Tutorial: How to make custom theme for Phase Shift

[djlastnight]

Haha, thank you so much man

[yakkers]

Thanks for the guide, I'm currently working on making a visually simplistic Drummania-style theme just for myself to use and the information about how the meters and note models work is a lot of help.

I would imagine it's not possible, but do you know if there's any way to adjust the camera angle of the neck via themes or mods? I know there's the neck angle setting in-game, but I'm looking to do a flat top-down view and the highest neck angle makes the note board really tiny onscreen and it's also not quite a perfectly head on view.

[djlastnight]

Thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately, you can't adjust the camera angle via the theme system.

[yakkers]

Oct 16, 2016 21:20:28 GMT djlastnight said:

Thank you for your feedback. Unfortunately, you can't adjust the camera angle via the theme system.

Alright, well thanks anyways! I might toss something like that in the suggestions forum then.

[yakkers]

Sorry for the double post, but I've been messing around and have a few more questions.

I would imagine not, but does the theme system give you any control over the size, layout, etc. of the note lanes? I'm wondering if I can customize that sort of thing for pro drums, I'd love to tweak the width of some of the lanes and maybe try adding a note lane for bass kicks like in DrumMania.

If not, is there any way to set individual models per-note, or are the textures per note color the most control you have over that? Because if that's a thing, I could fudge the positions of the models themselves to do pretty much anything with the layout since I'm only playing on pro drums and don't care if the other modes look broken.

[djlastnight]

Models such as board, frets, notes, meters are considered static resources and you can not control them directly from the theme system.

You should use 3D application (3d studio max) to create your custom 3d models (*.X file format).

Generally you can't change the frets layout, because PS takes fret.X model many times and shifts it by given offset (could be negative value too, if we start from the center of the screen).

Let's imagine that the step equals 100 pixels and we build 5 fret guitar layout.
We will have the following positions for different frets:
green -200
red -100
yellow 0
blue +100
orange +200
It must be obvious that for different fret colors PS loads different textrure (Fret_Green.png for green, Fret_Red.png for red.. etc).

Conclusion: It is not impossible to change the frets layout by using model, which contains more than 1 3d object.
Let us say we have 5 objects in our fret.x, but our textures are created in smart way, so we show only the needed object (the other 4 objects uses transparent texture at this time). I applied this technique for WoR meters and probably it will work for frets and notes too. Hope you get the main idea.

[carelplizz]

Can someone help me to turn down tail and spark . i'm trying so hard but can't find way to turn it down

[yakkers]

Oct 24, 2016 10:07:05 GMT djlastnight said:

Conclusion: It is not impossible to change the frets layout by using model, which contains more than 1 3d object.
Let us say we have 5 objects in our fret.x, but our textures are created in smart way, so we show only the needed object (the other 4 objects uses transparent texture at this time). I applied this technique for WoR meters and probably it will work for frets and notes too. Hope you get the main idea.

I see, so the idea is you can technically make a bunch of "sub-models" in the single fret and note meshes and have each color's texture only skin opaque pixels onto the sub-model in the position I want that color to be? That's pretty cool, and I think that will work for what I'm trying to do although it will either take a lot of measurements and math or a ton of trial and error to get everything positioned properly. You wouldn't happen to know by what factor the tom frets are horizontally scaled down on the pro drums layout, would you? If I figure out that number I could probably work out some math to get the exact coordinates I need.

Anyways, thanks a ton! I wasn't expecting there to actually be a workaround, I love messing around with hacky visual stuff like this so this should be a fun project.

Edit:
I really don't want to spam the thread with double posts so I'll just edit some additional questions in here...
I might just be missing something obvious, but I'm having trouble getting models to import properly. I can export as .x and put them in the game, but they don't seem to be lit. It just appears as a solid dark gray/black in game. I know it's not an issue with my exporter, because I tried importing a model from an existing theme and exporting it right back out and it worked fine there.

I made sure the model has a material, and it's got all the same settings as what I saw in the imported one that works fine.
Any ideas? Surely I'm just doing something stupid here.

[djlastnight]

Oct 25, 2016 22:33:09 GMT yakkers said:

although it will either take a lot of measurements and math or a ton of trial and error to get everything positioned properly.

You have to do the calculations - no workaround for this

I'm having trouble getting models to import properly

If you use 3ds max, you could send your project.

[yakkers]

Oct 31, 2016 19:08:51 GMT djlastnight said:

I'm having trouble getting models to import properly

If you use 3ds max, you could send your project.

Unfortunately all I have access to is Blender, so that's what I've been using. If I import a model from another skin it works fine, but I can't see any difference between those meshes and mine that could be causing it. I originally realized the .x models were importing with a material and I didn't have one on mine, but when I added a material and made sure it had all the same settings it still isn't being lit ingame.

Do you know if there are any other requirements, like with UVs or tri layouts or anything?

[djlastnight]

Do you use correct naming of your textures and your model? Fret.X should reference Fret_Green.png, Fret_Red.png, etc..
When you load the game, please see the game_log.txt for missing textures.

[amyrakunejo]

If I may note, pro/real drums has three different view settings.

Normal
Alternate
Alternate Flip (I use this one)

Normal has ALL seven lane gems being the same size (this is confusing to me).

Alternate has the drum lane gems larger and the cymbal gem lanes smaller.

Alternate Flip has the cymbal gem lanes larger while the drum gem lanes are smaller (this is visually appealing to me).

If one were to change the size and other visual parts, these different modes would be affected.

I seem to remember a game that had a six pad drum kit and a single kick pedal (don't recall the game title); the drum chart had the kick pedal note in the center of the chart (as a symbol instead of a horizontal line).

kW Xtractor?

Freeware?

Hmmm...

Right now I'm preparing for a very bad next few months, if not longer (I may not have a place to live for a long while and I'll leave it at that), so my main focus is on preparing to potentially lose all my projects and my livelihood, hoping on sheer luck to have a back door.

[yakkers]

Nov 2, 2016 17:40:01 GMT djlastnight said:

Do you use correct naming of your textures and your model? Fret.X should reference Fret_Green.png, Fret_Red.png, etc..
When you load the game, please see the game_log.txt for missing textures.

Late response, I sort of abandoned this project and I'm just coming back to it now.

And yes, the textures are all loading properly. I see no errors in the log and depending on what ugly mess the mesh decides to display as, I can see my texture on it, just not lit properly. It's generally just all black or gray.

EDIT: I got it! I hadn't been applying the object's scale when I scaled it up to the proper size to fit the lanes in game. I've never thought of that as something that would affect lighting, but it's something you generally always want to apply anyways so I guess I just overlooked it.

So, if anyone has problems with your models' texture not displaying properly in the future, make sure you're applying the changes if you scaled your mesh object!

[Cardellos]

hey djlastnight Thanks for the amazing tutorial.

Is it possible to put lyrics in the main menu?
i've tried and fail to many times.

thanks again

[djlastnight]

Aug 23, 2017 5:22:04 GMT Cardellos said:

hey djlastnight Thanks for the amazing tutorial.

Is it possible to put lyrics in the main menu?
i've tried and fail to many times.

thanks again

Hi. Sorry for the late reply.
I guess you want to add lyrics from the current jukebox song,
which is not supported by the game.