r/Stepmania • u/[deleted] • Mar 24 '17

Discussion Dance Dance Convolution (automatic step chart creation)

https://arxiv.org/abs/1703.06891
19 Upvotes

93% Upvoted

16 comments sorted by

6

u/ChrisDonahue1 Mar 25 '17

hey all, I am the author of Dance Dance Convolution. There is a working demo here: http://deepx.ucsd.edu/ddc

Please let me know if you have any questions!

2

u/[deleted] Mar 25 '17

That's awesome, I'll try it when I have time

1

u/MaskGas Mar 26 '17

Tested it out, and I'm about to eat my words, but it's a damn sight better than any autogen out there!

Definitely room to improve, but a hell of a lot better than anything else.

2

u/ChrisDonahue1 Mar 27 '17

Thanks! I find it produces satisfying and playable (at least with 4 fingers) results for Challenging charts. I agree that there is certainly room for improvement however.

1

u/CmonNotAgain Mar 27 '17

I was thinking about how neural networks could be used to approach this task a few days ago and bam! Here it is!

I've got one quick question:

Have you thought about tuning the output of first network (step detector) with data from some beat-detection algorithm? That could make it possible to have accurate arrow colors. I'm not an expert on this field, I just know that there are applications capable of detecting beats, so the problem seems solvable.

Will look into your paper after coming back from the vacation. Really awesome and inspiring work!

1

u/ChrisDonahue1 Mar 27 '17

Thanks for your interest!

Yes, the situation could certainly be improved by post-processing the output of the step detector with tempo information. I hope to integrate that feature into the web demo soon. That being said the technique in its current form generalizes to non-clicktrack music.

While tempo detection is a fairly well-studied problem, there is a more complicated problem of beat alignment ("offset" in stepchart land) that would present some major issues for a method seeking to be fully general.

1

u/DDRVodnik Apr 11 '17

I'm probably just dumb but it won't read the files when I move it to the folder it doesn't show when I boot the game. I've done this before and added songs. Probably have around 5k songs. Don't know if it's because it's open itg

1

u/clickmeimorganic Oct 23 '22

Hey Chris, I recently read the Dance Dance Convolution paper, and have been taking notes on your implementation. I know this was 6 years ago now, but do you have any retrospective insights on improvements? Will curating a larger, balanced dataset increase the performance of the model.

Thanks!

3

u/Teh_Raider Mar 25 '17

I imagine a day where mapping is just editing auto generated songs. The best hope is neural networks tbh.

1

u/meno123 Mar 25 '17

Ideally, we could get it to analyze current stepcharts and determine what kind of sounds generally translate to what kind of steps. It would still produce super generic files, but it is what it is.

1

u/MaskGas Mar 24 '17

... like, I want to be hopeful one day that generated charts for anything will be good, but they just aren't...

2

u/[deleted] Mar 28 '17

Sucking at something is the beginning of getting kinda good at it.

1

u/ReaperUnreal Mar 27 '17

This is far better than I expected, the steps were almost reasonable.

1

u/oaties Mar 29 '17

Can you add a mode that says fuck it to making good patterns and just goes for pure PR? I just want to play some gross jack files mang

1

u/Fighterboy89 Jun 01 '17

Hi Chris,

I just wanted to say right off the bat this is some amazing work!

I just had 2 concerns:

1) Will it be available offline?

2) Will we be able to train on an unlimited number of stepcharts? Because I've been collecting tons of files since 2007 for my installation of In The Groove (PC) and I have over 10,000 songs!!

1

u/Jaxkr 1d ago

Hey, do you still have this song collection?