About

This is the v4.8.3 release of Simply Love for StepMania 5. It is a modest update that includes new features and bug fixes.

Please note that this requires StepMania 5.0.12 or StepMania 5.1-beta. Future releases of SM5.1 should also work fine.

Older versions of SM5 are not supported. SM5.2 is not supported.

New Features

Upload Scores to GrooveStats via QR Code

The evaluation screen now displays a QR code that can be scanned to upload your latest score to your GrooveStats account. To use this new feature, you'll need a phone capable of scanning QR codes and a GrooveStats account. For now, only dance is supported (sorry Technomotion enthusiasts).

This feature was a collaboration between Archi, teejusb, and me (they did 99% of the work and deserve the credit). Though initially conceived of to facilitate the upcoming SRPG3 event, the feature grew to work with GrooveStats more broadly.

The QR codes make use of the luaqrcode library; many thanks to the people involved in that!

Judgment Graphic Previews in Modifier Menu

I'd been wanting to add this for a long time.

Note that having a large number of judgment graphics installed can cause the PlayerOptions screen to take longer to load. The default judgments that ship with the theme should be fine.

Note Density Graph above the Notefield

Players can enable this feature in the second PlayerOptions page, under Gameplay Extras.

This feature occupies the same space in Gameplay as score, so enabling it will hide your score. If you enable this graph and the Step Statistics sidebar, your score will be moved over into the sidebar.

Track "Miss Because Held"

This release adds the ability to track "Misses you earned because you were still holding down the arrow when you were supposed to have hit it instead." This sounds somewhat bizarre when described like this, but accidentally holding down notes becomes an issue in upper-level stamina play as pads are modified to be more sensitive.

This feature can be enabled in the second page of Player Options under Gameplay Extras. The data will display in Pane2 of Evaluation, where misses-because-they-were-held will appear as a superscript adjacent to the overall miss count. It looks like this:

(Those crazy kids and their stamina, always modding their pads to be more sensitive. Why, back in my day we played VerTex² in clunky Nike Frees and considered ourselves lucky! ...)

Casual Mode Improvements

The custom optionrows for choosing difficulty and arrow spacing (speed mod) in Casual Mode would previously reset to their first choice if you backed out of a particular song. They now retain the previous choice in a way I felt was suitable for novice players.

There were additional small changes like coloring the judgment labels on the evaluation screen, adding new novice-friendly packs to the CasualMode-Groups.txt whitelist, and lowering the input handler's repeat rate. You can read more about my thoughts on Casual Mode in 8927ece.

Prompt Users to Reset Preferences When Switching Themes

As you use Simply Love, it will modify many of your global StepMania preferences as it goes. This is needed to achieve multiple gamemodes (Casual, Competitive, ECFA, StomperZ). I've never been comfortable with this, but I was also never sure how to address it.

A while back, I attempted to handle it by having Simply Love create a Static.ini file that contained the default SM5 values for preferences that Simply Love would need to modify. Unfortunately, I botched even that, and it ended up confusing veteran ITG players and simultaneously accomplishing nothing because I had it written to the incorrect location. Read more at e536fe0, but the tl;dr is that if you see Save/Static.ini you can delete it because it's doing nothing.

With this release, I've added a new screen that appears when players go to switch out of Simply Love to another theme. It will briefly explain this mess and offer them the ability to reset their preferences to default values before switching if they wish. This was accomplished in dd1157a.

Make ScreenMapControllers Slightly Less Bad

I've personally always had trouble identifying which text in which column was currently active in ScreenMapControllers. It's proven to be particularly bad when pads needed to be remapped mid-tournament and the arcade CRT being used had poor contrast.

This screen seems to be largely hardcoded by the StepMania engine, but I hacked in a "cursor" to more clearly identify the text that currently has focus. You can learn more about the six hours I spent doing this in 9ec4799.

Show Overall Pack Lengths

It's nice to know how long the journey will be before you embark on it. Will you be streaming 200 for over thirty minutes in Last Trip or enjoying the best 4 seconds ever in Windows XP Critical Stop?

Simply Love has always displayed the lengths of each song in the MusicWheel, and now it displays the overall length of each pack as well. So far Crapyard Scent seems to have a comfortable lead in this regard, with nearly 34 hours of content. Not that it's a contest or anything.

Updated Translations

Simply Love v4.8 introduced support for Spanish and French, and v4.8.2 saw Brazilian Portuguese added as well. The localization files have been updated for this release's new features by Moru Zerinho6 (pt-br), Frank (es), and Remi (fr). Thanks to each of them!

In-Theme Credits and Acknowledgments

Simply Love's in-theme acknowledgments section has been updated. Perhaps you are in there now.

Smaller New Features and Changes

• add "Total Notes Hit This Game" to Gameover screen; this replaces Current Combo
• always show bpm (and MusicRate if not 1.0) on Evaluation screen; see 66778b4
• show Dancing Character optionrow on options page 2 if dancing characters are installed; hide it if not
• hide Score Vocalization optionrow if no voice packs are installed in ./Simply Love/Other/Vocalize/
• allow players to hide Combo milestones (the animation that occurs every 100 and 1000 combo) without hiding the entire combo; see 882f321
• remove gradual zoom from Combo number; see ef0b64e
• change HideDanger to be false by default; see a67bb6a
• move "Clear Credits" to the bottom of the Operator Menu to lessen the likelihood it is accidentally chosen; see: b5db0bc

Bug Fixes

Allow Similarly Named Judgment Graphics to Coexist

If you've played around with installing your own judgment graphics, you probably found the bug where StepMania would raise a warning about similarly named files (for example, Love and Love Chroma). There were some efforts to fix this in the previous release but those fixes required you to name files a certain way and didn't always even work then.

It should be fixed for real now. You should be able to name judgments graphics whatever your operating system allows and it they should Just Work™. I hope.

This was accomplished in 765c9aa and 288aec7.

Fix Notes Not Disappearing in ECFA

Over the years, players would occasionally report that getting a "Great" (W4) in ECFA wasn't causing the arrows to disappear. I figured this had something to do with MinTNSToHideNotes, but since ECFA always seemed to work for me, I mistakenly chalked the reports up to misconfigured SM5 installs by end users.

stepmania/stepmania#1816 caused me to revisit the issue and acknowledge that it really was a problem, and resulted in me spending several days digging into it. I tried many things that did not work, but I think I eventually found the cause and fixed it. You can read more technical details in 3bde5ca if you wish.

Allow ActionOnMissedTarget without Pacemaker

The ActionOnMissedTarget feature was added in v4.8.1 to facilitate score grinding. It allowed players in EventMode to have the song automatically restart or end if their target score became no longer achievable.

With the previous implementation, ActionOnMissedTarget would only work if the Pacemaker was also enabled, though this wasn't clear at all from the UI. The two features have been somewhat detangled and it should now be possible to have the Pacemaker or ActionOnMissedTarget or both or none. See 439ac39 for details.

Overall Better Support for Less Common Games

Though StepMania is commonly used for 4-panel dance game simulation, it can also emulate several other games. Previously, Simply Love's support for these other games ranged from "not bad" (Pump, Techno) to "it kind of works" (kb7, para) to "everything is on fire" (beat, kickbox, ez2, popn, lights).

I haven't worked miracles with this release, but Pump, Techno, kb7, and para should all mostly work now. The remaining games are no longer playable in Simply Love; if you try to choose any of them, you'll be redirected to a screen where you'll have to pick a game that is supported.

If this helps even one person who would have gotten stuck in lights otherwise, I'll call this a win.

This was fixed across a34fd32, 38e4a6a, and 3fcba90.

Smaller Bug Fixes

• fix bug with Decents and WayOffs not displaying correctly in multi-page Evaluation Summaries; see d519c48
• try our best to highlight highscores in Eval's Pane3 during EventMode; see ddb824d
• fix more bugs with SelectStyle and negative coin credits; see 96ff259
• allow at-home players to sort into double again; see f49930d
• show profile high score names in select music again; see bd03fba
• fix MenuTimer zoom for 4:3 displays; see eff85f7
• fix bug with Continue system when Premium is off; see fc5b2e3

Misc. Cleanup

As always, files have been cleaned up and comments have been added and clarified.

Change Summary

For a full summary of changes between v4.8.2 and v4.8.3, check GitHub's comparison of the two.