What keeps you using 3.95?

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  • Jimmymi1
    Forum User
    • Jan 2013
    • 340

    #106
    Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

    Originally posted by Kyzentun
    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).
    U wanna cater to sm 3.95 players?? add sm 3.95's screencut to sm5 for starters.... wich i even requested a year back i think???? if u actually dug into 3.95, played it and compared it to sm5 one of the first thing you would notice is the screen cut jeez have you even played the game?
    Last edited by Jimmymi1; 02-5-2016, 04:15 AM.
    heheh

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    • ca25nada
      FFR Player
      • Sep 2007
      • 384

      #107
      Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

      Originally posted by Jimmymi1
      U wanna cater to sm 3.95 players?? add sm 3.95's screencut to sm5 for starters.... wich i even requested a year back i think???? if u actually dug into 3.95, played it and compared it to sm5 one of the first thing you would notice is the screen cut jeez have you even played the game?
      I'm pretty sure even the default theme has settings for having footers during gameplay.
      Minaciousgrace: i could train a cat to pass overjoy in 15 years
      Minaciousgrace: whether or not i could keep it alive for that long is another question

      Comment

      • Jimmymi1
        Forum User
        • Jan 2013
        • 340

        #108
        Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

        Originally posted by ca25nada
        I'm pretty sure even the default theme has settings for having footers during gameplay.
        oshi, guess im switching to sm5.

        but my word still stand, do some intense stepmanning on 3.95 and go back to sm5 later
        heheh

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        • Dynam0
          The Dominator
          • Sep 2005
          • 8987

          #109
          Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

          To paraphrase the majority of 3.95 users, until the engine runs well enough to allow me to perform like I do with 3.95 then it doesn't make sense for me to jump over.

          Comment

          • lurker
            ur worst nitemare
            FFR Simfile Author
            • Jan 2003
            • 1628

            #110
            Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

            Originally posted by Kyzentun
            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).
            one thing i will note about this is that this fix wasn't especially noticeable unless you opened sm5 twice in quick succession, with the second time loading even faster than 3.9(5)
            Last edited by lurker; 02-5-2016, 10:15 AM.
            some feathery f**k

            Comment

            • Kyzentun
              FFR Player
              • Dec 2014
              • 125

              #111
              Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

              1. Turn on fast load. If you think you have a reason for not using fast load, explain why.
              2. If you have an SSD or less than 5k songs, you probably weren't paying attention to the load time anyway.
              3. Restarting stepmania twice in quick succession isn't a valid test because a lot of the stuff will be in the OS's filesystem cache. You have to actually tell the OS to drop that cache to make a valid measurement of startup time.
              4. Making a claim like that puts your straight into the "ignoramus" pile. Because I did spend a solid month on it, and I did measure the difference my changes made, and it was huge. I don't have an SSD, and I had 14k songs at the time.

              First example is that the INI parser and loader used by Stepmania had stupid flaws. It builds a tree data structure as it loads, where each section is a node, and each entry in a section is a child of the node. Before I fixed it, it would walk the entire list of children to add a new child. The banner cache INI file is one giant section, with one entry for each song. So with 14k songs, stepmania would sit for a solid 50 seconds parsing that ini file, not updating the progress bar at all. After I fixed the INI parser and loader to not be utterly braindamaged, it loaded that same ini file in 0.1 seconds.
              Next up were the sm and ssc loaders. They're nearly identical. Every time the loader reaches a new tag in the file, it would walk an elseif chain of 48 string comparisons. String comparisons are slow anyway, so doing 48 just to find the single match slowed down loading substantially. I restructured the loader to use an associative map of strings to functions, so it can just do a lookup in the map when it finds a tag. This translates to ~6 comparisons for an ordered map, or a single run of the hashing function for a hash map (C++11 adds standard library hash maps, so ssc loading is negligibly faster in SM5.1). So there's a small but measurable speedup to sm and ssc loading.

              Then there's the radar value calculation algorithm. This examines the notedata and counts taps, holds, jumps, hands, rolls, fakes, lifts, stream, voltage, air, freeze, chaos. The original algorithm was traversing the entire note data 14 times, once for each of those fields. I rewrote it into a single traversal that does them all at once. That cut the time used to build stepmania's cache folder in half.

              Last was digging through the function that finds banners and jackets and other images in the song folder and tries to put them in the right fields in the cache ssc file. Firstly, it was looking in the song folder even when fastload was on, thus negating most of the advantage of fastload. Since the cached ssc file is filled with sanitized fields, there's no point in tidying it every time it's loaded, so TidyUpData doesn't run if the ssc is loaded from the cache. Unless it's something like #SELFIE with a # symbol in a field, which the msd parser interprets as a missing semicolon (msd is the underlying format for sm and ssc). So when you put # in the title field, the title comes up blank or cut off because the msd file format is trash not suited for arbitrary strings. The engine has to detect this and go fill in the field with TidyUpData every time it loads. I want to move to a lua format to get rid of this problem.

              Next, it was fetching the directory listing a dozen times to find different kinds of files. That was cut down to a single fetch, plus a bit of processing to sort the files into music, images, movies, and lyrics. So that part of building the cache is substantially faster (less substantial on an SSD).

              5. Your statement is equivalent to me saying "The difference between D4 and D7 charts isn't especially noticeable, they're both hitting tons of notes really fast.". Think on that for a minute, and you'll realize why you pissed me off so much.
              Stepmania Development in action:

              Comment

              • Frank Munoz
                Muein
                • Nov 2007
                • 2047

                #112
                Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                Might as well rename this thread "Critical issues with SM5".
                Not much discussion about 3.95, probably because there's not much to discuss.

                My main jive with sm5 is what every one else has, performance issues and play-ability.
                Another is the rate modifier, as changing it only augments duration and excludes pitch.
                Anything past a .1 modification just sounds bad and choppy.

                I do get better scores on sm5, though the judging seems a bit skewed from 3.95.
                sm3.95 also had a great 'note' skin, where as in sm5's I can't really tell the difference between half the arrows. Especially 16th and eighth note triplets.
                Last edited by Frank Munoz; 02-5-2016, 03:29 PM.
                Unknown and Unofficial
                may the good arrow guide you

                Comment

                • icontrolyourworld
                  Enjoy life!
                  FFR Simfile Author
                  • Oct 2007
                  • 4192

                  #113
                  Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                  stepmania 5.0.10 literally does not even open
                  Last edited by icontrolyourworld; 02-8-2016, 12:37 PM.

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                  • DeadSignal
                    FFR Player
                    • Jan 2012
                    • 136

                    #114
                    Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                    As far as I can tell, it could be most likely due to certain newly-implemented features (perhaps among other things) resulting in Windows XP no longer being supported for SM5. Not sure about the earlier SM5 versions though, e.g. 5.0.4 and 5.0.7.

                    That being said, 3.95 still holds out well from a pure gameplay-based perspective so I would kinda say that you aren't really missing out on much if that's all you really care about. This is certainly not to say that SM5's more up-to-date features are to go unappreciated, as I am currently considering switching to it once I figure out how to fully adjust my playfield in a way that would allow me to produce scores within or above what I can currently do on 3.95/OpenITG.

                    Comment

                    • Mad Matt
                      FFR Player
                      • May 2011
                      • 13

                      #115
                      Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                      Originally posted by kommisar
                      sm5 works perfectly on my old shitty computer, but not my brand new computer despite correcting any offset and visual delay
                      Originally posted by kommisar
                      ati video card: sm5 rulz
                      nvidia video card: sm5 sux
                      Could you provide me with some specs on your machines? And are you using the D3D renderer or the OpenGL renderer?

                      Comment

                      • kommisar
                        Dark Chancellor
                        FFR Simfile Author
                        FFR Music Producer
                        • Jun 2005
                        • 7324

                        #116
                        Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                        using opengl on both now


                        old comp: (desktop)

                        3rd gen core i7
                        6gb ram
                        ATI Radeon HD 5800 1gb


                        new comp: (laptop)

                        recent intel core i5 2.90ghz
                        8gb ram
                        NVIDIA GeForce 940m (4gb)


                        both ran HDD for storage though idk if that plays much of a role
                        Last edited by kommisar; 03-1-2016, 03:20 PM.

                        Comment

                        • Mad Matt
                          FFR Player
                          • May 2011
                          • 13

                          #117
                          Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                          Originally posted by kommisar
                          new comp: (laptop)

                          recent intel core i5 2.90ghz
                          8gb ram
                          NVIDIA GeForce 940m (4gb)
                          Can you check the value of the preference "LastSeenVideoDriver"? When I run SM5 on my laptop which also has a dedicated video card, it for some reason decides to use the intel onboard graphics regardless. I haven't gotten around to looking into the cause of that yet because I don't play SM much on keyboard and I get sufficient performance anyway, but if that could be your problem I might dig into it. From what I understand when it comes to OGL, NVidia > ATI > Intel

                          Comment

                          • kommisar
                            Dark Chancellor
                            FFR Simfile Author
                            FFR Music Producer
                            • Jun 2005
                            • 7324

                            #118
                            Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                            LastSeenVideoDriver=Intel(R) HD Graphics 4600


                            LOL WHAT. guess it picks it up by default. huh.


                            was running on board the whole time. how 2 fix
                            Last edited by kommisar; 03-2-2016, 04:00 PM.

                            Comment

                            • Mad Matt
                              FFR Player
                              • May 2011
                              • 13

                              #119
                              Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                              So I did a little digging and the results I found are a little confusing.

                              First, you should be able to select which video card is being used from the NVidia control panel. Under "Manage 3d Settings", in the "Global Settings" tab you can set the NVidia card as your "preferred graphics processor", or in the "Program Settings" you can add SM to the list of programs, and set it specifically to use the NVidia card.

                              That said, I tried that on my laptop and found
                              a) SM reported that it was using the Intel Card regardless
                              b) the frame rate was ~50% higher when it was set to use the Intel integrated graphics.

                              I think SM reporting the intel card has something to do with the API it uses to get the video card info being very old. The fact that my laptop runs a higher frame rate with the integrated graphics is somewhat surprising, but not extremely, since SM doesn't use much of the GPU to begin with, it does most of it's processing in the CPU in either case.

                              Anyway, I'm not pro enough to tell if there was any difference in play consistency, and in either case my gameplay frame rate well beyond the monitor's refresh rate. If you do feel like playing around with forcing one GPU vs the other I'd be interested to hear your results, and if you can notice any difference.

                              Comment

                              • kommisar
                                Dark Chancellor
                                FFR Simfile Author
                                FFR Music Producer
                                • Jun 2005
                                • 7324

                                #120
                                Re: What keeps you using 3.95?

                                so first song, felt spot on timing wise

                                still have to hit a bit early but that's adjustable (visual delay etc)

                                i'm not warmed up or anything but this is infinitely better. last attempt with auto gfx card use was like 30-40 perfs lol
                                Last edited by kommisar; 03-2-2016, 06:05 PM.

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