Frequently Asked Questions

Send Questions/Comments to bytemstab@gmail.com

It like, totally doesn't work or something?

When there is a problem initializing DanceForce, the output of the error appears in the widow on the right side of the settings dialog in the AVS control panel.  If DanceForce believes that Direct Input has been initialized OK and  everything SHOULD be working, nothing is displayed in that window.  At the bottom of the settings dialog you should see a status message, "Don't have a good beat" or "We have a beat".  When the beat has become stable, you should see the dance counter counting off "one..two..three..four".  If you see all this and your joystick isn't dancing, try increasing the force-feedback amount in the control panel for the joystick.  You must do this yourself because as far as I can tell you can't change this setting in a program (that's probably for the best anyways).  If you are getting some kind of error output in the window to the right, please mail it to bytemstab@gmail.com. 


Why does the beat detection suck / rule?

The beat detection is based off of the AVS Beat detection.  DanceForce will only dance when the beat appears to be stable (so not at that first part in the song when the bpm changes wildly)  This is because DanceForce does not want to look like a dork thrashing around.  When the song is going well and the beat is clear, the joystick will dance well, it predicts the point when the next beat occurs and applies just enough force to make it to that position on the beat.  When the beat detection sends down a few strange beats, the joystick usually will stop in place to the right/left.

What about my precious joystick? Am I hurting it?

Dude, I have no idea if this is good or bad for the joystick. I can say that a lot of testing has gone into this program and the joystick which I used to develop with (MS Sidewinder Force Feedback) is no different than it ever was, and bugs at times caused some major thrashing around. Also, a lot of work went into the coding of the force settings. The joystick actually reduces force as it nears its 'destination' point so the joystick does not use too much force at any time. In fact, the highest amount of force it is able to use is only 1/3 of the maximum force DirectInput can set the joystick to do.

While testing with a Logitech Wingman Force 3D I noticed that if the force setting was set to 150% (apparently with the Logitech drivers you can do that) the joystick tended to thrash rather violently (it was pretty funny to watch).  So, don't do that, unless that is the desired effect.

Do AVSConverted files get deleted when the plug in is uninstalled?

No.

What do I do when I want to cycle only through non force-feedback AVS Presets after using AVSConvert? 

Basically you should delete the DanceForceEnabled directory.  The reasons are that as long as that directory is underneath the \plugins\avs\ directory, winamp can select a random preset from in there (and thus kick of the force-feedbackness).   Since none of those presets are special and they can be automatically recreated by AVSConvert, you don't need them around.