Hi everyone !

I'm new to this forum, i've discovered it today and he seems really interesting ! 

To introduce myself i'm a beginner in game programming in general, never done it before... i have 1 year of C++ with me and 1 month of OpenGL at this moment... few days ago i had the idea to create a dance dance revolution like game for educational purpose only i made some research on the internet and i've found something called stepmania, an open source version of DDR, another thing called "FMOD" that allows me to detect BPM from a song and also "SDL" which is a 2D library you can use for making 2D games. 

Thanks to my research i started to get an idea how how i could develop that kind of gameplay with all of these elements but unfortunatly it is too difficult for me to detect beat and bars from a song so i checked for another solution and i found that stepmania was using a special file format called "*.sm" file where many infos are stored such as song bpm, artist name, arrows that appears during the song etc... so i tough about making a program that parse the selected sm file, stores the datas from it and displaying the sm file's arrows on the screen in order to reproduce the DDR gameplay but i also have trouble doing this because i have never done file parsing before...

I'm a bit lost in this part... if anyone have any advice or wants to help me i will really appreciate it.

Thank your reading.

Regards.

ps : sorry for my english.

For that type of game, the program does not detect the beats or do any that work as the game plays.  Instead the game designer builds a save file that matches each music track. The file contains the time for the arrow, the arrow to play, how far and similar information. They fine-tune the values for the desired difficulty, they make patterns that feel fun to the player and are reasonable to hit with fun combo patterns and such.

So it looks like you've still got a lot of learning to do.

You will need to learn about file reading. You will probably want to build your own custom file format.

You'll need the ability to handle timing to make your data match your data.

You'll need the ability to play music, FMOD can do that.

You'll need the ability do handle the input of pushing buttons on the screen, and you'll need something to display which it sounds like you're working on with SDL and OpenGL.

You'll probably want your own custom tool to build and edit your data files.

Keep in mind that you also realy need to save the time an input occured otherwise could fall to frustrated players hitting corrently but the game false reacts for input lags

It looks like there's a pretty good description of .sm files here https://github.com/stepmania/stepmania/wiki/sm. Maybe in the actual stepmania repo you could find some code related to parsing them and go from there.

Hi all, thank you for your replies i really appreciate it ! for the moment i have something like this : 

I still have a lot to do but i really want to have something "playable" in the beginning... and then add the "music part" later, i will maybe use midi files or sm ones i don't know for the moment !