What keeps you using 3.95?

[Kyzentun]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

- basic modifications/optimizations to those themes, and even as far as customizable resolutions (as MinaciousGrace has said).

MinaciousGrace's resolution complaint was incoherent. You can get a resolution of 718x616 by setting your aspect ratio pref to 1.166 and height to 616. It sounded like he wanted the aspect ratio distorted. I don't know why you expect developers to make a game that displays things with the wrong aspect ratio, so there must by some misunderstanding. For squishing the notefield (fixing fat arrows?), 5.1 provides an option in the menu for adjusting the x zoom on the notefield.

MinaciousGrace made an SM5 theme that crashes SM5 the next time you start up if you're not on windows. If that's the level of your theme modifying skill and needs, you should ask a dev to do it for you so that you don't cause problems for other users. I've already dealt with two reddit threads from people who needed to know how to manually modify their preferences just to be able to start up stepmania again.

- Another reason worth keeping 3.95 as a build is that players have the ability to use the editor to place 192nd notes.

I have no idea where you're coming from with this. SM5's editor has always been able to place 192nd notes.

[MinaciousGrace]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

MinaciousGrace made an SM5 theme that crashes SM5 the next time you start up if you're not on windows. If that's the level of your theme modifying skill and needs, you should ask a dev to do it for you so that you don't cause problems for other users.

im just gonna go ahead and point out the fact that stepmania doesn't have built in os detection and optimized settings for the relevant platform in the first place is a fucking abhorrent disgrace

and also there are users who have just as stupid crashing problems with your base build

and also that it's not my job to provide a well-tested cross platform product that is bug free and available for use by anyone, it's your job

my theme is for me because it's what i want and the key difference here is i didn't make a thread on ffr asking why people don't use my theme before instantly flaming them for lodging legitimate concerns

[MinaciousGrace]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

Actually lets cut the circuitous bullshit and get the real heart of the issue here. This thread isn't about the keyboard user base, providing feedback, improving the client to meet user demands or pointless shit-flinging at people's development skills outside of their area of expertise. I'm a self taught R programmer and my area isn't in game development, it's in statistical computing. If you spent a week writing a program in R to generate long term population estimates in sub-saharan countries I'd find it just as fucking laughably pathetic as I'm sure you find whatever I put into transcendence.

But you're aren't wrong. If my theme-ing capabilities were so dog shit I should have gone to devs and requested a litany of features relevant to keyboard gameplay multiple times over the course of the last half decade. Oh wait. I did. As did many other players. All of whom you have entirely ignored. You just don't seem to get that in the entire development lifetime of sm5 the collective development team has failed to deliver a single feature within the client that would be worth the transition to sm5. Nobody in this thread thinks 3.95 is the perfect and many of them have already spent years making small edits to their themes that you would ask them to reconstruct on a new client that offers absolutely nothing in terms of features to your players.

But this thread isn't about any of that. This thread is about you, and your pathetic insecurities. This thread is about you needing to validate the time and effort into developing sm5. This thread is about your need to be heralded as the savior of the game by the community because for all this pompous jackassery and the logical flagellation that you have been throwing at everyone here your major fear is that maybe we're all right. Maybe for all the effort and time and vitriol you have put into the development of sm5 you have produced nothing of note. You took a gameplay focused client and you forced your concepts of aesthetics onto everyone and entirely ignored the gameplay facet; not because it's not important, but because you just don't know what the fuck you're doing.

The fact that the majority of this community rejects sm5 isn't a reflection on our incapacity to identify a usable product, it's a reflection on your incapacity to produce one. The fact of the matter is if you produced something worth using, we would be using it. But you didn't. Because you are a shitty programmer, an even shittier developer, and an even shittier person.

And this entire fuck-assery of a thread is your flailing about as you slowly come to terms with it.

The only mark you will leave on this world is your utterly insignificant carbon footprint. Your entire life will be obsoleted by a handful of cattle in wyoming and undone by a few fucking square meters of shrubbery in scotland.

good fucking day, sir

[Kyzentun]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

And there we have it. MinaciousGrace can't even clarify his problem with resolutions after I've made two different attempts to address it.

[Guilhermeziat]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

Uh.. c-c-chill o-out man...

[Arntonach]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

[Frank Munoz]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

And there we have it. MinaciousGrace can't even clarify his problem with resolutions after I've made two different attempts to address it.

tbh you're doing the same thing though
as hostile as minacious is, and the last few sentences made which could have just been left out, he did address his own problems.

you nitpicked an entire post made from halogen and targeted minacious, about an aspect ratio complaint.
ignoring the entirety of what the whole post was about.

and you have been 'nitpicking', in this sense, since the beginning and eventually caused your own degradation. Ignoring your own faults and pinpointing only the matters that you want, and never address the other points made.

yea there are some 'attacks' which should be filtered out and honestly never made and you shouldn't really have to read but you know they're petty, and are using them to fuel an old feud.

[TC_Halogen]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

I offered a whole bunch of insight, and you literally... just tunneled into the point that you wanted to pull apart, rather than taking any sort of criticism.

(p.s. the 192nd note being on SM5 doesn't help your cause when you're trying to switch people from 3.95 to it, by the way.)

You guys just refuse to listen to anything that's being said, and you're being borderline insulting in the process.

This thread should just be locked; it's serving no purpose anymore.

[xVaLoRx]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

This thread should just be locked; it's serving no purpose anymore.

please dont lock, i've quite enjoyed the read

[Gruzzly_Bear]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

MinaciousGrace made an SM5 theme that crashes SM5 the next time you start up if you're not on windows. If that's the level of your theme modifying skill and needs, you should ask a dev to do it for you so that you don't cause problems for other users. I've already dealt with two reddit threads from people who needed to know how to manually modify their preferences just to be able to start up stepmania again.

um mina and everyone else you guys may be aware of this, but the reason why it's crashing is because of PrefsOverride.lua in the Scripts folder setting the sound driver to WaveOut when it doesn't exist on Mac and Linux

so it's a very easily fixed problem - just remove the line that says WaveOut

[Kyzentun]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

you nitpicked an entire post made from halogen and targeted minacious, about an aspect ratio complaint.
ignoring the entirety of what the whole post was about.

I picked out the stuff that could be identified as an actual issue. And ignored the part where apparently Halogen thinks every problem he had with SM4 6-7 years ago applies to SM5.

Then Minacious comes along and says that SM5 has absolutely no improvements. When someone says that, it's clear they aren't going to consider anything that is done to be a reason, because they're not looking. So what is there to actually do for someone like Minacious? I try to pick one thing that might be fixable, and he responds with personal insults. This isn't a guy trying to solve problems, or someone who even wants problems to be solved. He is however, a prime representative of the FFR community.

I could list improvements made to SM5. The list would be longer than this thread just to cover the last 2-3 years. 90% of the features you guys cheer about in ca25nada's theme thread wouldn't even be possible without the work I personally put into improving the engine. Most of them were made because I wanted some improvement in my own theme and the engine got in my way.


Halogen: Your insight didn't list much of "this is an actual problem". It was "people use 3.95 because they use 3.95". Not even a single customization listed in detail, then you invented a problem that doesn't even exist as a reason not to use SM5's edit mode.


Basic modifications: In 5.1, there's an entire submenu dedicated to adjusting the notefield. Hidden/sudden, offsets for both, receptor offset, field zoom (on all three axes), field rotation (on all three, though only x rotation is useful), disabling the white flash on hidden/sudden (it's not hardcoded anymore), and other more obscure stuff.

Online mode: I don't play it, personal insults aren't going to make me want to work on it. If this was a paying job, I'd ask my boss to throw you out of the building.

Windows optimizations: One guy reported a crash that went away when he manually specified a sound driver that besides WaveOut. Now he's gone and I have no way to investigate why WaveOut crashes for him. This is typical of problems that occur only for windows. I can't reproduce them for myself, the person experiencing them can't test, explain, or investigate enough to make it possible to fix the problem. So it doesn't get fixed.

This probably bears repeating: I don't work on things I can't test. If I can't test something and make sure it works, or find someone reliable to test it for me, I don't make it or touch it. If that means you're left out in the cold, tough luck. Find a windows dev to solve the problem, or step up and do it yourself (like I did for every feature I wanted).

Timing: Some day, when I have nothing useful whatsoever to do, I'll investigate why this judgment graph has weird spikes instead of a smooth curve. If Minacious and Halogen are typical examples of the competitive scene, it's not worth investigating something that might indicate presses being misjudged by a few random milliseconds. The insults do you no favors.

SM6: I make no promises about something I haven't even started work on yet.


There, I wasted some time addressing more issues in detail.

[GammaBlaster]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

please dont lock, i've quite enjoyed the read

yo valor how's it going

[TC_Halogen]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

for fuck's sake, you really are saying that i'm insulting you after all the time i spent making a post trying to at least give you thoughts as to why people are potentially upset

a.) i didn't make up any problem that didn't exist - you're failing to realize that the whole purpose of you coming in here was to get 3.95 users to use SM5; i listed a reason that complements users being able to play better - if users can use the game the way they want and it has additional usable features from previous versions that existed, why are they going to move over (i.e. why is someone gonna go from 3.95 -> 5 when they can perform on it and have extended editor features, hence why i mentioned 192nds in the first place)

b.) contrary to what you might think, i'm actually not bitching about SM5 as much as you seem to give me credit for, otherwise i'd have spent an ample amount of time isolating things in detail - i'm actually using it because it runs rather well on my desktop and i have a theme that allowing me to play at relatively close to full potential (the theme you so callously mention as being incapable of running on a different platform - which for the record does not affect me so [b]why should i personally care[b/])

c.) the other points that i offered were just purely thought-provoking in that maybe you could hopefully stop being blind and realize that players have reasons behind everything they are bringing up, but clearly you don't care

d.)

I could list improvements made to SM5. The list would be longer than this thread just to cover the last 2-3 years. 90% of the features you guys cheer about in ca25nada's theme thread wouldn't even be possible without the work I personally put into improving the engine. Most of them were made because I wanted some improvement in my own theme and the engine got in my way.

thanks for that! but that doesn't give you the right to be disrespectful to us the way that you are now - you're a dev that's helped built the game engine, but you're not responsible for the elements that ca25nada, someone who actually comprehends the players of this community, helped to create - you wouldn't have known that the players wanted a bunch of these things on your own because you don't bother to keep in touch, so don't sit here and try to take credit for something that you only implicitly did; you're a dev for a game, you had features requested, and you did it as the responsibility of being a dev for the game (and note: you working for free doesn't nullify any of these points, because you have the right to choose and you could choose -not- to do it)

again, no one is complaining about the work that you do in the slightest; in fact, within the context of this thread, people are complaining about the attitude you are giving them when they are telling you how they feel

this is the last post i'm making in this shithole excuse of a thread, good luck with finding what you need.

[Frank Munoz]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

Well, if you did pinpoint stuff that could be "identified as an actual issue", the comment concerning Minacious' theme modifying skills is irrelevant... albeit it's a bit understandable to wanna retaliate to some of the things being directed towards you, it's still unnecessary(as most of the things said in here).
especially considering that there's direct tension between you and minacious, and you blamed the whole sm3.9 userbase based on minacious' post.

To summarize:
I no longer give a shit about 3.9 players if there's that much blithering vitriol involved.

the thread was derailed because of this.

At one point the thread was no longer about what keeps people using sm3.9, and more about convincing you that our reasons have legitimacy.
Halogen said it well -

But honestly... seeking questions from the community was a good start by you guys, but the consistently vehement disagreements and ad hominem towards this particular community is really stupid, considering the fact that you guys came to us with questions. If you want to be irritated towards us making stupid requests out of our own volition (not that it's the most advised thing to do, but whatever), that's fine -- but when we're coming up with what we have as concerns within our particular community and you treat us like our opinions do not matter, you can't really expect to be received well.

The segment about us praising ca25nada's theme is something that doesn't need to be said here, as it has it's own separate thread
you also say that 90% of it wouldn't be possible without all the work you put into sm5.

It seems like you wanna be appreciated,
which you are because damn did you do some work
BUT, this thread seems to show a lesser side of that, as halogen said before
"...when we're coming up with what we have as concerns within our particular community and you treat us like our opinions do not matter, you can't really expect to be received well."
which is exactly what has/is happening; bad perception.

Halogen is making points about how to better communicate with this community, which should have really really been considered.
It's one of the things hindering you from obtaining useful information from us.
--------

Basic Modifications: There's alota customization in sm5 which is great cause many users can customize their play style even more. Just wish it was a bit more user friendly.

Online mode: Whether you play it or not... that demographic should be considered. Since FFR is almost exclusively an online game. And you asked this Online gaming community for suggestions.
Maybe it's time for a change ya know.
Considering the most active rhythm gaming community currently is probably OSU! and their online mode is apparently pretty solid, and actively used.
Hell, they held a world wide tourney LIVE. pretty rad.

You have said many times that you can't work on things you can't test.
It's understandable.

As for sm6, all we can really do is wait for what yall dish out and as much as you might think we overlook your efforts, I'm personally excited for it.

though... the problems in this thread now aren't really about sm anymore.

[PolygonEater]

Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

I didn't want to participate in this thread since all the legitimate claims of problems are being thrown out as incoherent whining, but....

1. Rates above ~1.6 will crash when browsing the song selection menu, and when returning to it from gameplay, seemingly randomly.

Why is this? Oh...it might be the part where the code which deals with speeding up the music was torn apart causing it to sound AWFUL and crash. Hmmm...I wonder what happens when you put it back together? Lets see...it never crashes even on 3.0+ and no longer drifts off to the right side, and since someone put in the work of fixing the ringing it's actually better than using rates on 3.95.

Here's an example from my stream of a song which would normally sound really bad on rates on both 3.95 and SM5, but after putting the rate system back together is actually acceptable.

https://www.twitch.tv/xwidghet/v/67700637

2. Stepmania 5 stutters/lags. To specify, I'm talking about where stepmania doesn't have a new frame in time for the next vsync.

This could be the part where when running windows it always sleeps 1 millisecond, even if that means the next frame will be late. This mixed with whatever happened to the opengl render that made it monumentally slow, will make users think SM5 is garbage. Around three years ago or so I ported the DX8 renderer to DX9, and the result was that OpenGL and DX9 had the same frame rate during gameplay. Now when I run it, OpenGL is 1/2 to 2/3rds the speed of DX9. Anyone happen to know why? OpenGL is supposed to be the faster and better renderer.

3. The timing is different.

Why? Is it arguably more accurate? No SM5 dev who seems to know what's different will expand upon this, just confirm that it's different.

4. Move to saving files in App Data.

I understand that the move to app data was done to get around problems, but why don't you give the user an easy way to get to it? Unknowledgable users will just have no idea where their screenshots etc are going. Could be a hotkey, or even just a short cut.

I do have more, but I think I'll wait to see what kind of response I get before going on.