A couple of Stepmania Fixes

[Choofers]

Originally posted by Staiain.

Originally Posted by Staiain

I'll add a few easy tutorials here when I'm not lazy. I'll begin with how to make your stepmania run as smooth as possible:








Making Stepmania run smooth on Vista/7


3.9/3.95

Go to the Program folder of StepMania and rightclick on StepMania.exe and check out these boxes shown below:





This will disable Aero theme and other Windows crap that will make your StepMania offsync and choppy


Now for a weird fix that removes frameskipping; go to the Data folder, and locate StepMania.ini and add WaveOut to SoundDrivers= shown below:





This works with Windows Vista and 7

Also be sure to disable VSYNC, this helps on all OS versions





StepMania 5


Same as 3.9/3.95:







The settings in StepMania 5 are located in Save and Preferences.ini:










And another tip, be sure to have your monitor refresh rate set to the highest supported by your Monitor/Graphics card






Close StepMania before making modifications or theses fixes won't be saved

Doing all of these will definitely improve your framerate and your overall scoring. I attribute my sudden boost in skill to this post!

Setting your monitor refresh rate doesn't affect fullscreen, there's an in-game setting for v-sync. Turning that off will uncap your framerate but you may experience "tearing" (I haven't).

Another tip: Doing these things will give you noticably higher performance, but your personal skill in terms of skill and reading will probably stay the same. Remember to keep practicing!

[skorpion9x]

I don't seem to have a "Save" folder in my "Stepmania 5" folder. I can't find a "preferences.ini" file in any of the folders that I do have.

[cedolad]

Look in your appdata.

[skorpion9x]

I think I found it. Thanks cedolad.

[Coolboyrulez0]

yeah trust him on that

after doing these fixes a while back + a new keyboard I am now on an upward slope of getting better while i noticed no improvements for months earlier

[Staiain]

8)

Many of these fixes should work on a FFR Standalone aswell I belive

[Jousway]

can this get a sticky?

[Moogled]

bumping this since I've been playing with stuttering arrows for weeks/months on sm5, put waveout in and it feels smooth like 3.95 again (edit: waveout + d3d was the combo, opengl didn't work)

[Jousway]

this is why I asked for a sticky

[gold stinger]

Thread demands Sticky or else I will bump it every 2 weeks until it gets a sticky or content gets added to an already stickied thread

also maybe these options will finally make my StepMania experience not shitty and can finally hit arrows in it wowee

[CaptainAhab]

Thank you so much, this definitely helped my performance on Windows 10 when I did everything described (except Program Properties... the ones pictured don't seem to exist on Windows 10 when I right-clicked StepMania5.exe, unless I just didn't see them).

[Hakulyte]

Is there similar kind of fixes for MAC users that you guys may know about or it's the same thing?

[Mahou]

There were a few more things I did to my SM client to make it run smoother. Not sure if anyone else is interested in seeing it though. By the way, I'm using Windows 7 so I'm not sure if it's applicable to a lot of people.

[CaptainAhab]

Originally Posted by Mahou

There were a few more things I did to my SM client to make it run smoother. Not sure if anyone else is interested in seeing it though. By the way, I'm using Windows 7 so I'm not sure if it's applicable to a lot of people.

Sure, why not?

[gold stinger]

ya I would be interested in seeing what you did, need as much help as I can get if ya wanna weed me off of FFR and onto SM

[shakesoda]

Originally Posted by CaptainAhab

Thank you so much, this definitely helped my performance on Windows 10 when I did everything described (except Program Properties... the ones pictured don't seem to exist on Windows 10 when I right-clicked StepMania5.exe, unless I just didn't see them).

Desktop composition can't be disabled on Windows 8+, so there aren't any options for it.

WaveOut should be the only option that matters anyways for this, VSync off only helps if your driver is set to queue frames more than it should be since input timing in SM has nothing to do with framerate.

EDIT: Someone pointed out to me on IRC that timing might look visually a little different, but you could fix that with a visual delay of negative one frame (give or take)