Hi! I’m new to charting and to ArrowVortex, so I have a question - how can I test chart when I haven’t finished it yet? I mean, it would be too complicated to save everything every time, throw it in folders, etc. and then run it in Etterna to check how 10 notes are played. Maybe there is a good beginner’s guide, because It would be pretty usefull for me as a person who just started trying to make a chart for Etterna.
Press Ctrl+O in the songwheel to enable practice mode, then enter your file. In practice mode you can click around on the NPS graph to play different sections of your chart. Left click to immediately warp to part of a song. Right click to create an anchor, where you can press Backspace to warp back to that anchor. Right click two different points in the graph to select an area to practice. Right click outside the graph to pause the chart.
What’s great about using practice mode to playtest is that you don’t have to exit out of the file while you make changes. Simply press Ctrl+S in ArrowVortex to save any additional changes you make, swap to Etterna, press Ctrl+Shift+R to reload the chart, and you can play those changes right away.
Okay, thank you very much, but I before think that this is possible to play test it inside ArrowVortex somehow xD. Now Im wondering about how to correctly save stepfile so Etterna can see it
save the file once in a folder and move that folder into the game properly. as long as the game never tried to load your song folder when it had no .sm or when your .sm had no valid chart, it should appear ingame and then you can do the practice mode thing. you can wait until you create a minimal chart before opening the game, or create the whole thing from scratch including creating the song folder while the game is opened and press ctrl q to load it for the first time. depends on the order of how you want to do things
here’s what I do when I get to the point where I need to playtest as I’m charting. I’ll put the audio and .sm into a proper song folder and start etterna. in the music selection screen, I’ll navigate to my wip folder and idle on the pack so no music plays. I can alt+tab pretty easily between etterna and av at this point, I’ll make changes in av, save to .sm, alt+tab back into etterna, drop down to the song I’m working on and hit ctrl+shift+s to reload just that song. this can be kinda finnicky if you change the metadata at the top of the .sm (ie song name, artist name, etc) and it’ll usually just send you to whatever pack shows up first in your current sort order. here’s a quick example of what I mean, av is in focus with etterna running behind it.
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