How the site is generated

The Index Page and individual steps pages are automatically generated with perl scripts.

Graphics

To see how the graphics look, go to the images directories. A lot of graphics are still unfinished; you can also look at the demo.html pages to see what the graphics are.

Main Index Page

I maintain the song information in a Excel spreadsheet. I then save it in tab-delimitered format, which the perl script then crunches into the index page. The script also checks if step files exist.

Steps

The steps script is also in perl. It takes text files and converts them to html, with links to graphics.

If you want to send me a list of steps, make sure it follows this format:

It should be an ASCII-text file. The first 7 lines should look something like this:

Beethoven Virus          ; title of song
Ludwig van Beethoven     ; artist
162                      ; beats per minute
NO                       ; mode code
5                        ; difficulty level
from Korean site         ; creation
2001-11-08 Onigame       ; verification info
4/4                      ; time signature

As you can tell, anything after a semicolon is a comment. It will get ignored.

The first three lines are pretty obvious. Here's what the others mean:

Mode Code

NO: Normal, One-Player Mode
NL: Normal, Left Player in Two-Player Mode
NR: Normal, Right Player in Two-Player Mode
NA: Normal, All Players (when the same sequence of steps is used for 2-player mode and 1-player mode).

For Hard and Crazy modes, use "H" and "C" instead of "N". For Double mode, use "D" without a second letter.

Difficulty Level

This is the number in a circle when you select the song.

Creation/Verification Info

Who created this file, or where did these codes come from?

The date you verified this code, and your name or handle. As more people verify them, we'll add to this line. If you're not sure of the steps, add "(Unverified)".

Time Signature

If you can read music, you probably know what this is. Here it means something slightly different.

The second number is how many arrow-lengths will be in a measure. For instance,

Middle
Lower-right
Lower-left
1-4 Upper-right
4-0
Diagonal
This measure has four arrow lengths, and
Comment 1

Comment 2

this measure has six. (Usually it'll be four.)

The first number is how many ASCII lines are in a measure. For instance, the second example above will appear in the file as:

  3   ; Comment 1
1     
   4
1     ; Comment 2
   4
 2  5

There will be six lines devoted to the measure, so the time signature is "6/6".

The first example, however, has a half-beat, so we'll have to write eight lines instead of four:

  3   ; Middle

    5 ; Lower-right
1     ; Lower-left
   4  ; Upper-right

 2  5 ; Diagonal

(note the 3 blank lines) So the signature would be "8/4".

Currently, the only supported signatures are those that evaluate to 1 or 2, i.e., when the lines per measure is equal to or twice the beats per measure.

Writing Beats

The previous example also shows you how to write beats. On each line, put the steps you need to hit. The numbers range from 1-5 for most modes, add 6-0 for double mode. Leave a blank line for a beat where there is no step. The order of the numbers doesn't matter, nor does the spacing (as long as they're all on the same line). You comments will appear to the right as shown. Try to put helpful comments.

Also, you can insert an extra "half-beat" lines, like so:

  3   ; Middle
    5 ; Lower-right
1    H; Lower-left
   4  ; Upper-right
 2  5 ; Diagonal

This is for a "4/4" signature, and will give the same output as the first example above. The "H" in the third line says "this is not a real line, but rather a special beat that goes between the previous and later lines."

Examples

If this is all a bit confusing, change the ".html" extension of any steps page to ".txt" to see the original text file.

Back to PIU Steps Archive