What keeps you using 3.95?

[Wayward Vagabond]

If you guys can make editing files similar to ddream that would be fantastic(mouse and KB shortcuts mainly)

[_Juli_]

Originally Posted by Jousway

now tell me how much of 3.95 functionality do you use 1%?
*The rest of this shit means nothing to someone that ACTUALLY JUST PLAYS THE GAME*

The function and visuals that sm3.95 gives me is priceless when it comes to playing the game for me.

Originally Posted by Kyzentun

Everything related to notefield position: I don't even understand what your problem is. Notefield position changing is the easiest thing to adapt to.

wew lad hard file, now try being used to hard stuff and then change the notefield position.

edited cause i didnt want to sound more like a cock than i already am, but you guys definately dont know the struggle of needing everything to be perfect to score well.

[Ziemniax]

Originally Posted by tuxdude143

I take it this is in full screen. I'll try seeing if I can replicate it.

Edit: What version are you using? I'm trying this in 5.0.7 and it's working fine for me. Try and get a video of what's going on or update to the latest version if you haven't already

I'm playing on 800x600 full screen (because 640x480 screws me up), and when I try to alt+tab, I get something like this:

To revert it I must change to windowed mode and back to full screen.
When on 640x480, it gets so moved I cannot even enter options, on 800x600 the change is smaller so I can at least enter options.
On higher resolutions I get lags, same on windowed mode.
The screen moves further down with each consecutive alt+tab without reverting it back to normal.

[MarcusHawkins]

Hey, CyberiaStyle LAST APPROACH has been released for Stepmania 5!
The theme looks sick, and it has all of the features you could possibly want!
Here is the link to this super cool theme!

It's a shame that between Stepmania 3.95 and this, 3.95 is such a let down.
Oh, well. That's life.

[Mahou]

I only went SM5 because of the PA counter. Otherwise, I could care less about any of the other features that it has. In regards with the timing, it does feel a little off compared to SM 3.95. I'm sure it's the same coding, but I feel I accidentally get more perfects when they should be Marvelouses. I agree with Mina. It does take some adjusting too - especially if you're very reliant on the SM 3.95 theme. It was workable, but I do remember it being a pain to finally just enjoy the game.

[icontrolyourworld]

I was talking to my friend on skype, and he asked the following which you may want to respond to even if it's in the release notes:

Why would I go through the hassle of upgrading to Stepmania 5 when I'm fine with everything that I have on 3.95? What does Stepmania 5 have that's so necessary that I should upgrade? The bug fixes really seem to be what you guys are pressing on for us to change over for, but in all honesty it doesn't really get in the way of us playing on 3.95.

I read the release notes (a couple of times) it looks like there were a lot of bug fixes which is nice. I don't really make themes so the themer stuff doesn't really do anything for me. The Song load time being improved is always good to improve on. I don't really need to delete a file in game. The reload current song, and never cache folder things are ok if you're a simfiler and you want to reload in game, but I probably wouldn't use it out of habit of not using it. I don't use the editor in game (on a side note if you could implement ddreams way of stepping into the game and improve on it that would be totally awesome for simfilers).

[Kyzentun]

Edit Mode: Making a good edit mode would require throwing out the current edit mode entirely and starting from scratch, which would take several tons of time and go through an unstable phase. Right now, I just want SM5 to be rock stable, rather than having an important chunk be unstable. Maybe later edit mode can be rewritten, when it'll be okay to have an unstable phase with bugs and skeleton features in every update.
That's why I've been focusing on fixing crashes and cleaning up little holes when not working on theming features.

Porting old themes: I've never tried to port an old theme or tried to theme before the SM5 era, so I don't know how hard it would actually be to port an old theme. The biggest thing though is that there are 100+ fewer ways to crash Stepmania by making a mistake in the theme. I've combed through a lot of it and tried to make sure everything gives some sort of error message instead of crashing out.

The biggest reasons I have for using SM5 are things that only exist in my theme. Some of them weren't possible or were a lot harder to do in a theme before I started adding theming features. Things like song sorting that doesn't become cumbersome for a collection over 5000 songs and unusable around 10,000 songs. Putting whatever info I want in the pane display, and editing it in-game using the normal game controls. Stuff like that is what makes the biggest difference to me.

No idea what causes the black screen and shifting for Ziemniax, and I'm not on Windows so I can't even try to reproduce it.

Asking for a special jumpstream mod and also saying that all the theming features and other changes don't matter to you is self contradictory. Having a ton of things available is what makes Stepmania advance. I assume you already tried Wide and Stomp and wanted something that will put jumps in 16ths too.

[tuxdude143]

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

I'd like to thank you for your kind informative response! The stuff in spoilers I'm happy to hear about

I know just about anyone can link to the appdata folder on the desktop or in the stepmania folder, even though it's obvious where it is now, it may not be for someone installing SM5 for the first time so I think it would be a good idea to have that link on the desktop and probably the SM folder.

Like I said, if having a lot of features and options and additional tools for theming and all is what you're aiming for great! And the fact that the options as you mentioned are going to be reorganized so the important stuff stands out and everything else is in submenus, I think that's a reasonable compromise. I was just saying IMO all I need for SM was the barebones stuff in my previous post and that having other stuff is bonus, as in it's cool to be able to do more things with the game.

So let me ask, is it really hard to port over old themes? To me it sounds like it's so easy to make a theme for SM5 that it would make sense to just port them over really fast. I mean all the sounds and graphics are readily available, and the only thing you'd probably have to change would be the option menus if there's something that just has to be there, like supported game modes. I know the ports are being worked on, but just askin

And actually can we add a jumpstream mod o.o Kind of like how there's echo, big, skippy, etc.

No problem.

The theming thing is interesting as 3.95 and 5 have drasticly different theming systems.

In 3.95 pretty much everything is controlled in the metrics.ini file and a few xml files around the place.

In stepmania 5 metrics.ini does FAR less and instead of xml files you have .lua files which are coded in the lua scripting language meaning that the actual code between versions is different.

If you have enough knowledge of both of the theming systems then porting is usually a breeze as far as I can tell. It's just that due to the differences in languages that the themes use they can't just be used fine in stepmania 5. This same kinda thing was present in stepmania 3.9 and 3.95 where 3.9 themes don't exactly work in 3.95.

Hope that answered your question!

[tuxdude143]

Originally Posted by Wayward Vagabond

If you guys can make editing files similar to ddream that would be fantastic(mouse and KB shortcuts mainly)

A proof of concept that recieves input from the mouse and allows you to move a cursor inside sm5 has been created as of now. With a bit of work themes could be made that have full mouse support which could also be added into the editor.

[tuxdude143]

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

I was talking to my friend on skype, and he asked the following which you may want to respond to even if it's in the release notes:

Why would I go through the hassle of upgrading to Stepmania 5 when I'm fine with everything that I have on 3.95? What does Stepmania 5 have that's so necessary that I should upgrade? The bug fixes really seem to be what you guys are pressing on for us to change over for, but in all honesty it doesn't really get in the way of us playing on 3.95.

I read the release notes (a couple of times) it looks like there were a lot of bug fixes which is nice. I don't really make themes so the themer stuff doesn't really do anything for me. The Song load time being improved is always good to improve on. I don't really need to delete a file in game. The reload current song, and never cache folder things are ok if you're a simfiler and you want to reload in game, but I probably wouldn't use it out of habit of not using it. I don't use the editor in game (on a side note if you could implement ddreams way of stepping into the game and improve on it that would be totally awesome for simfilers).

Around 80 or so percent of the changes in stepmania 5 are behind the scenes stuff (things to do with theming and all that). Most end users won't notice or use most of these changes (unless they use a theme that takes advantage of them).

Really it comes down to the fact that stepmania is a game about hitting arrows to music and there is only so much you can add until you run out of ideas and stuff. That's part of the reason why stepmania 5 has been expanding to allow simulation of other rhythm games like pump it up, EZ2Dancer and beatmania/BMS. We can only add so much until we run out of stuff to add.

However if the players have any ideas then feel free to pitch them to the devs. We want to help make stepmania 5 into the best version of stepmania out there. While this may mean cutting things from older versions to add new stuff (and there sadly isn't much we can do about that) it also means that we can expand, build upon what was already present and add new stuff with the help of the players.

Speaking from a devs perpective here and being perfectly honest, to a 3.95 player, stepmania 5 doesn't have much in it that screams for an upgrade. However unlike 3.95 and 3.9 stepmania 5 is in active development meaning that you guys can help us build this new version.

So, let me ask all of you.

What are some features You would like to see added into stepmania 5?

Us devs can't do it all on our own, we don't exactly have the ability to mind read. However the more of you who speak out the more we can change and add to make stepmania 5 the best version of stepmania yet.

If you have any feature suggestions, requests or anything feel free to send me a private message and I'll see what I can do.

[tuxdude143]

Originally Posted by Ziemniax

I'm playing on 800x600 full screen (because 640x480 screws me up), and when I try to alt+tab, I get something like this:

To revert it I must change to windowed mode and back to full screen.
When on 640x480, it gets so moved I cannot even enter options, on 800x600 the change is smaller so I can at least enter options.
On higher resolutions I get lags, same on windowed mode.
The screen moves further down with each consecutive alt+tab without reverting it back to normal.

Ok, Ziemniax could you please pm me some info about this.

Could you please include: Your version of windows, your default windows resolution, GPU model and anything else that you think should be added.

I'll try replicating and getting to the bottom of this.

[tuxdude143]

Ok. I've setup a google form for you guys to submit your feedback, bug reports and feature suggestions for stepmania 5. Every bit of feedback counts so feel free to submit your ideas.

http://goo.gl/forms/nUYjQXp8CA

[Wayward Vagabond]

Originally Posted by tuxdude143

A proof of concept that recieves input from the mouse and allows you to move a cursor inside sm5 has been created as of now. With a bit of work themes could be made that have full mouse support which could also be added into the editor.

I love you

[tuxdude143]

Originally Posted by Wayward Vagabond

I love you

Again, please bear in mind that as of now it is in its very early stages. Work would have to be done to couple it with the new theming system to create a theme that worked in conjunction with the keyboard to give a full keyboard mouse theme.

The new theming system could probably do that though. It would just be a matter of scripting

Also, you're directing your praise the wrong way. I'm not the creator of said proof of concept. Said proof of concept was created by Leo137 and can be downloaded here https://github.com/Leo137/default-leo

Also I'm not the creator of the new theming system as well (that has been around for a bit). That was done by the other members of the dev team

[icontrolyourworld]

Originally Posted by MarcusHawkins

Hey, CyberiaStyle LAST APPROACH has been released for Stepmania 5!
The theme looks sick, and it has all of the features you could possibly want!
Here is the link to this super cool theme!

It's a shame that between Stepmania 3.95 and this, 3.95 is such a let down.
Oh, well. That's life.

There's a bug where if you hit enter it will occasionally fail you from the song right away despite not holding the button. Also I noticed there was a no nomines option O:

There was also 1 other bug where changing from 1 options screen to another resulted in a black screen where you had to restart stepmania.

Other than that haven't found anything wrong with it, amazing theme. I always have thought the cyberia style themes looked absolutely incredible! Mad props to the guys who made it

also thanks again tux for some great responses! I have a couple of lame ideas for mods, but that's about it xD

1) Misses lower your lifebar the more often you miss, so not like upping life difficulty but just misses hurt more and more throughout a song

2) The higher you combo, the more it hurts if your combo breaks maybe not enough to kill you but enough to bring you to 1% after 1000 combo and then it resets to normal

I think the flashy combo thing is pretty cool too, is there a way to make it flash every 50 all the time instead of having it cut off after 700 or so?

[tuxdude143]

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

There's a bug where if you hit enter it will occasionally fail you from the song right away despite not holding the button. Also I noticed there was a no nomines option O:

There was also 1 other bug where changing from 1 options screen to another resulted in a black screen where you had to restart stepmania.

Other than that haven't found anything wrong with it, amazing theme. I always have thought the cyberia style themes looked absolutely incredible! Mad props to the guys who made it

also thanks again tux for some great responses! I have a couple of lame ideas for mods, but that's about it xD

1) Misses lower your lifebar the more often you miss, so not like upping life difficulty but just misses hurt more and more throughout a song

2) The higher you combo, the more it hurts if your combo breaks maybe not enough to kill you but enough to bring you to 1% after 1000 combo and then it resets to normal

While a last approach user is here, have you encountered any problems with last approach detecting new songs? It refuses to detect some packs for me

Also, I personally quite like the idea of misses increasing in weight the more they rack up. Means that people can't just mash through a song or something. I may see if I can add that as an option in a personal fork and see if it works well

[icontrolyourworld]

I haven't played enough to notice that o.o

[awychong]

Originally Posted by tuxdude143

While a last approach user is here, have you encountered any problems with last approach detecting new songs? It refuses to detect some packs for me

Yeah, I've had it trip over a few different files in the past, such as #SELFIE. I suggest going into your logs and looking for errors with ScreenSLoad overlay.lua to see what it has problems with.

[Kyzentun]

If #SELFIE is showing up with a blank title, it's because # is not actually allowed inside any field in the sm or ssc file. Stepmania has to check for the title coming up blank and fill it in from the folder name.

[tuxdude143]

I guess it just comes down to the cyberiastyle team not being the best at programming. Hopefully it gets fixed at some point.