Looking for help adding 50% distant to SM5

[SCWolf]

Overhead is a little too big on my screen and vanilla distant is beginning to look a little cluttered so I'd like to try 50% distant to see if it hits that medium.

Any help is appreciated

[Gruzzly_Bear]

Firstly, go into your _fallback theme's metrics.ini (located in your StepMania 5\Themes\_fallback folder).

There are two ways you can add 50% distant:
1: Change distant to 50% distant
2: Add 50% distant and keep distant

Method 1

To change 100% distant to 50% distant, change the line:
Persp,5="mod,distant;name,Distant"
to the following:
Persp,5="mod,50% distant;name,Distant"

Method 2

To add 50% distant, the steps are a lot more complex. Firstly, below the line:
Persp,5="mod,distant;name,Distant"
add a second line that looks like this:
Persp,6="mod,50% distant;name,50% Distant"
Then go a few lines up to the line that looks like this:
Persp="5"
and change it to
Persp="6"
Then go to your en.ini under StepMania 5\Themes\_fallback\Languages and under this line:
Distant=Distant
add the line
50% Distant=50% Distant
This will prevent SM5 from spewing out an error when you go to the player options.

Hopefully this helps!

[axith]

Thanks for the tutorial Gruzzly. I've been wondering about that for months now and never asked. SM feels better now. Oh, and thanks for posting the thread SCWolf.

[SCWolf]

Awesome! this worked perfectly

Thanks a lot man

[Kyzentun]

Is this where I can say that if you have to add stuff like this to the theme, it's a crap theme? Because I've had this problem beat in Consensual for almost 2 years.
(not sure how old this screenshot is) http://i.imgur.com/TLCCmR7.jpg
(last week) http://i.imgur.com/S67DTeu.png

[Gruzzly_Bear]

Originally Posted by Kyzentun

Is this where I can say that if you have to add stuff like this to the theme, it's a crap theme? Because I've had this problem beat in Consensual for almost 2 years.
(not sure how old this screenshot is) http://i.imgur.com/TLCCmR7.jpg
(last week) http://i.imgur.com/S67DTeu.png

It's the only way to add 50% distant into stepmania by default. The only theme (that I know of) that has this feature built in by default is yours. Doesn't mean that every other theme is crap. This is also not a theme-based option, the solution that I gave adds 50% distant system-wide.

[aj187]

the solution you gave will have to be redone every time you update stepmania though

[Gruzzly_Bear]

Is there any other way to add 50% distant (without needing to redo it every update)?

[Kyzentun]

(this post is going to be completely off topic, because the question of how to add 50% distant was already answered)

The default theme wasn't made with that kind of flexibility in mind, so the way Gruzzly_Bear described is the simplest practical way to add 50% distant to the default theme.
I think forcing people to edit themes for simple features is bad design because it's a recurring tech support problem. New people have to be told how to do it, old people have to keep reapplying their changes.
I suppose someone like me could make an interactive option row similar to the speed mod row that was added in beta 4. Since distant and hallway are the same mod internally (they rotate the notefield on the x axis), one option row could be used for both.
Incoming and space are distant and hallway with some skew added, so a second option row for skew would cover the people that want to use incoming and space.
Then you could do stuff like 70% tilt and -1000% skew to amuse yourself. (http://i.imgur.com/Am0sFmS.jpg) Because setting weird mods to break up the routine and take a break from serious play is fun sometimes.