Stepmania Online

This is AMAZING! I can't believe you guys came together and made this happen! This is better than when we ran it. It's so much more professional! I don't even know what to say yet. I don't have any time ATM to go get a new client and give this a whirl, but WOW! Josh and I NEVER expected SMO to live on after dropped it!

That means a lot coming from you Charles. I'm sure Houkou and Cube will also really appreciate the compliment.

Everyone here is still really dedicated to continuing development so it wont stop with how it is now.

Thanks! It's only going to continue to improve. We are just getting started...

I didn't realize until recently when someone asked for help with this just how burned out I was... There's really no way I could help. If this is just starting out, I can't even fathom what it will be like when you get it into full force.

if this SMO dies a new one will appear believe me, there are so many people wanting to play online with friends that when a server goes down a load of sub servers will appear, like when SMO.com died SMO.eu picked it up, but when SMO.eu also died, a load of small communities appeared with people hosting smo servers, for now this one has been accepted by everyone as the official one but if it were to die, it would be replaced.

also I dont know if you have heard but even the SSC crew wanted to make an smo server before AJ/freem (the main devolper of the sm5 line) had a burnout, but he was working on rewriting it
http://code.google.com/p/sm-ssc/source/browse/?repo=smo
the entire SMO system would be rewritten with a new up to date protocol and integrated in to sm5.
they did got permissions from chris to host on to stepmania.com when it was done from what I heard, but seeing that freem has a burnout and basically gave up on SM for now so who knows when it will happen, if it does happen that is.

Yeah, the protocol is ancient. It's kind of a funny story. Josh has Cystic Fiberosis and had to be hospitalized often back when we were working on SMO. He had access to the internet through a noisy phone line, able to sustain only about a 14.4k connection (best as I can remember). The goal was to make it possible to play MAX300 with a couple people online without excessive lag. As far as I remember, it was a success. Although I don't think he played anything more difficult than so deep.

This leads me to wonder why no one just expanded the old protocol through chat messages. I.e. more complicated client-server communications could be built by sending chat messages with special codes back and forth.

It would also allow for pretty good interoperability.

I am still shocked people are using 3.95, the non-version.

The only thing that could possibly cause this one to go down is my dieing or something. I have always had colo and dedicated servers well back when the original stepmaniaonline.com came out.

I actually don't play much of quake 3 these days either (especially since quakelive came out) but i still host all the servers I did since like 2002. Even if I lost interest in stepmania (which I doubt) it still would not go down.

This thread is full of win! I'm more surprised Charles posted here haha. It's nice to see you around!

(You probably know me as the guy who wishes you happy birthday on Youtube due to the funny coincidence)