Re: About some StepMania changes
Oh wow I didn't even notice your post until someone bumped this Oni-Paranoia. Account settings failed me again, sorry man.
Well in my prior post I said it a bit bluntly, that people get new themes for StepMania because they feel it makes the game actually look better. Of course "looking better" is extremely subjective, and relies on many different factors (which I felt explaining in detail wouldn't have made much of a difference in retort to the question you posed). Something I feel you didn't pick up in my prior post is that I warned if you had other theme makers creating themes with this "feature", it would isolate the theme from all types of players, or make unnecessary work for theme creators. In the event they wanted to make it more "keyboard player friendly", but also didn't want to completely isolate some of their audience, they would have to have multiple versions of their theme available for people to download. Oh, but since you want to separate current keyboard players might as well ask why the default options setup has all of these silly c-mod modifiers and other crazy stuff, and create yet another isolated version of a theme just because people are so terribly inconvenienced by a few options they don't use in the menu before selecting a song. Whatever infinitesimal convenience is gained from having some options removed from StepMania is not worth the unnecessary work of dividing up every theme into several different versions. It is far more easy and convenient to have a single theme with all available options, and if you don't use them, then you can scroll over them in less than a second anyway. If you ever DO want to mess around with options, they will be there, and you don't have to remove your theme to access them.
My options are already set the way I want them, and I almost never have to look at the options screen, so no. It really isn't that hard to navigate through the options menu, and I don't really understand where this perceived heavy inconvenience is coming from. If you are playing StepMania, pretty much the only time you would ever access the options menu (unless you are screwing around with random mods to test them out) is to change your c-mod (a rare occurrence unless you are using rates) or your x-mod. Considering that option is the FIRST one you see, that shouldn't be a problem. Now it would be a different story if there was an actual serious hindrance occurring here (for example, I could not change rates on SMO due to it being on the second page of the options screen) then perhaps there would be some merit to this. Although typically when an annoyance like this occurs, someone finds a real quick solution for the problem.
Let me put it this way, theme creators shouldn't bother with messing with options to make it "simpler" for players to navigate through. How people play StepMania is completely up to the player, and they should be the ones who decide which options are important or ones they use occasionally. In most cases, the options should never be tampered with (unless you are adding in x-mods or c-mods for yourself) because it is not very worthwhile to do. If some options are somehow severely inconveniencing you just by even existing in the menu, I'm sure you can ask around on StepMania.com and they will be more than happy to help you remove them from the metrics files.
Now if StepMania itself had an option which the player could toggle that could switch between "all options" and "preferred options", that would be fine. Similar to speedmods.txt in SM5, if there was a preferredoptions.txt file that listed all the available options, and let you type out which ones you wanted to be preferred (so they are the only ones that show up), that would be great. Granted I probably still wouldn't use it, but it gives the player full control over the options without having to sift through the metrics.ini, and would allow for a quick switch back to showing all the options if they wanted to try something out. That I would be all for, as then your options wouldn't be removed and messed with by theme creators, they would be your personal set for exactly what you wanted to see.
Again, sorry for the very late reply, I'll just check every once and a while regardless of what account settings says to ensure I don't look over a reply again.
Oh wow I didn't even notice your post until someone bumped this Oni-Paranoia. Account settings failed me again, sorry man.
Well in my prior post I said it a bit bluntly, that people get new themes for StepMania because they feel it makes the game actually look better. Of course "looking better" is extremely subjective, and relies on many different factors (which I felt explaining in detail wouldn't have made much of a difference in retort to the question you posed). Something I feel you didn't pick up in my prior post is that I warned if you had other theme makers creating themes with this "feature", it would isolate the theme from all types of players, or make unnecessary work for theme creators. In the event they wanted to make it more "keyboard player friendly", but also didn't want to completely isolate some of their audience, they would have to have multiple versions of their theme available for people to download. Oh, but since you want to separate current keyboard players might as well ask why the default options setup has all of these silly c-mod modifiers and other crazy stuff, and create yet another isolated version of a theme just because people are so terribly inconvenienced by a few options they don't use in the menu before selecting a song. Whatever infinitesimal convenience is gained from having some options removed from StepMania is not worth the unnecessary work of dividing up every theme into several different versions. It is far more easy and convenient to have a single theme with all available options, and if you don't use them, then you can scroll over them in less than a second anyway. If you ever DO want to mess around with options, they will be there, and you don't have to remove your theme to access them.
My options are already set the way I want them, and I almost never have to look at the options screen, so no. It really isn't that hard to navigate through the options menu, and I don't really understand where this perceived heavy inconvenience is coming from. If you are playing StepMania, pretty much the only time you would ever access the options menu (unless you are screwing around with random mods to test them out) is to change your c-mod (a rare occurrence unless you are using rates) or your x-mod. Considering that option is the FIRST one you see, that shouldn't be a problem. Now it would be a different story if there was an actual serious hindrance occurring here (for example, I could not change rates on SMO due to it being on the second page of the options screen) then perhaps there would be some merit to this. Although typically when an annoyance like this occurs, someone finds a real quick solution for the problem.
Let me put it this way, theme creators shouldn't bother with messing with options to make it "simpler" for players to navigate through. How people play StepMania is completely up to the player, and they should be the ones who decide which options are important or ones they use occasionally. In most cases, the options should never be tampered with (unless you are adding in x-mods or c-mods for yourself) because it is not very worthwhile to do. If some options are somehow severely inconveniencing you just by even existing in the menu, I'm sure you can ask around on StepMania.com and they will be more than happy to help you remove them from the metrics files.
Now if StepMania itself had an option which the player could toggle that could switch between "all options" and "preferred options", that would be fine. Similar to speedmods.txt in SM5, if there was a preferredoptions.txt file that listed all the available options, and let you type out which ones you wanted to be preferred (so they are the only ones that show up), that would be great. Granted I probably still wouldn't use it, but it gives the player full control over the options without having to sift through the metrics.ini, and would allow for a quick switch back to showing all the options if they wanted to try something out. That I would be all for, as then your options wouldn't be removed and messed with by theme creators, they would be your personal set for exactly what you wanted to see.
Again, sorry for the very late reply, I'll just check every once and a while regardless of what account settings says to ensure I don't look over a reply again.
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