Southperry Stepmania meetups - gauging interest

could be. does SM consume a lot of bandwith? Cuz my connection sucks.

Oh, and which SM is better for these cases? v3.95 or v4.0?

Downloading packs certainly uses a lot of bandwidth. The actual game does not, all it does is send the server an update of the arrows you've hit/missed every so often and receive updates from the other players.

3.95 and 4.0 are equally good as far as online play is concerned. 3.95 can't enter rooms with passwords, but I won't be using one because 3.9 players might not want to switch themes. Stepmania 4 is still in development and breaks theme compatiblity frequently, so there's pretty much only the default theme available for 4.0. 3.9 has been out for quite some time, and 3.9 themes are compatible with 3.95, so there's a rich set of themes available for 3.95. If you don't care about themes or you like the default theme for 4.0, use 4.0. If you want to change the theme, use 3.95.

God what, Community Keyboard Megapack is only Intermediate? orz

 Spoiler

You ought to see the songs in the Touhou Project pack if you think CKMP is hard.

All the Touhou songs in KoMmunity are from Touhou Pad Pack I'm pretty sure.

Oh yeah, it'd be good if I explained how to play online. =P

You should have the following options set:
Coin Options > Event Mode = ON
Machine Options > Menu Timer = OFF
Machine Options > Default Fail Type = Whatever. Don't put FailImmediate unless you're a masochist.
Machine Options > Judge Difficulty = 4
Machine Options > Life Difficulty = 4
Machine Options > Marvelous Timing = ALWAYS

Make an account at the Stepmania Online forums. Once that's done, go in the options menu in Stepmania and create a profile with the username you registered with. Select "Netword play" or something like that from the Stepmania menu (remember, you need 3.95 or 4.0). When it asks you where to connect to, enter smonline.us. When it asks for password, enter the password of the account you registered with.

Once you're in a lobby or game room of Stepmania Online, you need to press ctrl+enter to select things! Just plain enter is used for sending chat messages.

Enter the Novice or Beginning sub-lobby (I forget exactly what it's called). On meetup nights, I'll create a room there called Southperry. When you're in a room, pressing up twice will bring you to an options menu where you can adjust your speed mods and other options. (refer to this guide for how to add custom speed mods.) Pressing down allows you to select from the available difficulties of the selected song.

Finally, a word of advice to new players: Play with two hands and change your keys to something like dfjk so your fingers aren't crowded together on the arrow key.

I'm usually on Southperry IRC, so feel free to ask me questions there (in PM please, I don't pay too much attention to #southperry).