Why are people hanging on to 3.9/3.95?

[Charlo]

Thanks to this thread, I switched to SM5 from SM4. I am enjoying my new-found ability to hit mini-freezes. If there is a timing difference, I am not good enough to notice it.

[cibersammy]

judging by the comments, this community have some 90's computers or doesn't know how keep their PC clean and fast. We are in 2012, how do u expect run a 2012 game with that type of PC? If you can't run even NFS Underground 2 in your PC you live in other century.

[who_cares973]

a game like stepmania shouldnt be very demanding and you shouldnt need a brand new pc to play it

[FFR4EVA_00]

same reason why people still play ffr

[kommisar]

^^^^^^^^^^^

[who_cares973]

Originally Posted by FFR4EVA_00

same reason why people still play ffr

why'd you edit lol

[kommisar]

we skyped about it

[WTFBrandon]

Originally Posted by FFR4EVA_00

same reason why people still play ffr

yeah, basically.

plus... why upgrade something that's already perfect?
Thats just me though, never had a problem with stepmania and it's default interface or anything.
I play 3.9 because I like the way the interface is and i feel more comfortable playing with something I know already works.

It's kinda like how the Halo games went. Halo 1 good, Halo 2 better, everything after = shit.

People try adding too much stuff to it and ruin it when it was already fine.

[Arntonach]

Which is why I like 3.9+, all the nice little doodads like rolls, lifts, invisible arrows, going from different styles, improved themimg metrics & support for negative bpms and million bpm gimmicks with the only bug being the annoying tick crash in the editor.

[mutesauce]

I need 3.95 for one very simple reason: the cache. I own an ITG2 dedicab and, for adding custom songs to my machine, I absolutely need SM 3.95 for creating the song cache.

Unlike many ITG players, I have absolutely nothing against SM5. I think it's quite nice, in fact. Some of the recent Mac builds have been kinda buggy though, so for stepping pad simfiles I still stick to my ancient (but oddly stable) SM4 alpha build.

[Jousway]

Originally Posted by mutesauce

I need 3.95 for one very simple reason: the cache. I own an ITG2 dedicab and, for adding custom songs to my machine, I absolutely need SM 3.95 for creating the song cache.

Unlike many ITG players, I have absolutely nothing against SM5. I think it's quite nice, in fact. Some of the recent Mac builds have been kinda buggy though, so for stepping pad simfiles I still stick to my ancient (but oddly stable) SM4 alpha build.

why not use OpenITG?

[GideonB]

Originally Posted by Jousway

why not use OpenITG?

OpenITG is actually quite slow for building cache at startup (in my experience its slower than my current SM5 setup)

[mutesauce]

Originally Posted by Jousway

why not use OpenITG?

Several reasons. First, I can't even run it on my computer to cache stuff because I have a Mac and there is no Mac build. Consequently, I really don't know anything about the program on account of never having used it. I wouldn't have the time or patience to deal with any problems that arise from using software that's still in beta. I'm not entirely sure there's an agreed upon "correct" global offset for it either, and I already have all ~2,000 of my machine's files synced to ITG's standard -0.012 global offset. And finally, none of oITG's additional features are terribly relevant to me. Regular ol' ITG does everything I need it to and it does it quite well. I don't have the means, need, or desire to change.

[icontrolyourworld]

SM5 load time (all songs cached): [9min 16sec-6117 songs]
SM3.95 load time (all songs cached): [1min 34sec-5902 songs]
FFR load time: [0min 15sec-1200 songs]

I play ffr the most

[dAnceguy117]

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

SM5 load time (all songs cached): [9min 16sec-6117 songs]

wow, that's so brutal. I would never ever play if that were the case for me. that's a really good point about ffr/sm3.9/sm5 load times.

[tofurox]

Originally Posted by WTFBrandon

yeah, basically.

plus... why upgrade something that's already perfect?
Thats just me though, never had a problem with stepmania and it's default interface or anything.
I play 3.9 because I like the way the interface is and i feel more comfortable playing with something I know already works.

It's kinda like how the Halo games went. Halo 1 good, Halo 2 better, everything after = shit.

People try adding too much stuff to it and ruin it when it was already fine.

Personally I bought every Halo game and thought they kept on getting better.

[ddr_f4n]

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

SM5 load time (all songs cached): [9min 16sec-6117 songs]
SM3.95 load time (all songs cached): [1min 34sec-5902 songs]
FFR load time: [0min 15sec-1200 songs]

I play ffr the most

Still better than OpenITG's load time

And that one was based off of SM3.95

[Ohaider]

Originally Posted by WTFBrandon

yeah, basically.

plus... why upgrade something that's already perfect?
Thats just me though, never had a problem with stepmania and it's default interface or anything.
I play 3.9 because I like the way the interface is and i feel more comfortable playing with something I know already works.

It's kinda like how the Halo games went. Halo 1 good, Halo 2 better, everything after = shit.

People try adding too much stuff to it and ruin it when it was already fine.

i'm sure they said thing about writing step files in note pad back in the day.

[icontrolyourworld]

alright so i played on sm5 for a fair 2 weeks or so
pros
-i kind of liked having the flashy thing every 50 combo
-scrolling through songs seems to be slightly faster (less lag) but not really that big of a pro
-i did like the noteskin and assist tick in sm5
-actually writing out speed mods (once you find out how) is pretty easy

cons
-it lags really bad on harder songs making it impossible for me to score well
-it takes 10 minutes to load the program because i have 6k songs i want to load
-it was more challenging than it should have been to find out how to add speed mods
-i'm still mad that the machine score isn't scored the same as from 3.9/3.95, i like to know if i got 93mil or 94mil on some songs ok?
-i don't like that i have to unplug ALL my flash drives to select my profile. i don't even.
-rates should be in increments of .1 since i'm used to that, i'm sure there's a way to change that but i haven't bothered to look into it
-it's dumb that screenshots save in appdata until you make a screenshots folder in program files
-it's dumb that anything is saved in appdata and not all in 1 folder in program files

neutral
-i don't use the sm editor i use ddream so that part of sm isn't a concern for me
-i don't care to much about having 100+ themes, i don't even care what my theme looks like
-i don't care about having 100+ noteskins
-i'm not an option whore, i use c735 and that's it. Having 100+ modifiers on at the same time isn't important for me

Everything i could possibly want right now is already on sm 3.95. I play because I like hitting arrows and sm 3.95 gives me the best experience right now. I don't care if 3.95 is unstable I crash maybe once every 2 months on it so it's not a big deal. I'll keep checking back on sm5, I have high hopes for this new version of stepmania.

[foxfire667]

Seeing this thread got me interested in trying out StepMania 5 for myself, and seeing if it made any genuine improvements from the version I was already using. I originally stuck with 3.9 because the last two times I attempted to update my versions of StepMania (StepMania CVS and a StepMania 4.0 beta release) there were some issues that prevented me from actually playing the game. CVS always registered short hold notes as NG, and as a result made many songs annoying to play due to my life bar constantly being penalized by a glitch. As for the 4.0 beta, it would just flat out crash while trying to cache my songs, obviously making play impossible.

It was a little awkward to get everything set up the way I had it in 3.9 (considering the odd choice they made of having the game by default store it's profile data and screenshots in a separate directory than the application). Although once I got past this, and downloaded the SM 3.9 note-skin, overall it seemed to work far better than I was expecting it to. For some odd reason my SM 3.9 would frequently crash at random, which has not occurred once since I have downloaded SM 5 (which is a HUGE improvement for me). Additionally it has SMO capabilities, and works very smoothly in windowed mode.

I also feel like I have a little more consistent MA in SM 5 than in 3.9 for some reason, although every once and a while I hit a small lag spike which throws me off. Not sure why I get any sort of lag, considering it puts no real processing strain on my computer at all.

It's also fairly disappointing that SM 5 has no option to start without reviewing the songs it has already cached, and as a result have to wait FOREVER for it to load just like in 3.9. Seriously, this NEEDS to be implemented, even if it means I would have to turn the option off to add new packs to my songs folder. At this point I play FFR while I wait for SM to load, and I might get through a few 2-3 minute songs before it's finished.

All in all I am glad I went to SM 5 due to the issues I was having with 3.9 in the past, but I hope that a few more features are added to make it worth the update for those who were more fortunate with their StepMania. If it wasn't for SMO and the lack of crashing, I probably wouldn't have bothered to change honestly.

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

it's dumb that anything is saved in appdata and not all in 1 folder in program files

Create a blank file in the StepMania folder called "Portable.ini", then everything will be in the StepMania folder from that point on.