Newbie type o' question...

[Spooty Biscuit]

Alright, I just got ITG PC (mDaWg's version). This is the first experience I've had with playing on the P.C. (yep, haven't even played SM before) I was wondering, just how do I import songs and create my own stepcharts to them?

[bingoman303]

First of all, the songs have to be in .ogg format in order for ITG to recognize them. You can search for a program that converts music files into .ogg. And, I'm also sure that ITG can only read .sm files and not .dwi.

I know how to do this using stepmania so you should get that.
1. Get Stepmania
2. Put each song in its own folder. For example, if you have a song called "HEY" make a folder called HEY. Then put that folder in Stepmania/Songs. Repeat for all songs.
3. Open Stepmania and go to edit/sync songs.
4. Select the song you want to make steps to and go into the editting menu.
5. Hit ESC, then save. This creates a blank .sm file in the song folder.
6. Exit Stepmania. Open up preferences.ini for ITG (should be in my documents/In The Groove/Save). There's a line that says "AdditionalSongFolders=". After the equals sign, put the folder where your songs are (for me, it would be C://Program Files/Stepmania/Songs).
7. Start ITG and enter the edit menu. Select the song you want to make steps for and start editing! You can also edit steps in Stepmania but I find ITG's editing to be better because it just looks better and you can add rolls.

I haven't actually done this but it should work. Let me know if any problems arise or if you need any clarification on anything.

[Spooty Biscuit]

K, made it through step 2, but then it said "no songs installed" when I went to edit/sync songs.

I told it to reload the songs in options. It looked at the folder I'd put in, but still told me no songs were installed.





Ok, dug around a bit and found a file in SM's song directory that says...

1. Create a new group by creating a new folder (optional)
2. In the group folder, create a folder for your song
3. Copy all the files for your song into the song folder
- background (optional)
- banner (optional)
- music (required)
- BMS files or DWI file (required)


What's BMS/DWI file? The fact that it's required and I have no idea what it is is a little bit of a problem.

[bingoman303]

Ok perhaps you can try an alternative. This will not require stepmania. Open notepad, go to file --> save as, name it SONG.sm (change SONG to name of song). Then just follow steps 6 and 7 in my first post. See if that works.

by the way, a .dwi file is a file that has the actual steps to the song. I'm pretty sure ITG uses .sm file. It is easier to code and can implement background movies.

[Spooty Biscuit]

I figured it out. ITG actually automatically creates a sm file when you access a song through full edit mode. I'm already half way through making my edit.

[abrannan]

Wow, is Dance with Intensity (DWI) so dead that people haven't even heard of it anymore? Such a shame, it was easier to set up and use than Stepmania, even if it was less feature-rich. It's what got me started on DDR, DWI with a simfile of Exotic Ethnic (Try starting out with that as your first and only song).

[xstatic]

abrannan said:

(Try starting out with that as your first and only song).

lol - I probably would have quit.

[psisar]

Sorry Andrew, DWI is a good as dead. With .sm files being compatible with ITG and ITGPC and Stepmania being completely customizable, DWI didn't stand a chance.

[bingoman303]

ha, i never knew editing with ITG would be so easy. Sorry I made all those silly steps to follow. At least now we all know how to do it.

[abrannan]

psisar said:

Sorry Andrew, DWI is a good as dead. With .sm files being compatible with ITG and ITGPC and Stepmania being completely customizable, DWI didn't stand a chance.

Oh, I know it's dead now. I just hadn't realized that it had been dead for that long.

And of course .sm files are compatible with ITG. All ITG is is a re-skinned, slightly modified Stepmania, with a basic encryption scheme thrown on top.