What keeps you using 3.95?

[MinaciousGrace]

k i wasn't being specific before because a lot of issues i have most people probably dont really care about but here we go

-Default theme doesn't have a bottom bar or "footer" which must be compensated for when switching from 3.95 to 5.0 in order to have the same arrow scroll length. To me this is ridiculous; under no circumstances should the default scroll lengths be different between two versions of a game entirely based on muscle memory. Any casual player will switch and hit early greats simply because of this and struggle with shit accuracy and consequently shit scores and give up on sm5 probably within an hour. Obviously a footer can be added, and I used stian's edited theme to adjust it to precisely the height the 3.95 footer is but the entire point of a smooth transition is that I shouldn't have to do this and I don't know of any rationale behind so in the first place.

Before I go on let me outline what a smooth transition between versions is.

Step 1: install game
Step 1a: if i use heavy mods or theme edits, make those same edits
Step 2: play game
Step 3: get scores within 10% of my old scoers

Anyway moving on:

-The whole appdata garbage. If it's not necessary
a) why have it in the first place
b) why not default merge the folders and give people the option to then put crap in user profile shit, guarantee you nobody on this fucking planet or anywhere else will do it.

I mean it doesn't take a rocket scientist to go into a totally different folder hierarchy to change two goddamn settings for the game but it's obnoxious as fuck and just adds on to the pile of crap you have to do to make the game playable.

-Options menu. Why are there 30 different menus. Why are ui graphics theme and appearance all different menus. Why are different options not in their analogous 3.95 menus. I don't want to spend 30 minutes scrolling through menus to find shit. I don't want to spend 30 seconds scrolling through menus to find shit. Shit should be where other shit was in other versions. Shit should be called the same shit it was in other versions if it is indeed the same fucking shit. Once again this is obviously not some huge fucking game breaking issue but I should NOT have to check 4 different menus to change my theme because I never fucking remember which one it's in. Also why is reload songs in the middle of the fucking menu. Why does the relative position of this have to be changed. Why can't you just leave it 2 from the bottom so everyone who spent years going to options and hitting up 3 times can continue doing that. I'm sure I could mod the theme and do it myself. I could also learn to program and make my own stepmania 6 galactic arrowsmash edition. And also learn to build rocket ships so I can play stepmania in space. And then solve faster than light travel to play stepmania in another galaxy.

-Screenshots. Let's make a stop here and talk about the one feature I ever really cared about, which the new score saving system somewhat replaces but in a circuitous fashion. Why is it so goddamn hard to tag screenshots with songnames if they are taken at a score screen. This is a feature I requested through multiple channels over 5 years ago and it has literally taken until now for a system to be put in place that lets me find and identify specific scores in a 1500 screenshot folder. This by the way, the only reason I switched. You can keep the rest of your features none of them have any relevance to me as a player. In fact if you asked me I could not tell you what any of them were.

-Showstats. Sometimes, I just want to see what my fps is, and nothing else. Why can't this just have a third setting: fps only?

-Uncapped fps. My 3.95 runs at 1000 at menu and 900 avg over the course of a song. Many years ago when I attempted to switch to 5.0 the highest fps I could get uncapped was 500 and it quickly deteriorated to 350-300 during gameplay. But Mina!!! He say with the fist in his anus, if human mind cannot read more than 30 frames per second, why do it matter>??? And the Mina respond- even if that were true large differences in fps result in slightly different timings in order to hit marvs and going from 1000 to 500 will result in you hitting late perfs. The version of sm5 I have now runs at 250 fps uncapped in menu and under 200 during gameplay. This isn't a huge issue for me now since I started using vsync a long time ago, but it is a consideration for any player who plays with vsync off. And even if literally everything else were perfectly the same between the two versions when switching, this alone would have dissuaded me from using any sm5 build prior to the most recent one.

-Custom resolution. Personally I hate the default resolution for the game. I fucking hate fat arrows fat hands and fat everything. They're harder to read and fuck that shit. I played 3.95 at 717x616. I loved playing 3.95 at 717x616. I loved being able to go into stepmania.ini and set the graphics to 717x616 and when I start the fucking game. It fucking started at 717x616. Sm5. I change the resolution in the stepmania.ini and load the game and it FUCKING DEFAULTS RIGHT BACK TO THE RESOLUTION I DON'T FUCKING WANT. Why the FUCK. And don't even tell me to change the fucking aspect ratio instead that creates 10 million graphical issues. I don't see why custom resolutions are ignored in sm5. I had to fucking download shiftwindow and set it to change my sm5 window size to a specific resolution and now I have to fucking start shiftwindow load my trigger settings and do this EVERY FUCKING TIME I OPEN THE FUCKING GAME. I SHOULD NOT HAVE TO DO THIS. No amount of features in the universe would convince me to play sm5 if I didn't remember about the shiftwindow workaround.

Ok now we can start getting to the juicy bits.

-Perhaps it is because of the fact that I use a custom resolution or maybe this is true for sm5 vs 3.95 as a whole buT CMODS ARE NOT THE SAME BETWEEN VERSIONS. I used to play distant c987 on 3.95. After adjusting sm5 that accounted for the aspect ratio change such that the modified playing window was the exact same height and proportional width as my 3.95 setup. This means that the rendered arrows are the exact same pixel height/width between both versions of the game. And after adjusting my sm5 footer to the exact same relative level as my 3.95 setup as well as adjusting the receptors such that my arrow scroll area was the exact same distance between the two versions of the game. And after setting my mods to c987 and distant, I tried playing the game naively thinking everything was fine and BAM early perfs every arrow. Cool. First I offset the receptors an extra 10 pixels to account for this but I was still hitting early so after a bit of fumbling around and changing receptors back to their original levels (read: hours of changing shit and incrementing speed mods by 1 which is a whole different level of complaint btw) I managed to arrive at 94% distant and c1018 which produces arrows which arrive at receptors over the same length of time (with precisely the same distance from bottom to receptor) on sm5 as c987 distant on 3.95. K lets recap. Even if everything else is the same. The same cmods between the two versions of the game did not produce the same arrow time on the screen. This is like the literal most basic component of playing the game WHY ARE THEY FUCKING DIFFERENT. I cannot actually put into words how much this blows my mind that it could ever happen and how unbelievably frustrating and infuriating it is to even contemplate much less deal with. I can only hope that you can recognize even a fraction of it.

And finally not because this is actually the end of my complaints but because I just don't remember any others; I take serious issue with the whole "if you want to make any minor edits to your theme whatsoever, just learn lua! Teehee". I spent 20 minutes trying to move the fucking bpm during gameplay to the bottom of my screen instead of the top left before giving up. I should be able to do this without learning lua. I could do this in 3.95 in 20 seconds. Sure theme editing is more powerful in sm5 I get that I do. But lets boil it down again. If you come up with a new version of a game and you want to convince people who have been playing an old version perfectly happy for years you make it as easy and fucking painless as possible to transition. You don't go and say, "Hey my new version of this game is so much superior look at all these features it has look how gr9 it is EVERYONE SWITCH NOW." "Ok cool I'll check it out but hey I want to move the bpm display from one corner to the other" "LOL BETTER LEARN LUA FAGGET HAHAHA PEACE NERD" Do you know why it doesn't take an mba in electrical engineering to operate a dishwasher? Because if it did, NOBODY WOULD FUCKING USE THEM.

So let's recap everything I had to do to get a playable sm5 setup.

step 1: install game
step 2: set additional songs folder in that file it took way too long to get to for no reason.
step 3: install ultralight
step 4: spend 30 seconds looking through the 4 different ui menus to change theme to ultralight
step 5: close game and try to set custom resolution and remember that i can't
step 6: remember about and download shiftwindow
step 7: calculate the exact resolution I would need to play at in order to match the gameplay area of my 3.95 setup
step 8: set shiftwindow to set stepmania to this resolution
step 9: restart game and realize I hate all the noteskins
step 10: get wafles to convert my 3.95 noteskin but now I lose the ability to have holds inherit parent arrow colors. Which reminds me why don't we get support for 96ths and 192nds yet.
step 11: Set c990 because your shitty system only does increments of 10 by default, but still hopeful this will result in a playable atmosphere.
step 12: Try to play game, realize footer height is too low resulting in early hits
step 13: open sm3.95 and sm5 side by side and get footer pixel height precise
step 14: open mspaint and alter footer.png to the appropriate height
step 15: try to play sm5 again, still hitting early, realize receptors are too high
step 16: match relative height of 3.95 receptors on sm5 after opening both and running them side by side again
step 17: ok cool now i can play the fucking game jk im still hitting early
step 18: move the receptors even further down to account for hitting early
step 19: play for an hour before realizing its still shit and unplayable
step 20: move receptors back
step 21: ask wafles how the fuck to change the cmod increments to 1 instead of 10 cuz its lua bullshit
step 22: he fucks up and now im using c9870
step 23: he fixes it and now im using exact c987
step 24: do careful frame analysis to determine if c987 is actually just not c987. oops they aren't the same
step 25: scratch my head and jerk off
step 26: eyeball a +50 cmod adjustment and slowly work from there over the course of a few hours to arrive at c1018 which produces reasonable scores
step 27: somewhere way before here which i forgot to put in but im too lazy to change step numbers was the fact that the game was horribly laggy and incredibly choppy until someone reminded me of the waveout fix. I shouldn't have to enable something as incredibly fucking obscure as that just so i dont get 500 perfects on toml this is probably what most people experiencing lag have to do. Why this isn't enabled by default who fucking knows.

I'm sure I'm missing a bunch of things and remember I had wafles doing any lua changes that needed to be done for me. If I didn't I would have said fuck it way before the end and I'm pretty sure most casual players just say fuck it after step 2.

Anyway you wanted specific there you go.