The Future of Stepmania

[Leo137]

and stop talking about how all charts should be technical, casual players play horribly bad files of the songs that they like and pro players play dump or jumpstream files

[codcrille]

Not a very active member of stepmania society but I play the "quality" KB packs that's been made since the last time I remember to check in. What's keeping me from really being active though is a reason to interact with people. I play the files, I enjoy them. Occasionally I'll even post a few scores but that's it. I don't play much SMO at all because it's such a hazzle to find anyone who plays the same files I do at the same time I'm online which brings me to the whole point of this post.

Isn't it possible to play files, in Stepmania, without having to download them in advance?

Like streaming them off the SMO server and just playing whatever file comes up in the lobby regardless if you have the file yourself or not. Manually getting files to play, searching for appropriate packs that suits you is kind of ancient. What game these days requires you to manually search for new patches? None. Every game ever made since like 10 years ago streamlines it down to Start game > Game looks for any new patches, downloads and installs > Play. Given I have zero clue on any other rythm games because Stepmania is my first and only game in the genre, but if you want to get new players to play Stepmania instead of any other similar game you should probably try to streamline the experience as all the extra work is probably keeping alot of potential players out.

[aj187]

Copyright. That's the number one reason song streaming hasn't been made available. (At least, as far as I can tell anyways.)

Game patches are also inherently different from songs. The people who develop the game have the right to release patches without being slammed for copyright infringement.

Of course, if you'd like to pay the legal fees that would result as of this, then go right ahead.

[Izzy]

The reason downloading songs from smo during the game doesn't exist is because the smo protocol would need to be updated. It hasn't been forever because it would break 3.95 from working the same way as 5.0.

Stepmania 5 would also need a client update. Technically 3.9 could also be updated but then everyone would still need to download a new client.

It could be developed in such a way that you download it from other players and not from a central server which I guess would remove liability from smo.

[macgravel]

You have my axe.

[Arkuski]

I was thinking about the lack of a centralized stepping community lately. Here is a list of what I see as the most active beacons of stepping left:

FFR
Stepmania
SMO
Thirdstyle
Zenius
r21freak

This doesn't include major pump communities and this is all coming from a str8 noob so I'm probably missing some. I'm also wondering how much overlap there is in these places. I have accounts everywhere except SMO but that will likely change soon. If everybody were to converge to one place, would it be here? Or would we be roping in a mere fraction of hobos who have never heard of FFR?

[Leo137]

i would think about SMO, because its the point in common with (almost) all the comunnities

[Wayward Vagabond]

i would consider SMO to be the common point imo

[MarioNintendo]

Stepmania Kickstarter?

I didn't take the time to follow much of the thread, so I don't know if this has already been said, but while focusing on centralizing the concept of Stepmania is a good idea, I think there needs to be a rethinking of the organisation of the stuff found on stepmania.com. Last time I visited, the site is a mess; search engines don't work well, info is deorganized, you only stumble on old stuff... I noticed they had an update saying the cleaned up most stuff, so it might be fixed, but it's really painful to go there.