Well, now, instead of playing the home verions of DDR, I'm playing on a homemade pad that I connected to my PC. With Stepmania, you can manually design songs or record steps, very much like my DDR Recorder idea, and very much like Edit Mode in home versions. However. one thing that I am accustomed to doing is getting into the habit of making repetitious patterns, even now, since I make manual stepfiles.
So, on one website, this teenager was talking about how he took a test on a scantron, and I thought, "Hey, wouldn't that be neat if you could scan a scantron or some other standardized test-taking form onto your computer, and Stepmania (a DDR simulator for the PC, which I forgot to mention) would make the A/B/C/D the steps. A is left, B is down, C is up, and D is right. Anything extra would be ignored. Jumps would be if there were two bubbled in, or if the scantron shows a wrong answer. All you'd have to do is push a button, like, `/~, and the next proper step would be put in on the measure that you marked. You could still put your own steps in.
Taking the idea one step (no pun intended) further, Stepmania could judge the beats of the song and make the notes align with it. Any major hits/accents would also have jumps, as well as the regular jumps marked on the scantron. If you run out of scantron bubbles, Stepmania could make random notes for you.
Well, the bottom line - Scantron Stepcharts are a very good, easy, and painless way to get completely random stepcharts for your DDR songs.-- Nemmy, Sep 17 2005 Wow, I wish someone would do something with this.-- Nemmy, Oct 03 2005 Scantron machines are pretty expensive, not to mention isn't it ten times easier just to use a key instead of filling in one of those stupid bubbles? I guess I'm biased giving that I hate scantron tests, but alas.-- iamnafets, Oct 03 2005 You could use a scanner and a program that looks for marks of a certain tone of gray (the pencil).
Using the key is a good idea, but using filled-out scantrons promote education! And we don't want our next culture to be listening to rap and working at Mickey D's into their 60s, now, do we?-- Nemmy, Oct 03 2005 random, halfbakery