Dancing Monkeys Question/possible bug/request

wearylemur · Basic Member Joined: 25 Aug 2005

I think dancing monkeys is a great application. I noticed the author said he uses these forums so hopefully he will see this.

I was wondering if anyone had any advice on how to improve the confidence level of a song. I've noticed some songs have higher levels than others and that makes sense. However if there is a way to tweak an encoding to give dancing monkeys a better shot I'd love to find out about it.

Also I've noticed that sometimes it doesn't use the feet levels I've given as the parameters. For instance if I do 3 5 7 there have been times where I've gotten 3 6 6. My guess is because dancing monkeys is doing a best fit between the song and the requested feet, but then again it could be a bug.

Finally I thought it would be great if there were more options we could set either to help the monkeys (for instance if we know the bpm) or even greater config options like -nopauses or -moreholds or -lightchoas or -heavychoas those sort of options really could help guide the monkeys.

Jedo · Trick Member Joined: 18 Nov 2004 Location: NYC

I think it would be great if it worked for mac OSX

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wearylemur · Basic Member Joined: 25 Aug 2005

I think there is a mac application called soft windows. Dancing Monkeys doesn't appear to be that complicated. Also I believe the author has the source on the site and it looks to be done in c and matlab. I know there is c for mac os x (at least i hope for their sake there is;) and matlab sounds like an app that would be made for the mac. You should be able to compile your own if that is the case. Either way it sounds like to me with a little work you could get it running.

I also had another suggestion for dancing monkeys that I thought I'd mention. I notice that it cuts songs down to around a minute and thirty seconds automatically. It would be a great option to tweak the cut off time. For example a switch like -truncate 2:00 to make the song last 2 minutes.

tanonev · Basic Member Joined: 20 Aug 2005

http://www.mathworks.com/programs/mac/index.shtml

I think it's expensive, though...

Does Dancing Monkeys have any random features, or is it deterministic? It would be really cool if you could hook up Dancing Monkeys to StepMania (with pads, of course), and have it generate a different stepfile every time you played

wearylemur · Basic Member Joined: 25 Aug 2005

i do not know how the algorithm works. at some level the steps appear to be random with some intelligence behind it. for instance with some songs i've noticed the chorus will have the same step pattern each time the chorus appears. i also noticed the higher confidence dancing monkeys has in the song the better job it does.

it does not seem to generate random steps every time, however it does generate 3 sets of steps each time (one for each difficulty). if you wanted you could make all three sets the same number of feet and you would have at least three to pick from at roughly the same level.

i have not tried running it on the same song more than once to see if it comes up with different steps each time. i suspect it would.

Okiyama · Trick Member Joined: 06 Aug 2005

ok umm i got the song generated (w00t) now uhh how do i dump it into stepmania?

Kles · Trick Member Joined: 23 Aug 2005

In the output folder of Dancing Monkeys, there should be a folder with the name of your song. Drop that in to C:\program files\stepmania\songs\(insertfoldernamehere) or wherever you installed StepMania.

Okiyama · Trick Member Joined: 06 Aug 2005

it only have a .wav file in it