About
This is the v5.3.0 release of Simply Love for StepMania 5. It's mostly geared around supporting the upcoming Stamina RPG 7 Event as well as starting the deprecation of FA+ mode (read below). It includes a couple new features as well. It is the third release compatible with ITGmania but it does require version 0.7.0 of ITGmania for run.
Supported Versions of StepMania
Simply Love v5.1.2 is compatible with current releases from the official StepMania/ITGmania project.
Compatible Releases
✅ StepMania 5.0.12
✅ StepMania 5.1-b2
✅ StepMania 5.3-a4.13.0 (OutFox) (preliminary support)
✅ ITGmania 0.7.0 - Make sure you download the ITGmania specific version below.
If you are able to compile StepMania's source code yourself, the 5_1-new branch is supported. The wiki has instructions for compiling.
If you are able to compile ITGMania's source code yourself, you can check out the 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.
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!
Changes
Setting up for FA+ mode Deprecation
With the white window being emulated in ITG mode for a few releases now, the existence of an explicit FA+ is largely redundant. This release begins porting many of the remaining features to ITG mode. These are:
- Showing the white window on the histogram and scatterplot on ScreenEvaluation. This happens when a player has both the
FA+ Windowenabled in Gameplay as well as the option toShow FA+ Pane. - Storing the white counts in Stats.xml. This will allow us to transfer the scores from FA+ mode to ITG mode without losing data
There are two remaining things left before the mode gets fully deprecated, which might happen in the next release. These are:
- Notefield doesn't flash for the white window in ITG mode. While this requires a noteskin change and NOT a theme change, since ITGmania did not update the noteskins with this release, we will consider this an outstandng issue. @teejusb will try to get the noteskins out sooner than later (potentially before the next Simply Love release itself).
- Create a script to actually easily transfer the scores from FA+ mode to ITG mode.
Notefield Positioning Options
Because many people play on a wide variety of setups, the notefield position might vary based on monitor height or pad placement. This release adds options to change the X and Y positions of the notefield to help normalize the play experience. Moving the notefield will also move all the other elements such as measure counter, subtractive scoring, column cues along with it. Note that it might still overlap with other elements of the screen so make use of this option as needed.
Another Error Bar Trim Update
We introduced the Error Bar Trim and @Valentina16 posted an update in the previous SL releases. We've removed the Trim option in favor of allowing to specifically choose to trim down specifically down to Excellents or Greats (or None).
Modifications to the Early Decent/Way Off Behavior (ITGmania only)
This is an ITGmania specific feature. For more detailed explanation check out the [ITGmania release notes(https://github.com/itgmania/itgmania/releases/tag/v0.7.0) for this release.
Long time players of ITG will know that there has been a divide in the game environments of the two major sub-communities regarding the Decent/Way Off judgments. See this video for the best explanation.
Simply Love has been supporting both of these environments separately for quite a while, but there is definitely added complexity to the code to maintain them. Starting with ITGmania 0.7.0, we aim to normalize the overall game environment across the whole scene.
Without going into too much detail, the engine change modifies early triggers for the Decent/Way Off windows such that you will still incur the life bar hit as intended on those judgments, but you will now have the ability to hit the same arrow again for score. This lets timing focused players re-hit an arrow for scoring purposes, and stamina focused players to use those timing windows to keep to their form in check. Additionally, this also completely eliminates way off towers as well as brings back chord cohesion as a game mechanic.
This change was beta tested for a couple months prior to this release by many players with the (majority of) feedback being positive. This is the first public release of this feature. ITGmania 0.7.0 has this feature enabled by default. We also introduce toggles to hide judgments and notefield flashes for the early hits, which is helpful for (often timing-focused) players who aren't used to seeing them.
Favorites (ITGmania Only)
Added support for favoriting items! You can add and view favorites from the sort menu. Currently this feature is limited to local profiles only, but I'll fix this in the next release.
Bug Fixes/Other
- Used
Std Dev * 3(i.e. 99.7% of judgments fall within this values). This metric is a "max timing error-esque" statistic that tries to reduce the impact of outliers. - Fix fluctuations in EX Score Subtractive score (thanks @zarzob)
- Remove Held Miss Tracking as an option and always have it enabled
- Fix Screenshot Naming to remove symbols
- Bump lookahead by one so you can always see the potential next two streams
- Fix max timing error to have sub-millisecond precision
Contributors
@teejusb - that's me!
@SugoiFactory - SUPER helpful and helping me with porting FA+ features as well as changes. This release may not have come out in time without him
Thanks to all who contributed to this release!
Change Summary
For a full summary of changes between v5.3.0 and v5.2.1, check GitHub's comparison of the two.
A full summary of the ITGmania specific changes can be found here