ITGMania is the game engine officially supported by the ITG community for events such as ITL Online and Stamina RPG, and Simply Love is the officially supported theme included with it. On top of all the legacy StepMania features, there are a ton of options and shortcuts available, so it can be difficult to be aware of or find all the most useful ones. Some of the important/popular ones are outlined here.
¶ Main Menu Options
Configure Keyboard/Pad Mappings
- In addition to the things you'd expect in any dance game software, as of ITGMania 1.0, there is a bindable restart button, which works both during gameplay and on the evaluation screen.
Input Options
- Menu Buttons: Option to turn off pad navigation so you don't accidentally scroll standing around.
- Input Debounce Time: Can mitigate misfires by having a small window in which retriggers of a panel are ignored.
Graphics/Sound Options
- Global Offset: This is where your "sync" of the audio to the steps is set. If you're accurately timing to the beat but your timing is looking negative on the evaluation screen (hitting the beat is registering as early), you want to make this proportionately more positive (delaying the audio playback to bring it in line), and vice versa. It can also be adjusted during gameplay (detailed later).
Visual Options => Appearance Options
- Center 1 Player: Puts your arrows in the middle of the screen if you're alone.
- Translate Song Titles: If you can't read Japanese/Korean/etc. characters, this will transliterate them to Latin characters.
Advanced Options
- Default fail type: ImmediateContinue lets you keep playing the chart (without further opportunity to pass or score) after you fail.
- Profile Sort Order: Can make the profile select screen less inconvenient based on your needs.
Simply Love Options
- Visual Style/Rainbow Mode: Theme aesthetic adjustments.
- MusicWheel Scroll Speed: Scroll the songwheel faster.
- MusicWheel Style: IIDX lets you loop an open pack when you scroll past the end instead of scrolling to other packs.
- Preferred Style: Lets you skip the gameplay style select screen.
- Default Game Mode: If you want standard play, you probably want to set this to ITG.
- Allow Screen (various): Lets you disable a lot of the screens you have to press through between the main menu and the songwheel. If you disable the game mode select screen, you'll boot into the Default Game Mode you set.
- Keyboard Features: This enables things like song search and practice mode. You want to turn this on if you have a keyboard.
- Preview music loops: You can disable the preview music on the songwheel from replaying when you leave it alone.
GrooveStats Options
- Enable GrooveStats: Needs to be turned on to submit to and retrieve from online leaderboards and events, etc. You will also need to register for an account and either login with a QR code (below) or register your API key with your local profile by hand (see https://github.com/GrooveStats/gslauncher#setting-up-your-groovestats-api-key)
- Auto-Download Unlocks: Events like ITL or Stamina RPG allow you to unlock new charts through certain accomplishments. This will allow them to automatically download when unlocked rather than having to manually download them from the website.
- Separate Unlocks By Player: Option to keep track of what you unlock separately from what others who play on your setup unlock.
- Display GrooveStats QR Login: Option for people to be able to log into GrooveStats with a QR code instead of setting the API key in a text file for a profile. Be aware you need to keep the select profile screen enabled for this feature to work.
Left + Right: Activates songwheel options. This includes a ton of useful stuff:
- Sorting and searching
- Practice mode
- Favorites
- Input test
- Loading new songs
- Checking unlock downloads
- Changing modes or profiles
Ctrl + Shift + R: Hard reload - useful if the chart has changed from when it was first loaded (i.e. if you edited it or downloaded an updated copy), as sometimes the old cache will interfere if you only use "load new songs".
Spin (e.g. Left, Down, Right, Up, Left): Add/remove chart to favorites
¶ Main Modifiers
- Type of Speed Mod: 'C' ensures a constant scroll speed throughout the chart, while 'M' provides an option to match the maximum scroll speed of the chart to the equivalent CMOD while maintaining relative scroll speed changes, which can be convenient for "NO CMOD" charts.
- Mini: Shrink the arrows to fit more of them on the screen at once (a zoom out effect). Generally allows a faster readable scroll speed.
- Perspective: Some people prefer the "Hallway" perspective, which has a 3D effect where the arrows get larger as they approach the receptors.
- Background Filter: Puts a filter between the arrows and the background art to improve visibility.
- Visual Delay: Can compensate for a difference between the visual appearance of the steps and the judgement timing due to things like monitor lag. Note this is different from global offset, which is between the audio and the step timing.
- Music Rate: Can speed up or slow down the song.
- Scroll: Some people prefer 'Reverse' to make the arrows scroll downards instead of upwards.
- Gameplay Extras
- Flash Column for Miss: Can make it easier to tell which arrow you missed in in a sequence.
- Density Graph at Top: Shows the graph of step density at the top of the screen during gameplay, which can be useful for knowing when intense sections are coming up or how long they go for.
- Judgement Tilt: Tilts the judgement based on whether your step was early or late for visual timing feedback.
- Column Cues: The column for the next step or mines after a significant period with no steps is highlighted to help you prepare.
- Judgement Tilt Intensity: If judgement tilt is enabled above, this determines the magnitude of the tilt.
- Error Bar: Visualization of where your step timing fell within the judgement windows.
- Error Bar Trim: The cutoff for the worst timing window that appears on the error bar.
- Measure Counter: Provides a count of measures of stream during gameplay. This determines the quantization that counts as stream for this purpose.
- Measure Lines: Creates horizontal lines on the scroll at the specified interval.
- Early Decent/Way Off Options: ITGMania allows you to rescore a step you accidentally hit it early in the way off or decent windows and then hit it again with better timing (but you still take the life penalty). The early decent/way off judgements can be distracting when this happens, so you may prefer to enable this to hide them.
- FA+ Options: If you want to play FA+, the main format played by the tech community which enables an extra (stricter) timing window, you can enable these options.
- Display FA+ Window: Show the 15ms fantastic window during the game (blue fantastic within 15ms, white fantastics within 23ms).
- Display EX Score: EX score become the main score shown during gameplay and on the evaluation screen.
- Display FA+ Pane: Show EX/FA+ results on the evaluation screen.
F7: Assist tick
F8: Autoplay
Hold enter: fail to evaluation screen
Hold esc: back to songwheel
F6 twice: AutoSync Machine - this has the game automatically your global offset (audio) while you step as accurately to the timing of the beat as you can. It's important to press F6 TWICE if you use this feature, as pressing it only once will sync the specific chart you're playing, taking it away from its intended sync and rendering it useless for syncing to everything else. Make sure it says 'AutoSync Machine' on the screen when you're using this.
(Alt + ) Shift + F11/F12: Manually adjust your global offset. Using alt enables smaller changes. You can manually put in changes based on your average results or feel this way, which can be easier for some people to fine tune than using the automatic sync.
F3 (held) => F6 => 2: Refreshes the evaluation screen, which will attempt to resubmit your score if the first attempt to submit failed.
Spin (e.g. Left, Down, Right, Up, Left): Add/remove chart to favorites
¶ Files and Folders
If you install the game normally, your saves, songs and various folders of things you might add to will be stored separately from the installation. This is convenient for persisting all your stuff when upgrading your ITGMania version.
- Windows:
%APPDATA%/ITGmania (shortcut for {drive}:/Users/{username}/AppData/Roaming/ITGmania)
- Linux:
~/.itgmania
- Mac (ITGmania 1.2.0 and newer):
~/Library/Application Support/ITGmania
- Mac (ITGmania 1.1.0 and older):
~/Library/Application Support/ITGmania, ~/Library/Preferences/ITGmania, ~/Library/Logs/ITGmania, ~/Library/Caches/ITGmania, ~/Pictures/ITGmania Screenshots
If you choose the portable install, everything will be stored together in the game installation directory. You can change any standard install into a portable install by adding a blank file called Portable.ini. On Mac and Linux, you can use the terminal command touch Portable.ini in the ITGmania directory to create a Portable.ini. To continue using your existing data, you will need to move your saved content into the ITGmania directory.
Within that main directory, you can find your profile in Save/LocalProfile/, probably associated with a long number. You can figure out if it's your profile by checking the DisplayName near the top of Editable.ini or Stats.xml. Here, you can find your scores (Stats.xml) and your in-game favorites file (favorites.txt).
¶ Favorites and Playlists
You can edit your favorites.txt to have extra subfolders in game by adding a line with the folder heading prefixed with ---. There is no functionality to edit within these in-game at the moment, adding a song to favorites just tacks it onto the end of the file, and removing a song from favorites removes it from everywhere in the file.
You can also have additional playlists, which have the same format as the favorites.txt, by storing other text files in a Playlists folder.