About
This is the v4.9.1 release of Simply Love for StepMania 5. It's a pleasant little update that focused on bug fixes.
Supported Versions of StepMania
Simply Love v4.9.1 is compatible with current releases from the official StepMania project.
Compatible Releases
✅ StepMania 5.0.12
✅ StepMania 5.1-b2
If you are able to compile StepMania's source code yourself, the 5_1-new branch is supported. The wiki has instructions for compiling.
Incompatible
❌ Forks of SM5 (e.g. starworlds)
❌ Older versions of StepMania (e.g. StepMania 3.9)
❌ Forks of older versions of StepMania (e.g. OpenITG, NotITG)
❌ SM5.2
If you have trouble installing or running StepMania, particularly on macOS, this Troubleshooting Readme may help.
SM5.3 compatibility is described further down in these release notes. Keep reading!
Installing Simply Love
If you are upgrading from a previous version of Simply Love, fully delete the old Simply Love folder first.
Do not merge the new folder into the old.
Full install instructions are in the Installing Simply Love README. It's worth looking at!
Bug Fixes
Evaluation Screen UI + Input Bugs
There were also a lot of initialization and input scenarios for the new Evaluation screen I hadn't considered in the 4.9 release!
It was possible to get yourself into situations like these:
That's not how Casual Mode is supposed to look.
Oh no.
I've worked to address these in Simply Love 4.9.1. They should be fixed now!
NPS in Gameplay
Simply Love 4.9 introduced a bug where the Peak NPS (notes-per-second) text would always display the value for the previous song.
I'll do you one better, Furry Flea, and fix it. ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
Evaluation Screen Load Time
Simply Love 4.9 extended the single-player Evaluation screen to better use available space. This was good overall, but my code took the very naive approach of just loading everything twice. This caused the screen to take twice as long to load. Amazing. 😮
You probably didn't notice any difference for shorter songs with reasonable step counts, but the slow load time became very noticeable for stepcharts with 10000+ notes.
Load time for the Evaluation screen should now be back to where it was in SL 4.8.7 and prior.
Pacemaker Text
Simply Love 4.9 had also introduced a bug where the Pacemaker text overlapped with BPM text in double.
Gameplay's UI has been adjusted to accommodate its many possible configurations, including:
- 4:3 aspect ratio vs. widescreen vs. ultrawide
- single vs. double vs. 2-player vs. solo vs etc.
- single BPM to display or split BPMs
- StepStats side pane shown or hidden
- Target Score bar graphs shown or hidden
- Center1Player is enabled or not
- score shown or hidden
- NPS density graph is enabled or not
- Pacemaker is enabled or not
I did my best to test all of these in every combination I could think of but I'm sure something has slipped through.
If you spot something that overlaps with something else, post about it on social media and I'm sure I'll hear about it. 💛
Avatars for Local Profiles with Same Name
Previously, two separate local profiles with the same DisplayName would both show the same avatar (whichever came first in the list). This has been fixed!
Instructions for setting up profile avatars can be found here.
Scientific Notation
Songs with very large BPMs were previously displayed using scientific notation. 🔬⚗️
This was an oversight on my part and has been fixed so you can appreciate each and every digit in its excessive glory.
Split BPMs with MusicRate
Some songs feature "split BPMs" where each stepchart can use its own timing data (BPMs, stops, delays, warps, etc.).
For example, an expert difficulty might have a slowdown section while lower difficulties maintain a steady BPM to be nice to new players.
Combining split BPMs with the MusicRate modifier means that two different BPM ranges could scale differently, though previous Simply Love releases did not show that this was happening.
I've added extra text to the Music Rate row that only appears when split BPMs are in effect.
New Stuff?
I tried hard to make this release bug-fixes-only but some small new things still snuck in. 🤦
Remaining Time in StepStats
"Elapsed" time in StepStats side pane has been replaced with remaining time. This will count down as you play and save you (and/or your Stamina Pit Crew™) the mental math of figuring out how much longer you have to go.
Simply Spooky
Simply Spooky is looking a little more spooky than usual, just in time for October to end. 🎃
Other Things
Licensing
I switched Simply Love's open source license from MIT to GPLv3 for this release.
This is unlikely to impact players at all, but you can read my notes in b3a278e if you'd like to learn more about it.
here in the darkness
The Rabbit Hole, initially introduced in SLv4.8 Extra Stage, has been renamed here in the darkness.
This more appropriately captures my feelings on it now, two years out, as I am better equipped to distance myself from then. It also actively distinguishes my own work from the unfortunate YouTube series that also uses the name The Rabbit Hole.
As part of this renaming, I revisited each chapter and tidied loose ends, fixed bugs, and reworked much of the music and visuals.
StepMania 5.3 Compatibility with Simply-Love-SM5
Alpha builds of SM5.3 are not supported by Simply Love at this time, but the OutFox team and I have been using this public thread to discuss the topic and our respective goals: https://github.com/quietly-turning/Simply-Love-SM5/pull/184
As that thread points out, I have included code in Simply Love that prevents it from being used in SM5.3. This was a conscious decision on my part, informed by a combination of:
- a legitimate misunderstanding caused by an early in-person interaction
- me wanting to keep StepMania free for players (you) and open source for developers (me)
As of this writing, SM5.3 is free to download and play, and though it is not yet open source, the project's FAQ page and my conversations with the team have made it clear that it will be open source in the future, when the team is comfortable with that.
As an open source developer, myself, I keenly appreciate that these things take time, and shouldn't be rushed.
When will I remove the block?
My plan is to remove the block from Simply Love when SM5.3 is made open source. At that time, I'll be able to review the new StepMania source code (as will everyone) and assess how to improve Simply Love to accommodate.
In the meantime, if you'd like to try out StepMania 5.3, I think that's great and that you should do that! I've heard very positive things about performance improvements and modernization of ancient code, and I'm looking forward to using to using the OutFox team's efforts in the future, when they are ready.
If you'd like to use Simply Love with SM5.3 alphas now, you can remove my block with a very simple edit to my code.
The file to edit is: ./Simply Love/Scripts/SL-SupportHelpers.lua
It's not a large file, and you'll find a bit of code that looks this:
-- SM5.0.x is supported
-- SM5.1.x is supported
-- SM5.2 is not supported because it saw significant backwards-incompatible API changes and is now abandoned
-- SM5.3 is not supported for now because it is not open source
if not (t[2] and (t[2]==0 or t[2]==1)) then return false endYou can change that to:
-- SM5.0.x is supported
-- SM5.1.x is supported
-- SM5.2 is not supported because it saw significant backwards-incompatible API changes and is now abandoned
-- SM5.3 will be supported when it is open source :)
if not (t[2] and (t[2]==0 or t[2]==1 or t[2]==3)) then return false endI'm aware that there are forks of my work that have already made this change, but this personal approach makes more sense to me right now.
Thanks for reading. 🙂
Contributors
@Sereni fixed a bug that caused Personal High Scores to sometimes not appear on the Evaluation screen.
@Valentina16 fixed a bug with the Target Score system that was introduced during the 4.9.1 development cycle.
Thanks to all who contributed to this release!
Change Summary
For a full summary of changes between v4.9 and v4.9.1, check GitHub's comparison of the two.