Development

Just another update in case you were curious. Winter break! That means free time to work on Beats. I’ve responded to the flood of emails that you’ve all been sending me as well the handful of questions posted on the forums. Beats 1.4b progress is nicely coming along, but expect it to be a big one since much of the internal code structure is being revamped (that mess that we cranked out during those 48hrs of PennApps is finally being cleaned up). At the least, the next version should run a lot smoother, be less buggy, and a with a …

The new website and forums are now finally up! Aside from a bunch more info copy-pasting, you’ll be noticing some graphical improvements over the next few days as we have a small but talented graphics/web team helping out here on UPenn’s campus. Beats 1.4b’s progress is progressing smoothly as you can see via the latest Changelog and the To-Do List. As of the moment, on-the-go song installation is pretty much ready to go, a few nice graphical upgrades have been made, and the scoring system has (started to) become stabilized in preparation for Scoreloop integration (e.g. future scoreboards, achievements, etc.). …

An update based on some user suggestions. And before you ask, no .dwi support isn’t here yet, but its being worked on and definitely will appear soon. And no reverse play, leaders board, or any of those other major things on my To-Do list. Good news though is I figured out what was causing all those crashes with certain .sm files and have put up a preliminary warning about them. When .dwi support is added, the .sm parser will also be rewritten, so hopefully Beats will be able to support 90%+ of those StepMania/Dance With Intensity stepfiles out there! I’ve …

A quick update with a few changes that’ll hopefully fix a lot of crashes and make your gameplay experience a lot better ; 3 Going through the crash reports, I quickly realized that there were a lot of bugs that involved simple fixes, or, in the case of .sm file parsing, simple error catches. I admit, the current .sm compatibility of Beats isn’t so great. After all, I wrote the parser (alongside the rest of the alpha build of the app) in under 48hrs (sleep, or rather lack thereof, included), so things are very, VERY buggy. I will be completely …

The first release was a surprising success, with a lot, lot more downloads and feedback than I ever expected for my very first Android app. Obviously people want StepMania/DDR for their Android phone – and thats exactly what they’ll get! In 1.1b are a handful of new settings that I’ve added based on user feedback (a developer that listens, yay!) as well as others I though would be nice. A nifty preliminary pause/resume functionality has been added, and so has an auto-start setting. Numerous things have been tweaked and now crashes/buggyness should occur a lot less (if they do occur …

After almost a month of cracking out code (spending numerous sleepless nights using over the Google API) and weeks of closed beta testing, “Beats, Advanced Rhythm Game” is finally out for Google Android! Beats is a clone of the popular cross-platform rhythm game/engine StepMania, which is most well known as a simulator of Konami’s popular arcade game Dance Dance Revolution. Beats 1.0b (the initial beta release) is now available on the Android Market. Just search using the keywords beats, rhythm, or stepmania and look for the app released by Keripo. You can also download it directly here. (Direct download) (Direct …

“Beats, Advance Rhythm Game for Android” is a Google Android game/engine for playing user-generated stepfiles that follow the StepMania 3.9 .sm file format. Beats is written by University of Pennsylvania undergrads Philip Peng, Matthew Croop and Yui Suveepattananont (Team Notes). PennApps is an annual hackathon hosted by UPenn in which students compete/write a web/mobile app within a 48 hr (weekend) timespan. (Direct download)

A user on the iPodLinux forums posted that they had started working on a Flash player port to the iPod. I was skeptical, and here’s why: Keripo wrote: Here’s my two cents. Keep in mind that this is just my speculation/rambling/etc. so don’t take it to heart/seriously. I’ve looked into getting Flash playback on the iPod before in the past and the only suitable project I found was Gnash. Gnash is an open source, GPL’d replacement for Adobe’s web browser flash player. Its written in C++, uses GTK+, and can be cross-compiled. I’ve ported simple GTK-to-hotdog before so that’s not …

Project ZeroSlackr is based around the ZeroSlackr Framework, a highly customized, user-friendly iPodLinux system/installation targeted at new users. The project maintains and integrates numerous applications and packs created by the iPL community. Installation of iPodLinux through ZeroSlackr will not require a reformat of your iPod (i.e. you will be able to keep all your music and files). The ZeroSlackr Framework will only install on iPods formatted on Windows (WinPod in FAT/FAT32) and iPods supported by the iPodLinux project. If you are unsure if your iPod is supported, see the Generations page. Unsupported models include: iPod shuffle (no screen), iPod nano …

After playing around with Loader2’s “ipod_beep”, I added a “boot tune” function to Loader 2 which plays back a .pzm file generated by the piezo maker module. The download below includes a modified loader.bin, a sample “boot.pzm” file (which Final Fantasy fans will recognize) and the patch file with the modifications (since Trac is down, as always). Use ipodpatcher to install the bootloader (see the Loader 2 wiki page for instructions). Copy the “boot.pzm” file to your iPod (Loader 2 checks for a “boot.pzm” or “boot_tune.pzm” file in the same locations as it does with the kernel and loader.cfg file). …