[pyddr-devel] Level an Difficulty sorting in songselect

[Pavel N. Krivitsky]

Hi, Frank,

> What I would currently dearly love to incorporate into any selection
> interface is a function that objectively establishes the difficulty of a
> dance.
> Another thing I would like is the ability to find groups of songs with
> specific difficulties. E.g. dances with jumps; or songs with rhythmic
> difficulties. Currently I can't even see if a dance has jumps, let alone
> the number of possible jumps used, etc.

I would love to see such capabilities as well. I've pondered taking a
shot at creating an algorithm to parse the steps and figure out how
difficult they would be (it's an interesting machine learning problem
that might even constitute publishable research). Unfortunately, it
would be to be a big project (and might require recruiting actual
players of varying skill levels and familiarity with songs to test it).

There is also the problem of defining the difficulty of a dance
objectively: there is variability between players (for some, the
limiting factor is their ability to read steps, while for the others,
it's ability to move fast enough), within a player (a song might be full
of "surprises" that are only hard the first time through), and between
styles (with bar vs. without).

Though, we might have better luck having being able to generate the
"radar" diagrams that are present in some DDR games, which break the
difficulty up into jumpiness, speed, unpredictability, and other
aspects. We might want to look into whether SM can do that, and how.

> What you wrote below will probably bring the latter closer, but not the
> former.
> 
> Before I start commenting on what you wrote, I'll add something about
> why pydance and not e.g. stepmania.
> 1. The current interface is more concise and clear (a boon to people
> like me), SM's interface is hell for a first time user. 

I am not a "first time user" by any standard, and I still prefer
pydance's interface. IMO SM interface is too glitzy and cluttered.

> > Something I think we could do instead is have each song-difficulty
> > combination be a separate entry in the song list, when the sort mode is
> > "difficulty" or "level". So, without folders, there would be several
> > entries for each song, each one with just one difficulty. If we want to
> > get really fancy, pressing LEFT or RIGHT (to change the difficulty) will
> > move the cursor to the entry with that difficulty.
> 
> Just to check that I understand: you want to replace the
> songitemdisplays with danceitemdisplays, and link families of the latter
> (=song) together to mimic the behaviour currently implemented. 
> If this is the proposal, I see no problems.

I think that's pretty much it.

> As you do not seem to have much time to spend on this, and I nearly
> burned away my motivation on the songselect adaptation, I propose to
> keep the pacing down a bit. For reasons I won't discuss on a public
> list, I can't make promisses as to whether and when anything will be
> finished. I'll write a new response after reading about (and hopefully
> understanding) virtual folders.

Agreed. I think that we can do this gradually. I'll try to get
SongItemDisplay/DanceItemDisplay into the right shape in the next few
days. (That is, to allow it to display only a subset of difficulties in
a particular entry, without causing any regressions.) We'll see where to
go from there.

                    Pavel
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