How to play mania 4k good

Khelly · ^

I use the term mania interchangeably for any vsrg game. Here I'm using it to describe 4k vsrg confined to Osu mania, Stepmania, and Flash Flash Revolution. I view them only as different platforms to play the same game.

So you've come to realise that maybe Osu standard is a bit in the shitter and the constant idea of feeling like you have to full combo every map you play isn't that great. What game is there to play and get better at? Mania has the answer. No longer will the worth of your play be decided solely on whether or not you get combo first and then your accuracy. Only your accuracy will matter. You can miss as much as you want - if you go from 95% to 97% but miss two times more, it's an improvement. In addition to that, the only thing needed to play is a keyboard - no other peripherals like a tablet or a mouse that take up precious space. Hell, you can play on a laptop without lugging extra shit around.

If you wish to play more than one key, play 7k or 7k+1 first, but if you're only interested in 4k, then there's no need to play any other keymode. Since I don't know shit about any other keymode other than how to setup LR2, I can't talk about them.

What the fuck to set up

I'm going to begin with osu mania because frankly I believe it's the best place to start when you're just a beginner. It's the easiest and most accessible place outside of FFR and frankly, the quality of ranked maps for beginners isn't that bad.

For starters, in the options, set your osumania keyboard layout for 4k to anything you like. Most people use a combination where the left and right hand keys are on the opposite sides of the board - I use xc ./. You can also in this same menu set if you want to use upscroll or downscroll. Either one works, it just depends on your preference.

Under general, DESELECT scale scroll speed with bpm. This makes sure that your scrolling rate is mostly constant between maps though map creators can still adjust it to their whim with slider velocity, but that's highly dependent on the map and 4k doesn't do it so often. Especially with stepmania style maps and converts.

When you get into a map, press F3/F4 to adjust your scroll speed. For beginners somewhere between 10 and 20 is ok. I use 28 right now but I started with 20.

For skins there's a variety of bars and arrows as well as orbs. I started with bars but I skill boosted immensley with arrows. On halogen's profile: https://osu.ppy.sh/u/169992 he has a link to portalmania which is pretty much the best arrow skin for osu mania in my opinion. In the skin, in the arrownote folder, you're able to pick between whichever colours you want. I use red for my edges and light pink for the middle. You can make all of them the same, or different colours. Jakads also has a cool skin in his profile: https://osu.ppy.sh/u/jakads which is also pretty sweet for 7k too.

One of the neat things about mania is that you can adjust your hit position. This is literally the area where your ms error is 0. In the skin.ini it would look like this

[Mania]
Keys: 4
//Mania skin config
ColumnStart: 280
HitPosition: 437
SpecialStyle: 0
UpsideDown: 0
JudgementLine: 0
ScorePosition: 265
KeysUnderNotes: 1
ComboPosition: 130
WidthForNoteHeightScale: 65
LightFramePerSecond: 48
ColumnWidth: 70,70,70,70
//Colours
Colour1: 0,0,0,255
Colour2: 0,0,0,255
Colour3: 0,0,0,255
Colour4: 0,0,0,255

Changing the hitposition to a smaller number makes it move UP in relation to your receptors, so if you always hit too early, you can make the position smaller. Combo position works the same way. I personally use combo position to tell my eyes where I should be focusing when playing.

MAPS

As a beginner, anything from 1.0* to 3.0* generally is fine in terms of osu mania ranked. It'll be easy to find anything and everything to practice on. http://osusearch.com/ and the beatmap ranked section for mania will be where you'll look. Set cs from 4 to 4 because cs = key count in the search.

At this point you just press button when the arrow or bar or orb comes down. All you have to do is constantly improve your accuracy on files you've already played or get scores on harder ones. As a general rule if I can't get 90%, I won't bother playing it without ht. 90% can easily grow upwards to 97% and beyond, and you don't need to worry about bullshit like fullcombos or anything like that.

The judgments in mania are: 300(rainbow)/Marvelous, 300/Perfect, 200/Great, 100/Good, 50/Bad, and miss. A 100% full combo with only perfects nets around 967,000 score. higher levels of marvelous, which always has the same 16 ms window regardless of OD, can really impact your score. Going for higher MA instead of playing harder maps is a different aspect to improvement depending on what you want.

Ranked maps on osu are really generally bad. After about 3* mapping styles become bland, uninteresting, and rely on long notes for crutches in a way that's unfun to play. They get better after 4* with real types of patterns, but after 5* you find that the ranked maps are few and far in between. The ones that do exist go from ok to good to subpar at best. There's just not enough content to actually get better at this level without unranked or Stepmania converts. I'll put links to good and interesting unranked and SM packs at the end of this OP. One of the most important things is having GOOD FILES to play and not just playing shitty osu standard converts or bad spy ranked maps.

PP and dans

PP is 95% a factor of two things: The star rating and the score. Score is only correlated with accuracy, but is also influenced by combo to a degree which is kind of stupid. This only matters when playing ranked as if you set accuracy goals, it doesn't matter if your 880k 96% isn't beaten by a 870k 97%. You got the 97%. PP begins at 650k and tapers off after 900k. The biggest jump is from 700k to 800k. Star rating also grows exponentially at around 4 stars. 5 star files can reach to the 300's, 6 stars to the 600s, 7 star + to the 1,000's.

In IIDX(?)or at least lr2 there is a system called dans to track your skill. You pass it, you advance to the next level. For 4k, shoegazer and a few others invented dans that have a 96% requirement. The thread is https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/t/304735 and for me it's one of the more rewarding levels of satisfaction after finally clearing a dan where before it was impossible. 1-3 dan use ranked maps. 4 dan begins stepmania converts and mapping styles. If you regularly play, you can get to 4-5 dan no problem, but they do demand a general skillset, so you can't be an unbalanced fuck like me who has near 9-dan streams yet barely 6-dan jacks and be expected to progress.

These dans are also submitted! https://osu.ppy.sh/s/373170 On this beatmap page contains links from 1 dan to tachyon v2. Note that 4-dan is updated and tachyon has a v3. These are also accepted for submission. I also created 4 dan v2.

Stepmania

Stepmania has come out with the best files available, but one of the challenges is getting this shit set up.

2016-06-26 15:15 Lampranthus: http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/vbz/showthread.php?t=133223
2016-06-26 15:15 Khelly: I mean
2016-06-26 15:15 Khelly: I WAS going to ask you about that yesterday
2016-06-26 15:15 Lampranthus: https://github.com/ca25nada/spawncamping-wallhack
2016-06-26 15:15 Khelly: but you left
2016-06-26 15:15 Lampranthus: http://www.staiain.net/StepMania/smwiki/index.php/Noteskins

The first link is probably good enough, and links you where to DL stepmania. There are two primary customisations: Themes and noteskins. Noteskins is just your arrows or bars or orbs or whatever. Sadly the staiain.net link is down, but I use wafles4 which is found: http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/vbz … p?t=133619

Themes affect literally everything about your client. Two good ones to use would be spawncamping-wallhack, as above, or Mina's wife: http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/vbz … p?t=145215 Personally I don't use anything else or go looking around, but that doesn't mean alternatives don't exist.

Options

I'm just going to go over the main options I feel are important.

Under options in graphics, turn vsync off. It fucks with the notes appearing on the screen.

Under theme options: Set default score type to DP. The weightages from marvelous to miss are 100%/100%/50%/0%/-100 or 200%/-400% Stepmania is REALLY unforgiving for goods and especially misses compared to osu mania. For PS, a perfect is listed as 66%. This is also called ex-oni, and it's not really used, but you can if you want.

Under arcade options you can change the client to save up to 20 of your scores.

Under display>Appearance options is where you can change your theme and set your default noteskin. You can turn percent scoring off.

Under display > UI You can set the play field to the centre instead of the left side.

Profiles simply creates your name and tracks your gametime and keys pressed. You can get an avatar by putting one in C:\Games\StepMania 5\Themes\spawncamping-wallhack-5.0\Graphics\Player avatar for example.

Under advanced options you can set your default judge, life, and when you fail. More on judge later.

When you get into song select, you can hit enter twice in order to go to the in-game options. It looks like this for me:

.eJwNwlEOwiAMANC78C-lUArsMoYwwmY2IaP7Mt5dX95H3dehFrWJjLkArPss_Vr1lH7lVnXrvR01j33q0k_IIrlsZ33LBExsDHpMjpLlSNGAJXYxBEuEFIjZerAG-YH4_zTsvHf6NZr6_gBF_SNK.PJi9Q16d1S3f40UTREA3ARHx-98

Speed is the rate the notes fall. Cmod is a constant rate for everything, and Xmod varies it on the bpm much like slider velocity. I would start with C500-750 and adjust from there.

Rate is one of the big advantages of Stepmania over Osu for me personally. Osu just has .75 and 1.5 rates whereas sm you can have any rate, it just depends on your theme. Most should support .1 increments. What this means is that you have way more files at your disposal in your skill range to play. Simply up or downrate it. And when the file gets to be too easy, you can increase the rate. You don't have to abandon a file whose patterns you like or a song you enjoy when it gets to be trivially easy. You can just adjust rates.

Overhead perspective is how you see things in osu.

Remove lets you remove a whole bunch of extrashit in SM you don't like or don't want for a file. I choose no rolls because they're green long notes that you have to keep hitting which is annoying. You can also remove jumps, hands, and quads from a file as well if you want.

SM defaults to upscroll, so reverse makes it downscroll.

Mines are things you're not supposed to hit and they remove your acc. You can turn it off if you want.

Hide removes the bg. Cover simply dims it.

Avg and Ghost scoretype affects what you see on the pacing graphs on the edge of the screen. When you play, it tracks your progress on the % bar. The ghost goal is simply where the ghost score will achieve at the end of the file. Most people set it to 93% because that's where AA is set. AA is generally the go-to-goal.

The pacemaker graph shows the bpm at the certain point in time and the error bar shows your hits.

Judge difficulty is the timing difficulty.

Most people use J4, but the most popular are J4, J5, and J7. J7 turns most judgments from J4 up one exact notch. You can use any you like though.

WHERE ARE MY CHARTS

To download packs, just go to: http://stepmaniaonline.net/index.php?page=downloads
I can't really reccomend good packs for beginners, but if you're around 3-4 dan you can just start with yolomania which also exists in osu. There's also a handy spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ … d=43153121 which can tell you what to play from what packs in a general difficulty range. It's not exactly perfect, but it works if you want to find something new. Skills are split into divisions which gets its name from the system FFR uses.

There's also stepmanialeaderboards where you can search by difficulty. http://smleaderboards.net/
It's far from perfect either, but all you have to do is pick some number (like 10), play a few 10's, and adjust accordingly. I believe division 5 is about 20-25 for reference to the spreadsheet.

When you download a chart, just drag the main folder into /stepmania/songs so that all your files can be nice and organised. In the song select this groups them by pack.

OSU FILES

Individual files first, then packs. I will be listing unranked over 2.5*

https://osu.ppy.sh/b/815025
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/379059
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/756449
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/457850
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/252924
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/296211
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/450491
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/334944
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/662228
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/817137
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/651422
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/435369
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/637665
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/770550
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/670008
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/530768
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/670008
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/593503
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/691783
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/239327
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/795868
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1026952
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/331525
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/467656
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/756509
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/856880
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/480468
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/356979

Packs:

https://osu.ppy.sh/b/714473
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/780447
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/756873
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1015663
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/989286
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/893262
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1019855
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/893789
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/937991
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1008411
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/893818
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/1082734
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/740749
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/871529
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/487564
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/662215
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/495926
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/563155
https://osu.ppy.sh/b/495818

For all others, dl the unsubmitted stepmania converts: https://osu.ppy.sh/forum/t/399593

This list of maps is by no means exhaustive in what I have, but if you're progressing past 3* they sure do help.

SOME TERMS I WAS TOO LAZY TO DESCRIBE ABOVE

Jump - 2 notes
Hand - 3 notes
Quad - 4 notes
Stream - Series of notes that travel across the stream without a pause.
Jump/Hand/Quadstream - Streams with jumps/hands/quads
Trill - Pressing two different notes one after the other. 12121212 is a one handed trill while 24242424 is a two handed trill.
Jacks - hitting the same note over and over again in succession.
Jumpgluts - Uses the same hand motion as jack, but alternates the keys uses. For example, [24][13][34][12][13]
Dump - Files not charted explicity to the music in most cases. Usually made to be hard just for the sake of being hard.
Jumptrill - A trill but with jumps such as [12][34] being repeated or [13][24]
Rolls - Patterns like 1234 1234 1234 that seem to just repeat the same pattern as they roll across the screen. Can also apply to jumpstream where the patterns just seem to move back from left to right or that repeat the same direction over and over again.

Refer here for a better explanation than I can give: http://www.flashflashrevolution.com/vbz … p?t=127628

This isn't really in-depth or complete as I'll be better at answering specific questions rather than just typing at nothing.

Last edited by Khelly (2016-11-11 04:59:27)