Making your own dot patterns! In blocks!
I haven’t added this to my Github, so it’s more of a template project than an extension. To use the “extension”, you just make a copy of this project for yourself!
You can pretty much tell what I’m doing just looking at the example in the template project, but here’s everything I added, in order from top to bottom in the new “Fmusic” blocks tab (ignoring the obvious ones)
Blocks
Play (song... dots...) - This plays the first track as music (after a delay), and at the same time “plays” the second one, creating dots instead of sound. (that fall in time to hit the correct spot at the same time the delayed music plays) You can put one after another and they will work exactly the same as playing music normally!
When your song is played {...} - Code in here runs when you click on your song in the menu. Make sure to use a “draw background (colors…)” block at the top to draw the background and lines. Then you just put the song stuff you want to play in there to make it play.
Draw background with background (color)... - This block draws the background. You can also choose to update the position of falling dots, which is useful if you have changed the line width. It is a good idea to use this at the top of your “When your song is played…” block.
Set your song info... - Put this in the On Start block to change the info displayed when you click your song in the menu. The percentage displayed in the menu is determined by that “total points” input, so make sure to play your song to find the maximum points possible and change that number accordingly (the “# / #” part of the song stat screen will count for you, so you don’t have to play the song perfectly to count points. Just let it play and then that second number be the correct points count)
Set line spacing () - This controls the space between the lines. Changing this number only changes where new notes spawn, and you’ll need to use the “Draw background” block to actually re-draw the lines and move already falling notes to their correct x position. This is defaulted to 16, so if you aren’t making fancy line movements like I made for the template project, you can just ignore this block.
Reset your song data - This block resets the saved high score of your song.
Reset save data - This deletes all saves settings, like high scores, key binds, and other preferences.
When drum 5 plays {...} - This function runs when you use the 5th drum in the dots track. The first 4 drums are the ones that create single dots, so the 5th drum is the one right under those. It runs when the note would be created, not when the note would hit the line, so you may have to fiddle with timings for certain effects.
Copying song data from another project
To copy music data from another project, you need to go into the javaScript and copy the hex data. If you double click on the data, it should highlight all of it, even if it goes off the right side of the window with a “…”.
- Copy the data. (ctrl + c)
- Go into your copy of the template project and drag a new “Play song (…) dots (…)” block into the “On your song played” block.
- Convert to JavaScript.
JavaScript of the newly dragged song will look like this:
The data in there is stuff like the default temp, number of measures, etc. There are two sets, the first is the music data and the second is the dots data. - Double click the first bit of hex data to highlight it.
- Paste your copied hex data to replace the highlighted data.
- Just like when you double clicked the song data the first time, you have been automatically scrolled to the end of the pasted data. If you want to, scroll a bit more to the right and highlight + paste the data into the second hex spot as well. This will copy the song data into the dots track, which makes creating dots for the track a lot easier (imo) because you can listen to your song and see what is happening in the song while creating the dots. Just make sure to remove any unwanted drums or long notes from the top 5 rows so that the song data won’t create dots you don’t want.
If you have a lot of song tracks to copy, you can copy the whole block of song data, drag the same number of song+dot blocks into the project, and then paste all the song data into the javaScript somewhere and copy the hex from the block of song data into the song+dots blocks. That way you don’t have to repeatedly open and close the projects.