which they show up.
- Added: Announcer. w00t. Voice work and voice alteration done entirely done through Fruity Loops. I used Audacity to chop them down and to eliminate extra echos. I'm still new to using Fruity Loops, so I just played around with the default templates a bit till I got a desirable result. All voices use the regular female voice sped up a bit to 175bpm. Positive tones used the strings set up on the template, all negative tones used the sci-fi instrument.
- Added: Additional loops, both from the Furi Kuri OSTs. Currently I'm using three loops for the entire theme, the first is One T featuring Cool T - The Magic Key. That loop is used for all "in-game" menus. The second is off the first Furi Kuri OST, Pink, credited to Shinjinki Mitsumune (part of the Pillows? They do almost all of the series' music). That loop is used for all options menus. The third is off the second Furi Kuri OST, called Nightmare, and apparently it's a karaoke track, although I haven't seen any lyric versions of the song. Also credited to the Pillows.

History:
Trance Machina started as a derivative of my Trance Machina skin developed for Dance With Intensity, it eventually became more it's own skin as most of my projects end up being. I start working on it and well, it starts going another way. It's almost completely devoid of any part of the original DWI skin, even similar items were usually redone from scratch rather then ported over.

Trance Machina (actually, almost all my graphics...) relies on a set of graphics that have slowly changed over years. It started with a swirled image I created a number of years ago, then slowly turned into the backgrounds used today. It's quite a bit of efficient recycling... Or laziness... As it is now, the image is just one layer in dozens that appear in the background.

The Public Beta differs widely from my previous screenshots, I altered drastically the backgrounds, cutting out the large number of background variations and settling on a more reasonable but probably still ridiculous five different background screens (SelectDark, SelectDark2, SelectLight, SelectScroll, SelectMusicBG.) Each one I felt was necessary, and I think it looks a lot better then only having a single screen for every screen.

Credits:
All Battle Angel Alita graphics are from Yukito Kishiro.
All Magna Carta graphics are from... The Magna Carta artist...
All other graphics are are from Zhek, all default graphics are the work of the Stepmania devs.
Thanks to the gracious hosting of both the Theme itself and it's Arrow set, KoNaMaN. Incredibly invaluable.
Thanks go out to, again, KoNaMan, and to Satome Cyclone for taking screenshots and hosting those as well. Definitely helped me there.
Thanks to Healing Visions for providing me with the roman alphabet versions of the Japanese difficulty words.
Thanks go out to everyone who offered criticisms, praise, suggestions, and bug reports. Made my work easier, more rewarding, and more enjoyable.
Thanks go out to the entire Stepmania crew for creating such a wondrous and versatile program. I may end up putting more time into my theme then playing the game, but hey, I'm thinking about it ;)
The Freelang dictionary was incredibly invaluable for helping finding the Japanese variant spellings on English words, for locating the Japanese words I wanted, and for being completely free.
Tools created with:
- Photoshop 7.0
- Notepad
- Microsoft Japanese IME
- Freelang Japanese dictionary
- Charmap
- Windows Calculator
- Audacity
- Fruity Loops Studio 4
- WavSpliter
- Mozilla
- Microsoft Frontpage
- Sonique 2
- Bittorrent (for... acquiring stuff.)
Fonts used:
- Arcade
- Arial
- BankGothic
- Captain Podd
- Deftone Stylus
- Eurasia
- Free 3 of 9, extended
- Generation Two
- Ionic Bond
- Impact
- MS Gothic (Japanese IME)
- MS Mincho (Japanese IME)
- SonicCut Thru Heavy
- Token
- Ultra 911
- unisol
- WBXscar
- Webdings
- Wingdings 1,2,3
- Others (I'll list them when I remember ;)

ENJOY!