What keeps you using 3.95?

[Kyzentun]

Originally Posted by Izzy

I get 500+ fps and the game runs perfectly smooth, but I am incapable of timing my notes in sm5. I stick by my statement that it feels like the timing windows are wobbling.

If you want to amuse yourself, grab a fresh checkout of Consensual. Play a song, bring up the menu on evaluation, and pick "save_column_scores". That will save precise input timing data as the theme and engine see it to a file like this in your profile folder (Save/LocalProfiles/00000000/song_scores/).
Then you can write some program to load it up and examine the data.
The data format is a lua table. Each top level entry is the score data for playing the song once, with a timestamp. Each entry in a score data field is for one column. Column 0 is the aggregate for all columns. Each individual column comes after it. The step_timings field in a
column has the timing info for each note. time is the time the note occurs at, offset is the note time subtracted from the press time (so negative offset means an early judgment). frame_deltas is the the frame deltas from two frames before to two frames after the judgment (so you can check whether your perfect occur at the same time as a spike in the frame delta). The frame delta is how long a frame took to process and render, the inverse of fps.


d3dx9_43.dll: Need to find info on whether devs are actually supposed to package that stuff or not.

Errors on the title screen: You probably broke it yourself trying to edit the theme. The default theme doesn't show any errors on the title screen. Post the error text or log files if you're going to claim errors occur.

[Izzy]

That doesn't sound very amusing, but I'll see what I can do later.

[Kyzentun]

Analysing the timing data probably won't reveal the source of the problem. That's why I said, "if you want to amuse yourself". But it might give you some vindication or something.

[kommisar]

only observation i made:

ati video card: sm5 rulz

nvidia video card: sm5 sux


i'm certain there's more to it than that but from testimonies and setups i've played on this seems to be the norm.

[lurker]

Originally Posted by Kyzentun

Find somebody that you don't insult to help you. I'm not going to waste my time on someone with an insulting attitude. (this applies to basically all 3.95 players, especially those who are so ill-informed that they can't see the improvements that have been made)

i was venting a bit because precision has ignored the shit out of 3 very nicely word e-mails i have sent them about this exact issue so i'm sorry if that sounded a bit rude
however, up until this point i have been completely supportive of the continued development of this game and had not used 3.95 since ssc was released so for you to take my only complaint about sm5 ever and turn it into the anonymous bitching of the "ill-informed" (i.e stupid) masses fucking irks me

[Jimmymi1]

Originally Posted by Kyzentun

This is the kind of blatant ignorance I was talking about. If you're one of the people that has read the release notes in the last two years, you're not ill-informed. (though if you're not using an aggressively updated theme, most of the stuff in the release notes does not turn into features you can use.)

Performance is a legitimate reason to not switch. I'll look into it when I have time to spend a solid month on a painstaking risky thankless task. (thankless because ~10 people said thanks after I improved loading time in 5.0.7). For what it's worth, I get ~95 fps on my AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 840 with Radeon HD 5450 video card. (the total all-new parts cost for this computer was under $600 in 2011)
Maybe it's something dumb like the release build being built in debug mode. If that's the case, then Jousway can upload the 5.1 test build he made and you can check performance in that in his theme or mine or default. (default doesn't actually use the new features yet, I don't know of any other themes that do)

I made this thread because I was looking for trivial features that would only require an hour or two each to implement. Things that can be described clearly without resorting to "Do what 3.95 does", because I don't run 3.95, and what you think it does can be very different from what the code actually does. (Mad Matt uploaded the 3.95 source last year, so I have that, but it's not in a buildable or runnable state)
Instead, stuff suggested would require rewriting major parts of the engine and breaking theme compatibility (the edit mode rewrite suggestions). Or it's stuff that can only be done theme-side, like moving judgment/combo around. Or stuff that doesn't even make sense, like Mina's complaint that 717x616 doesn't work (If you set your aspect ratio to 1.164 and height to 616, the width is calculated to 716, close enough).

U wanna cater to sm 3.95 players?? add sm 3.95's screencut to sm5 for starters.... wich i even requested a year back i think???? if u actually dug into 3.95, played it and compared it to sm5 one of the first thing you would notice is the screen cut jeez have you even played the game?

[ca25nada]

Originally Posted by Jimmymi1

U wanna cater to sm 3.95 players?? add sm 3.95's screencut to sm5 for starters.... wich i even requested a year back i think???? if u actually dug into 3.95, played it and compared it to sm5 one of the first thing you would notice is the screen cut jeez have you even played the game?

I'm pretty sure even the default theme has settings for having footers during gameplay.

[Jimmymi1]

Originally Posted by ca25nada

I'm pretty sure even the default theme has settings for having footers during gameplay.

oshi, guess im switching to sm5.

but my word still stand, do some intense stepmanning on 3.95 and go back to sm5 later

[Dynam0]

To paraphrase the majority of 3.95 users, until the engine runs well enough to allow me to perform like I do with 3.95 then it doesn't make sense for me to jump over.

[lurker]

Originally Posted by Kyzentun

I'll look into it when I have time to spend a solid month on a painstaking risky thankless task. (thankless because ~10 people said thanks after I improved loading time in 5.0.7).

one thing i will note about this is that this fix wasn't especially noticeable unless you opened sm5 twice in quick succession, with the second time loading even faster than 3.9(5)

[Kyzentun]

1. Turn on fast load. If you think you have a reason for not using fast load, explain why.
2. If you have an SSD or less than 5k songs, you probably weren't paying attention to the load time anyway.
3. Restarting stepmania twice in quick succession isn't a valid test because a lot of the stuff will be in the OS's filesystem cache. You have to actually tell the OS to drop that cache to make a valid measurement of startup time.
4. Making a claim like that puts your straight into the "ignoramus" pile. Because I did spend a solid month on it, and I did measure the difference my changes made, and it was huge. I don't have an SSD, and I had 14k songs at the time.

First example is that the INI parser and loader used by Stepmania had stupid flaws. It builds a tree data structure as it loads, where each section is a node, and each entry in a section is a child of the node. Before I fixed it, it would walk the entire list of children to add a new child. The banner cache INI file is one giant section, with one entry for each song. So with 14k songs, stepmania would sit for a solid 50 seconds parsing that ini file, not updating the progress bar at all. After I fixed the INI parser and loader to not be utterly braindamaged, it loaded that same ini file in 0.1 seconds.
Next up were the sm and ssc loaders. They're nearly identical. Every time the loader reaches a new tag in the file, it would walk an elseif chain of 48 string comparisons. String comparisons are slow anyway, so doing 48 just to find the single match slowed down loading substantially. I restructured the loader to use an associative map of strings to functions, so it can just do a lookup in the map when it finds a tag. This translates to ~6 comparisons for an ordered map, or a single run of the hashing function for a hash map (C++11 adds standard library hash maps, so ssc loading is negligibly faster in SM5.1). So there's a small but measurable speedup to sm and ssc loading.

Then there's the radar value calculation algorithm. This examines the notedata and counts taps, holds, jumps, hands, rolls, fakes, lifts, stream, voltage, air, freeze, chaos. The original algorithm was traversing the entire note data 14 times, once for each of those fields. I rewrote it into a single traversal that does them all at once. That cut the time used to build stepmania's cache folder in half.

Last was digging through the function that finds banners and jackets and other images in the song folder and tries to put them in the right fields in the cache ssc file. Firstly, it was looking in the song folder even when fastload was on, thus negating most of the advantage of fastload. Since the cached ssc file is filled with sanitized fields, there's no point in tidying it every time it's loaded, so TidyUpData doesn't run if the ssc is loaded from the cache. Unless it's something like #SELFIE with a # symbol in a field, which the msd parser interprets as a missing semicolon (msd is the underlying format for sm and ssc). So when you put # in the title field, the title comes up blank or cut off because the msd file format is trash not suited for arbitrary strings. The engine has to detect this and go fill in the field with TidyUpData every time it loads. I want to move to a lua format to get rid of this problem.

Next, it was fetching the directory listing a dozen times to find different kinds of files. That was cut down to a single fetch, plus a bit of processing to sort the files into music, images, movies, and lyrics. So that part of building the cache is substantially faster (less substantial on an SSD).

5. Your statement is equivalent to me saying "The difference between D4 and D7 charts isn't especially noticeable, they're both hitting tons of notes really fast.". Think on that for a minute, and you'll realize why you pissed me off so much.

[Frank Munoz]

Might as well rename this thread "Critical issues with SM5".
Not much discussion about 3.95, probably because there's not much to discuss.

My main jive with sm5 is what every one else has, performance issues and play-ability.
Another is the rate modifier, as changing it only augments duration and excludes pitch.
Anything past a .1 modification just sounds bad and choppy.

I do get better scores on sm5, though the judging seems a bit skewed from 3.95.
sm3.95 also had a great 'note' skin, where as in sm5's I can't really tell the difference between half the arrows. Especially 16th and eighth note triplets.

[icontrolyourworld]

stepmania 5.0.10 literally does not even open

[DeadSignal]

As far as I can tell, it could be most likely due to certain newly-implemented features (perhaps among other things) resulting in Windows XP no longer being supported for SM5. Not sure about the earlier SM5 versions though, e.g. 5.0.4 and 5.0.7.

That being said, 3.95 still holds out well from a pure gameplay-based perspective so I would kinda say that you aren't really missing out on much if that's all you really care about. This is certainly not to say that SM5's more up-to-date features are to go unappreciated, as I am currently considering switching to it once I figure out how to fully adjust my playfield in a way that would allow me to produce scores within or above what I can currently do on 3.95/OpenITG.

[Mad Matt]

Originally Posted by kommisar

sm5 works perfectly on my old shitty computer, but not my brand new computer despite correcting any offset and visual delay

Originally Posted by kommisar

ati video card: sm5 rulz
nvidia video card: sm5 sux

Could you provide me with some specs on your machines? And are you using the D3D renderer or the OpenGL renderer?

[kommisar]

using opengl on both now


old comp: (desktop)

3rd gen core i7
6gb ram
ATI Radeon HD 5800 1gb


new comp: (laptop)

recent intel core i5 2.90ghz
8gb ram
NVIDIA GeForce 940m (4gb)


both ran HDD for storage though idk if that plays much of a role

[Mad Matt]

Originally Posted by kommisar

new comp: (laptop)

recent intel core i5 2.90ghz
8gb ram
NVIDIA GeForce 940m (4gb)

Can you check the value of the preference "LastSeenVideoDriver"? When I run SM5 on my laptop which also has a dedicated video card, it for some reason decides to use the intel onboard graphics regardless. I haven't gotten around to looking into the cause of that yet because I don't play SM much on keyboard and I get sufficient performance anyway, but if that could be your problem I might dig into it. From what I understand when it comes to OGL, NVidia > ATI > Intel

[kommisar]

LastSeenVideoDriver=Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600


LOL WHAT. guess it picks it up by default. huh.


was running on board the whole time. how 2 fix

[Mad Matt]

So I did a little digging and the results I found are a little confusing.

First, you should be able to select which video card is being used from the NVidia control panel. Under "Manage 3d Settings", in the "Global Settings" tab you can set the NVidia card as your "preferred graphics processor", or in the "Program Settings" you can add SM to the list of programs, and set it specifically to use the NVidia card.

That said, I tried that on my laptop and found
a) SM reported that it was using the Intel Card regardless
b) the frame rate was ~50% higher when it was set to use the Intel integrated graphics.

I think SM reporting the intel card has something to do with the API it uses to get the video card info being very old. The fact that my laptop runs a higher frame rate with the integrated graphics is somewhat surprising, but not extremely, since SM doesn't use much of the GPU to begin with, it does most of it's processing in the CPU in either case.

Anyway, I'm not pro enough to tell if there was any difference in play consistency, and in either case my gameplay frame rate well beyond the monitor's refresh rate. If you do feel like playing around with forcing one GPU vs the other I'd be interested to hear your results, and if you can notice any difference.

[kommisar]

so first song, felt spot on timing wise

still have to hit a bit early but that's adjustable (visual delay etc)

i'm not warmed up or anything but this is infinitely better. last attempt with auto gfx card use was like 30-40 perfs lol