[pyddr-devel] new song selector

[theGREENzebra]

> I checked in the start of some code and image for a new song selector
> and generic file parser (fileparsers.py and songselect.py). None of it
> is used in the main pyDDR code yet, but it does run, pretty quickly.

I saw it. Looking good so far. Did you zoom the small banners yet? I think 
that would be a good idea..

> Loading 263 songs takes a little under 5 seconds. I expect this to
> probably double before I'm done; right now the parser just keeps the
> lines in the .step file for the step data, and I still need to write a
> parser to normalize that.

yeah, it's not easy to load in lots of songs and parse them all =]

however, this is on your effective p3-500, right, so I guess I should expect 
better performance once it's done =]

> When I get some time (maybe this weekend but probably not) I'm going to
> write down my ideas for a "step2" file format (Brendan suggested
> '.dance', which I like), so if anyone has anything they'd like to be
> taken into account in a new format, fire an email or IRC message my way.
> The basic structure is going to be like .step, but much shorter, e.g. 'q
> 1010' instead of 'qurtr 08 00 08 00'. The basic idea is to keep it all
> both readable and inline, but remove redundant parts. This also has the
> advantage that conversion from .step is trivial. Each file parser is
> then going to normalize each other file format (.step, .dwi, etc) into a
> step2-style structure (something like ('q', 1, 0, 1, 0) ) which the
> internal classes will know how to deal with.

We need support for the following games and their respective modes:

DDR
---
single: beginner, basic, light, trick, standard, maniac, heavy, smaniac, oni
double: same, I guess?
couple: ditto?

I listed all the keywords, thinking that we should support reading any of 
those and if the stepfile says HEAVY we should display that on the side 
instead of instead of MANIAC

PIU / pumpy / pump it up
---
single: easy, hard, crazy (I feel like I'm leaving one out here)
halfdouble: same modes
fulldouble: same modes
couple: same modes
note that in PIU, two player mode is couple, not versus, maybe we could have 
a loader for "p1steps" and "p2steps" or something, I'm not sure.

PPP / paraparaparadise
---
god, I haven't played this in such a long time, but I think it's just single 
or versus, I don't remember PPP getting complicated enough for double. I DO 
however think that we should implement double for PPP, with some 
rearrangement of the sensors for the player. perhaps a fully surrounded 
player by sensors, or maybe just a really wide halfarc for each set of 
sensors? don't know, but we should expand upon the ppp concept

TM / technomotion
--
I really wish I could play this game. I have like two WMV clips of a korean 
kid playing it but that's it. I know it supports 5/6/8 panel, and it'll do 
double on 8panel mode (insane), so we may have to invent this later.

pyDANCE
-------
Make up our own specific stuff here. 9panel would be insane, but easily 
doable if we can do any of the above modes. 18panel for double would be even 
more insane but fun. I'm all about expounding on dancing games as it stands. 
We should support para and another game at the same time, even for one 
player, therefore requiring them to move both their hands and feet.

song selector issues
--------------------
we'll need to figure out a good way to switch "game modes". we could steal 
ideas from CPD and go with a "style" selection mode as shown in 
http://cpd.sourceforge.net/images/style.png but I think we should more go 
for the last button on the mat (or select and move random to another button) 
  to switch games inside the selector, and then it will just move the 
player's difficulty to the closest match (maniac DDR switches to crazy PIU, 
etc).

another thing that only about 190487 people harass me about a day is 
implementing a modifier screen into songselect, which I do think is a good 
idea. We could just save and reload the configuration file for the changes 
to work properly. Suggestions (and/or code) are welcome. I can't think of 
much else right now, and I have to go to work, but hopefully this helps a 
little bit of my outlying idea.

Brendan
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