Stepmania Online

Today I updated Stepmania to SM5 beta 4a as it wouldn't run anymore. This was due to a few packages getting updated on my system, so it needed a rebuild. Man I wish I read the SM forums ahead of time...

I know it has been out for a while but typically I don't update Stepmania unless something breaks. So when I started the game up I wasn't really anticipating much to have changed. But as things turned out, my themes were all unusable since they hard coded errors to dump to screen (well gee, I mean if I cared that it was broken I would have asked about it), all my speed mods seem to be missing, I can't keep a connection to SMO anymore without trouble ensuing (maybe there's fault on both sides, I don't know). It's like they created a bunch of regressions for no good reason, and at least in regards to dumping errors to screen the devs don't even seem remotely interested in making that opt out from what I've read so far.

Anyone have any suggestions to alleviate some of these things, or should I just go back to beta 3? I kinda don't want to do that as I can't rely on the aur package I usually install and would have to build SM the traditional way (I use Arch Linux) but maybe that's just going to be the path of least resistance for now.

EDIT: I hopped on the SM forums and discussed at least the on screen errors with one of the developers. Then we kinda narrowed down part of the reason these are even issues in the first place to being laziness and for the greater part crappy documentation. So I guess I might help out with the latter if I have time but...I hope they consider handling errors differently.

When it comes to user created themes, the developers want little/nothing to do with it for a reason. (They didn't make it. Blame the theme creator.) However, it's not always their fault entirely. Some themes only work for specific versions of stepmania. If you want to use a theme, be sure to find out what version it was created for.

If this continues to happen with fallback/default theme, then you really have a problem. They have to fix it in that case because they need a stable theme that anyone can use without errors.

~ SpoOkyMagician

I got most of the story from Kyzentun when I asked about it last. Its not that they don't care about non-dev made themes. Its more to do with the fact that errors in the newer lua-enabled themes were causing gross numbers of crashes and they had to put in lots of work to stabilize the theme engine so it can't crash the game in this way. Because nobody was cleaning their themes up (including actively maintained ones, like waiei) they decided dumping all the errors to screen was an appropriate measure to force themers to fix their stuff.

But...that's absolutely frustrating from an end-user point of view. Its not their problem and they're not the ones who should be expected to fix it. Nevermind the fact that none of the themes themselves have any kind of version tag and the only way for a theme to lock itself to a specific version range is for the themer to implement something of that sort using lua on their own. Its entirely optional.

In the end Kyzentun reverted the "dump everything to screen" change they made after we talked about it (if you checkout the master repo from git and build it you'll notice this), pointing out it was causing more strife than it was worth. I'm still trying to free up some time to help improve documentation, but I haven't even had time to touch Stepmania in the last few weeks.