What keeps you using 3.95?

[Dizzy_Gear]

There are a few reasons I don't use SM5, mostly scoring issues. I play much much worse on SM5, hitting a lot more perfs and greats than I do playing on SM3.95. It's just a really really weird feeling. Going from 3.95 to ssc, I had very little trouble and honestly, I actually play BETTER on ssc than I do on 3.95, which is why I still have ssc somewhere on my hard drives.

Personally, I couldn't care less about most of the other features that have been added if it doesn't make playing the game easier to read and getting better to play the most difficult of songs.

Also, just like Ziemniax, when I play sm5 full screen, when I alt tab out at ANY resolution, not just his, sm5 fucks up beyond playability and I have to either alt+f4 or ctrl+alt+del and forcefully close sm5 in task manager on a Windows system. The issue was present in XP when I played it on XP and it's also present in W8.1, which is what my current laptop uses. I prefer playing SM in full screen and sm5 just doesn't allow that when I do many other things in the background while also playing sm5.

Not to mention there just isn't any themes that really catch my fancy. Ultralight is good as a nice basis for me but outside of that, only Jousway's theme is something I'm REALLY interested in. > Dat sexy 8bit! <3

I also dislike the position of the combo/fantastic area. It totally fucks up my reading skills when I'm playing dumpfiles and I'm like nop can't see but I think that also goes back to what I previously said about getting used to the program, which I shouldn't have to do. I never had to get used to accuracy and timing when I started playing 10 years ago; I just had to get better. It's a really weird transition, like going from DDR Extreme to DDR X2 arcade machines: TOTALLY different feelings. And honestly, I didn't like the feel of DDRX2, just like how I don't like the play feel about sm5.

It's hard for me to justify playing a program that will give me A's on songs I KNOW I can DDP AA/near AAA on some of the more clusterfuck files I play.

I'm also surprised people still play CyberiaStyle after CyberiaStyle3. Everything after CS3 just doesn't look or play good and the newest looks ugly as all hell. o.O

edit: I also haven't tried the newest build yet so I will be doing that after I get situated from moving from one state to another. Don't get me wrong, I WANT to love SM5 because it's smoooooooooth but features isn't something I'm interested in nearly as much as it's the playing experience itself. And I just didn't have the time to constantly experiment with many things when I already have a program that works perfectly fine for me. Now that I have no job (yay unemployment...-_-), I should have some time to actually play around with features and shit.

[awychong]

Originally Posted by tuxdude143

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

I'd say it's more a case of not testing enough edge cases as opposed to simply being bad at programming.

Strangely, the file worked fine on my earlier setup (before my hard drive crashed). I'm not sure what changed.

[Candor]

ill be happy if the -glass- 3.95 theme was ported to SM 5 uwu
With some modifications of course related to lack of difficulty number display beyond 20, and lack of song banner in multiplayer :>

[tuxdude143]

Originally Posted by Dizzy_Gear

I never had to get used to accuracy and timing when I started playing 10 years ago.

The only reason you didn't have to get used to accuracy and timing 10 years ago was because you were, as I have bolded, starting out. You didn't know of anything else at that point which means that you had nothing to transition to in the first place.

With sm5 that is a little different as most players will have used 3.95 before, hense some transitions have to be made with getting used to new stuff. With improvements come changes and in turn comes new stuff. An element of getting used to something new has to be involved and in the end there isn't much we can do about that except removing the changes (which would just in the end make sm5 pointless as it would just be 3.95 under a different name).

Now, onto the timing thing. Have you tried changing the offset? There's a tool that allows you to change the offset up based around your timing in the settings which may help.

Have you tried the combo under field options? That could help with your problem of reading difficulty. I will pass on the idea of a IIDX like combo counter movement system though.

And for that bug you mentioned, if you could pm me your pc specs and all that then it would be much appreciated.

[Kyzentun]

Originally Posted by Dizzy_Gear

I also dislike the position of the combo/fantastic area.

I'm going to plug my own theme here just because it's a ton easier for me to make stuff like combo/judgment position configurable in it. Other themes don't have the menu tech that I built in lua for setting arbitrary config values. (though ca25nada does have the config file tech in spawncamping-wallhack now)
Consensual has player config options for moving the judgment, combo, and notefield around. (though notefield only goes up and down because I haven't decided how to handle the case where someone sets their config as P1, then later loads that profile as P2). For myself, I stuck the judgment above the targets, and that seems good.
The theme metrics for putting the combo/judgment underneath the field don't really help much for me. Making them less obtrusive and huge did help a lot though. Before I started my own, I used to play with Hide Judgment in every theme just because having it at all did more harm than good, and the noteskins would show explosions colored by the judgment anyway.

[icontrolyourworld]

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

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.

I don't think this was answered so I'm still curious about it. Since theming is so great on SM5 it should be a breeze using the graphics and sounds from old versions of stepmania. And if the whole LUA scripting thing is easy it shouldn't be that hard to like place all the graphics on the windows they need to be in relatively similar the previous versions counterpart. And then wherever needed add some mods and options or take away mods and options.
And for the most part if worse came to worst just change the in game graphics while you're actually playing, the lifebar, footer, and judge/combo.

[Renote]

50% Distant

[lurker]

random thred revival
i got back into pad play last month because i got a new CF control box from precision. naturally i tried using sm5 first because hey, it worked for keyboard right? however, the control box is a little crappy. it tends to dc for a split second if i hit the up arrow particularly hard, and usually it's not even long enough to force a miss... on openitg, which i am now using. when i was using sm5, however, the game would lag for about half a second every time the control box dc'd. this was enough to make me fail out of some 10s/11s i could pass without issue on any other setup. of course you could be a deflecting little shit and say "well that's your fault for having a bad setup" but to me it's a good indicator that sm5 is taking up way more resources than is necessary

[Jousway]

Originally Posted by lurker

but to me it's a good indicator that sm5 is taking up way more resources than is necessary

meanwhile I got better preformance on a pentium 3 using sm5 instead of 3.95

[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by lurker

but to me it's a good indicator that sm5 is taking up way more resources than is necessary

and you're an outlier, your point

SM5 runs like garbage for me too, fwiw - that's one reason why I won't move over, and it's a shame because I -love- Prim/ca25nada's themes, but the game is unplayable and I get nowhere near the performance that I should be, both with the game and with regards to scores

[Leo137]

Originally Posted by icontrolyourworld

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'm not sure how much of a port this is but misterkister was making an 3.95 inspired theme:

[Jimmymi1]

It feels like sm5 is a cheap knockoff to sm3.95 idk sry not sry

[Kyzentun]

Originally Posted by lurker

of course you could be a deflecting little shit

Find somebody that you don't insult to help you. I'm not going to waste my time on someone with an insulting attitude. (this applies to basically all 3.95 players, especially those who are so ill-informed that they can't see the improvements that have been made)

[Leo137]

i use sm5 and it lags, i just got used to it
and all my friends who tried sm5 coudln't switch because of the laggyness

sm5 is all good and neat but it seems you need a really good pc to run it smootly

[kommisar]

sm5



sm3.95


sm5 works perfectly on my old shitty computer, but not my brand new computer despite correcting any offset and visual delay

[Izzy]

That's basically what my scores look like between the two. I have no idea why, the game isn't lagging or anything. I simply can't time properly on sm5. It feels like the hidden timing windows are flopping around.

[TC_Halogen]

Originally Posted by Kyzentun

Find somebody that you don't insult to help you. I'm not going to waste my time on someone with an insulting attitude. (this applies to basically all 3.95 players, especially those who are so ill-informed that they can't see the improvements that have been made)

You're talking about not insulting people, yet toss an implicit insult blanket of your own and don't even bother to listen to the fact that some of us have tried it.

The fact of the matter is, the improvements to the game client mean absolutely nothing if it doesn't benefit the players who use the game engine. Yes, StepMania 5 has a load more features, and the level of customizability behind the game is certainly unrivaled compared to previous versions. But that doesn't mean a thing if players struggle to acclimate. Remember that this is a game - if you want die-hard players to move off of currently antiquated versions, you need to help them transition and give them a reason to do so. Features are useless if the overall gameplay experience is negative.

I'll reiterate that I've suffered very similar issues to kommisar and numerous others as well, and it's also worth mentioning that kommisar was someone who was a quite devout user of SM5/sm-ssc before having this issue.

EDIT: two earlier points in this thread and I think it's worth while to mention:

Originally Posted by tosh

You and kyz are trying to go out of your way to convert 4k keyboard players (making this thread on FFR) to sm5 and then you're like "oh we don't care if you prefer 3.95/get better scores on 3.95. the rest of the modes were broken on 3.95 so you still should switch even though you don't play those modes."

Okay the fact that you can't comprehend the concept of alternative skillsets/preferences is a telltale sign that you don't really care about accommodating the 3.95 community. Honestly it seems like you just want to make fun of a group of people using a version of the game that they personally prefer for whatever reason.

that point, coupled with the fact that you're still being condescending (along with jousway but that's nothing new tbh), and it just shows a general lack of effort to really cater to the group you're addressing. As I've said before, SM5 looks great. It's very customizable. I'd use it in a heartbeat thanks to ca25nada's incredible effort on ultralight and spawncamping-wallhack - but unfortunately, the game runs sub-optimally in terms of frame rate and my scores are far from negligibly changing, and I'm someone, like many others, who refuses to deal with that.

[Kyzentun]

Originally Posted by Jimmymi1

It feels like sm5 is a cheap knockoff to sm3.95 idk sry not sry

This is the kind of blatant ignorance I was talking about. If you're one of the people that has read the release notes in the last two years, you're not ill-informed. (though if you're not using an aggressively updated theme, most of the stuff in the release notes does not turn into features you can use.)

Performance is a legitimate reason to not switch. I'll look into it when I have time to spend a solid month on a painstaking risky thankless task. (thankless because ~10 people said thanks after I improved loading time in 5.0.7). For what it's worth, I get ~95 fps on my AMD Phenom(tm) II X4 840 with Radeon HD 5450 video card. (the total all-new parts cost for this computer was under $600 in 2011)
Maybe it's something dumb like the release build being built in debug mode. If that's the case, then Jousway can upload the 5.1 test build he made and you can check performance in that in his theme or mine or default. (default doesn't actually use the new features yet, I don't know of any other themes that do)

I made this thread because I was looking for trivial features that would only require an hour or two each to implement. Things that can be described clearly without resorting to "Do what 3.95 does", because I don't run 3.95, and what you think it does can be very different from what the code actually does. (Mad Matt uploaded the 3.95 source last year, so I have that, but it's not in a buildable or runnable state)
Instead, stuff suggested would require rewriting major parts of the engine and breaking theme compatibility (the edit mode rewrite suggestions). Or it's stuff that can only be done theme-side, like moving judgment/combo around. Or stuff that doesn't even make sense, like Mina's complaint that 717x616 doesn't work (If you set your aspect ratio to 1.164 and height to 616, the width is calculated to 716, close enough).

[Izzy]

I still don't understand why my accuracy is so drastically different in sm5. I get the feeling that if I recorded my gameplay perfectly and then played it back on sm5 that it would not yield the same score. I understand that the timing windows are identical, but there is some strange implementation detail that changed.

I get 500+ fps and the game runs perfectly smooth, but I am incapable of timing my notes in sm5. I stick by my statement that it feels like the timing windows are wobbling.

I really really really want to switch to sm5, but I really really really can't if I can't play the actual game on it.

[Frank Munoz]

Originally Posted by Kyzentun

...I made this thread because I was looking for trivial features that would only require an hour or two each to implement...

...Instead, stuff suggested would require rewriting major parts of the engine and breaking theme compatibility (the edit mode rewrite suggestions)...

That's just it my man, Sm5 needs too much tweaking, fixing, debugs, and maybe even rewriting for others to even consider using it.
It is literally an incomplete program that requires too much attention.

Yes, it looks nice.
...

Listen, if the majority of the rhythm gaming community gets multiple errors on the TITLE screen, there's something very very wrong.
Though there are a few fixes for most of the petite errors, no one should even have to go and download a separate .dll just to run the damn thing.

You have to understand that all this unnecessary work deters many a people from switching, and newcomers wont even know where to start.
Why would they use something that doesn't work outa the box?


Also, what halogen said is right on point.
very similar to why people still use the legacy engine for ffr rather than the amazing r3.
sure there are tons of way to customize your gaming experience but if you're already set to go on an older version, why switch?
Except here, r3 actually runs...

tl'dr
sm5 works - 40% of the time.
sm3.9 works - 85% of the time.