The Etterna Project

[Guilhermeziat]

Uh, Mina, about the NG holds giving -6 and missed holds aswell, I think that these punishments are too high for what a perfectly hit single note gives you (which is 2, if I'm not mistaken?).

What I was thinking was, why not make NG holds give -2, so that it would basically nullify a perfect hit (and still give penalties for non-perfect hits + NG)? I think that would make a bit more sense, since half of the note is the press and the other helf is the hold, right? Of course a held note would still give 0 though. About missed holds, I think it's better to disregard them, either by setting them to 0 or making the game understand that you only missed the note and there wasnt actually a hold there to be missed with it (no idea how that would be done), because missing the note will make you inevitably miss the hold, which would make you lose 13.5 points for a miss instead of the normal 7.5. This sounds a lot like the opposite of what happens on the DP system, which is hitting the note and inevitably completing the hold because the system is so lenient gives you 8 points instead of the normal 2 for a single arrow.

I hope I was clear enough with this suggestion and thanks in advance for making this!

[MinaciousGrace]

yeah both the curve and how holds are dealt with need some (a lot?) of work

im wrapping up the last few major changes im making to the base code and then making a few more changes to the theme and hopefully within a day or two have a more stable release than whats out now

one of the major changes is that the chart key system is written entirely into c++, it's faster, more robust, done on load and cached with a bunch of other data; basically you do it each time you load a chart for the first time and you have seamless music select from that point forward

after that that the next priority is to go over the scoring system itself

[SpaceGorilla]

can we not shit on sm devs even though they're worse programmers than children who've just been introduced to html

they don't deserve it tbh

[Jousway]

to bad kyz will never read mina's post because he blocked ffr in his host file lawl

[Dinglesberry]

Lol why is it always about calling x shit or y garbage or whatever

Doesn't anyone just care about fixing the game? Hell if I was one of the devs for stepmania I'd be able to understand Minas style and be happy the game is going to get better but eh what do I know

[Leo137]

Originally Posted by Jousway

to bad kyz will never read mina's post because he blocked ffr in his host file lawl

didn't he had blocked before that and unblocked it just to see his newer posts?

...

[MinaciousGrace]

Originally Posted by Jousway

to bad kyz will never read mina's post because he blocked ffr in his host file lawl

It's pretty amazing both of your capacities for infinite shamelessness and bullshit. You each owe the this community a massive apology and you know it.

This was never about making you guys look like shit. This was about making the game play up to the reasonable standards I was pretty sure it could. You made yourselves look like shit. I could have plastered all the flaws and hilarious inefficiencies in specifically kyz's code on reddit with his real name all over it, but I didn't, because that wasn't the point.

You guys wanna come here and start shit then you better be fucking sure you can handle a single jab.

ps. both you and I know he read that post get outta here LOL

[Jousway]

Originally Posted by MinaciousGrace

It's pretty amazing both of your capacities for infinite shamelessness and bullshit. You each owe the this community a massive apology and you know it.

you're pulling me in the drama between you and kyz becasue???? wtf did I ever do to you mate, also apology to this comunity, I never said anything negative, I was always on you guys side, I dont like kyz nor did I like what he said

not cool mang

Originally Posted by MinaciousGrace

This was never about making you guys look like shit. This was about making the game play up to the reasonable standards I was pretty sure it could. You made yourselves look like shit. I could have plastered all the flaws and hilarious inefficiencies in specifically kyz's code on reddit with his real name all over it, but I didn't, because that wasn't the point.

in real shaming in the first place isnt cool so I agree with that, also ya didnt make me look like shit, just kyz the only code from me in sm5 is for noteskins and I dont think I did anything wrong there :V

Originally Posted by MinaciousGrace

You guys wanna come here and start shit then you better be fucking sure you can handle a single jab.

ps. both you and I know he read that post get outta here LOL

I didnt start shit nor will I, also I'm sure he hasnt read it cuz everytime I tried to talk to him about your post he keeps saying he hasnt and wont so yeah :V

[MinaciousGrace]

Originally Posted by Jousway

you're pulling me in the drama between you and kyz becasue???? wtf did I ever do to you mate, also apology to this comunity, I never said anything negative, I was always on you guys side, I dont like kyz nor did I like what he said

not cool mang

in real shaming in the first place isnt cool so I agree with that, also ya didnt make me look like shit, just kyz the only code from me in sm5 is for noteskins and I dont think I did anything wrong there :V


I didnt start shit nor will I, also I'm sure he hasnt read it cuz everytime I tried to talk to him about your post he keeps saying he hasnt and wont so yeah :V

oop well if that's the case my bad i've had both of you mixed together in my head for a while now and that's unfair. To be honest I would much rather be actively working with devs rather than clashing and having to do/figure out everything on my own. But we can't always have nice things.

in other news preview of fpsmanias???

clearly 2500 fps is gratuitous however the aim was to make the game lightweight enough that you could stream it while alt tabbed out of overcrysiswatch4ever with no noticeable impact on performance

in my experience an average framerate of 1000 gives you plenty enough leeway to protect against any would be spikes and this further extra margin opens up pretty much a hedonistic level of possible features/overlays, even for people who aren't running 1080s

in fact i'm pretty sure this game now runs better than any 3.95 build ever did and even those with modest to pathetic (i don't mean that in a derogatory sense i just mean your pc sucks shit and therefore you do) rigs should be able to stream without it adversely affecting gameplay, or also, not-stream without it adversely affecting gameplay

the edits to the base code at least on my part are pretty much done for this cycle of development and all that's left is for me to test it a bit to make sure its stable

the changes will be pushed momentarily and hopefully by sometime tomorrow the next alpha release of the build will be available

i've done some-but-not-very-many updates to the theme itself and the current working alpha version of it will also be released when the build is and IMPORTANT: you must be using the new build in order for the theme to function

i mean you dont need to be if you're savvy enough to find out where the build dependencies are and modify them but shit why wouldnt you cmonBruh

assuming there are no major bugs in either the build or the theme the project is more or less ready to exit alpha phase into early stable release phase where updates can be added without fundamentally changing things so now that i'm not spending every waking hour poking at c++ code bug reporting would actually be appreciated!!!

tl;dr nice things coming 4u guys retroactively put yourselves on the nice list ok

edit: while initially it was my intent to savagely shred apart everything in the code i found useless or didn't like I didn't end up doing that; any functionality in the 5.0.12 build this was forked from should be retained though enough has changed that I wouldn't be surprised if there were bugs (particularly concerning mod maps). Any themes that functioned on the aforementioned build should also work so you dont have to use mine if its 2 cool 4 u.

[shakesoda]

what's with the dramaposting

it's obvious that something is wrong here with the devs vs community situation, and apparently the devs vs other devs situation, but we don't seem to get wind of anything until people have already gone off on explosive rants on their respective random communities.

most things about the game have reasoning behind them or are perhaps just a legacy and should be fixed, and optimizations that don't cause breakage in the stable branch are welcome.

we take criticism if you give it to us, but hardly anyone comes around to tell us actual problems in any actionable way (sometimes we get people just calling us horrible people [thanks, appreciate it] or throwing context-free crash logs at us, which we can't do anything about).

please just talk to us normally on github/irc. if you don't want to deal with kyz, deal with me instead.

p.s. high framerates are cool but things like that 1ms thread sleep do exist for a reason (taking all resources makes everything else on the system lag), if you need it disabled I'd accept a PR for a preference.

[rushyrulz]

shakesoda has spoken

[MarioNintendo]

Hey, this shakesoda guy is pretty cool!






Now ehm maybe this is not the right place (maybe I deserve to make a fool of myself with a completely new thread), but here goes da big question:
Mina. I'm a complete stepmania 5 noob. I want to download your work and make my sm run at 1000 fps. Do I have to redownload stepmania as a whole, or only part of the code (and if so, where do I put the updated code)?
Also, while we're at it, I want to include the graph which shows average taps-per-second and the marvelous-perfect-etc. count. This has nothing to do with what Mina worked on, but... help? ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[MinaciousGrace]

Originally Posted by shakesoda

what's with the dramaposting

it's obvious that something is wrong here with the devs vs community situation, and apparently the devs vs other devs situation, but we don't seem to get wind of anything until people have already gone off on explosive rants on their respective random communities.

most things about the game have reasoning behind them or are perhaps just a legacy and should be fixed, and optimizations that don't cause breakage in the stable branch are welcome.

we take criticism if you give it to us, but hardly anyone comes around to tell us actual problems in any actionable way (sometimes we get people just calling us horrible people [thanks, appreciate it] or throwing context-free crash logs at us, which we can't do anything about).

please just talk to us normally on github/irc. if you don't want to deal with kyz, deal with me instead.

p.s. high framerates are cool but things like that 1ms thread sleep do exist for a reason (taking all resources makes everything else on the system lag), if you need it disabled I'd accept a PR for a preference.

Unfortunately I think there's a fundamental divide between the game that the development team wishes to produce and the game that the 4k kb community wishes to be playing. I won't go into detail about my personal experiences in 2008~2009 of trying to get into contact with the development team to see the changes I wanted in the game. We'll just say it was unfruitful, insulting, and ultimately soured any hope I had that game could or would change in ways I thought were for the better.

That being said I'm not going to let past prejudices get in the way if you are actually interested in listening to what I or xwidget have to say, so we'll find you on IRC.

@marionintendo: I'm working on tidying everything up and then I'll write up relevant changes/what you need to do/what you should expect and all that! Just don't hate me if it takes me all night and isn't ready in the morning.

[MarioNintendo]

Dude I can wait, that's no issue at all Take all the time you need

[MarioNintendo]

I mean I've been waiting 3 years for vgmp4, I have plenty on my plate as it is

[SpaceGorilla]

is this the first advance towards the long awaited peace between players and developers?

find out next time on FFR Z

[PolygonEater]

Originally Posted by shakesoda

p.s. high framerates are cool but things like that 1ms thread sleep do exist for a reason (taking all resources makes everything else on the system lag), if you need it disabled I'd accept a PR for a preference.

I removed the 1ms sleep because sleep is not deterministic and should never be used in any application where you want it to resume and complete at an accurate interval. Sleep is fine for things like say, the input thread waiting for a device, but not for the main gameplay thread. If there is a way to implement this deterministicly I am interested to hear it, I could very well be missing something.

That being said, the purpose of said sleep would be for old machines with single/dual cores where saturating the hardware with Stepmania is a real possibility. For the GPU at least, I am adding a deterministic frame limiter via a busy loop so people with weaker GPUs can avoid the high load if they like.

[MinaciousGrace]

cool new download links time

theme:
https://github.com/MinaciousGrace/Til-Death
build:
https://github.com/xwidghet/stepmani.../tag/0.0000003



You must be using the custom build in order for the theme to function properly.

Currently the custom build only involves modification of the stepmania executable, and not any other resources. This means no installation is required. Just download the .exe from the link and overwrite the one that exists in your stepmania5/Program. You are advised to make a backup of the original executable on the off chance the custom build doesn't work.

If you don't the wife system won't work at all, since the chartkey system has been built into c++ and is based on how the game interprets charts. This means that .ssc .dwi .sm files are all hashed rather than just .sm files. 4k/6k/8k charts should all theoretically be compatible with the system now however I have to remove some blocks I put in place to prevent the old chart key generation script from from crashing the game when trying to generate keys for non-4k charts.

Currently key generation is done both on initial song load and at the start of gameplay so you don't technically need to rebuild your cache. However you are strongly recommended to delete your song cache and rebuild it before playing.

This is done automatically and at the moment there is no way to disabled it, even if you are not using my theme. However everything is done before gameplay begins and thus has no effect on it, and the effect outside of gameplay is a marginally longer loading time.

Not using the custom build will also prevent many of the gameplay elements from functioning properly. The custom build adds parameters to the judgment messages that streamline interpretation and minimize what should be needless logical checks and hooks back into c++ objects to get information that should be disseminated by the judgment messages in the first place.


Brief changelog (only going to skim the major changes for now, a more comprehensive and in-depth changelog will follow eventually):

Build:

Performance massively increased due to a few targeted optimizations.

- Inefficient mathematical implementations in high traffic functions were replaced. The 40% of processing they were hogging during gameplay has been reduced to less than 1%.
- The game no longer calculates point in time during gameplay for every actor asking for it every frame (ie, every note on the screen). Points in time for the entire file are pre-calculated as gameplay begins and stored in a vector which is then simply read from as each actor asks for it. This however necessarily requires that an assumption can be made about whether or not the pre-calculated values will be valid by the time they are needed. I'm fairly sure that lua modding can be used to alter the timingdata of a file as you're playing it, so this system will shut off if an lua script is loaded before gameplay as a pre-caution. Values are then once again calculated on the fly. Previously calculation of point in time made up about 25-30% of what the game was doing. Pre-calculating values reduces that number to again, below 1%.
- Rendering parameters are pointerised rather than being copied and emptied every time something needs to be rendered. Copying these values rather than accessing them from a fixed memory point resulted in a fairly large degree of overhead for rending any object on the screen. The changes resulted in about another 10% performance boost after the above two were made.
- Various lazy and/or inefficient coding practices sharpened up. Static casting where appropriate. Avoiding silly situations in which floats are converted to ints in order to round them, then converted back to a float, then converted back to an int. In relativistic terms these have had a mostly negligible impact, but it's the principle of the thing.

The result is that during what most people here would consider standard kb gameplay the game just does about 20% of what it was doing before per frame, and about 95% of that is rendering objects. Essentially framerate should average more than 5x what was previously achievable on the base build. Themes that were already minimal will see less of a performance boost, and the most gain will be seen by themes employing lots of fancy stuff. For reference the old version of transcendence during gameplay with all features enabled, including the nps graph and etc. Fps averaged around 200 and often dipped below. Custom build with the new version of my theme with all the same features and more enabled, is stable at 1400 fps during gameplay.

Other stuffs

- Framelimit preferences have been added to preferences.ini. Now that the game spends the large bulk of its time rendering rather than inefficiently calculating inputs to the render engine, gpus can actually get taxed pretty hard. FrameLimitGameplay controls the maximum framerate during gameplay, and FrameLimit controls the maximum framerate for all screens aside from gameplay. They are separate entities and must both be set if you wish to cap framerates for the respective screens. My personal suggestion is to cap framerate at 300 outside of gameplay, and 1000 inside. As noted previously this will still fully utilize one of your cpu cores.
- Added preference for pitch rates, EnablePitchRates. Disabling this will make it act the same as any other Stepmania 5 install.
- Scrolling through a lot of songs on song select (like alphabetical sort on massive collections) has been improved greatly.
- Fix rates causing arrows to have motion stutter whenever the sound driver returns duplicate timestamps. This is most noticeable with DirectSound-sw.
- Judgment messages now have extra params that make sense
- A whole ton of shit that was soaking up resources when not even active have been told to stop it or been disabled entirely (lightsmanager for arcade cabinets and dancing characters fall into the latter category). I'll document all of the instances of this later (i mean they're in the commit messages in the repo, but I'll document them here later).


Theme:

- Fixed a billion bugs with songsearch. Now it should totally definitely work seamlessly. And if it doesn't who cares because I plan to rewrite the implementation into c++ anyway.
- Fixed issues with selecting waifu preventing the old scoretracking system from working properly.
- Re-enabled nps counter, nps graph, screen-filter, and lane-cover. They are now all selectable and operational as they designed to be.
- Fullprogress bar and miniprogress bar are now two separate entities that can be turned on or off independently.
- Lifebar is now just a bar that goes up and down. Not a fourth dimensional non-euclidean anti-newtonian trapeslinkyzoid.

Notes: Theme still doesn't support widescreen. I'm working on it and I intend to in the future, it's just not a higher priority than getting everything else working first. Second player support however, is still totally gutted.


You are encouraged to report bugs if you run into them. My inclination towards solving problems in most cases outweighs my adversity towards helping people with shit I think is stupid. For example, if some mod map doesn't work let me know and I'll look into it. I've already tested the megalovania mod map and it works fine, if you can call that file stepmania working fine.

There's quite a bit more to say and in a little bit of time the OP will be reorganized and restructured to become the base for the new theme (prolly the same time it gets githubbed and moved out of alpha)

One final note. Chances are you'll have to spend a little bit of time adjusting. The game is much smoother and crisper and I hit everything like 20 ms early from not being used to it.

Apart from that enjoy your performance boost, both game and player wise.

[Soul Evans]

I never had anything above 200 fps on osu while you said you had 2k fps, so i'm not sure it will have 2k fps for me but god is it better than what i had before lol

[MarioNintendo]

i'm at work but i'm so hype to try this out
I'm curious (I didn't find if you mentioned this in your post): is the build set to work only with your theme, or is it also compatible with other themes, say BareBones or UltraLight for example?