StepMania, sm-ssc, and the Future

Chris Danford has stated that he has no problem with the StepMania fork sm-ssc becoming StepMania version 5. This change will take some time to make happen, but all of you can help throughout the process.

I will ask that you guys give input and stick around the IRC server irc.badnik.net and enter the #sm-ssc channel. If you wish to leave constructive comments or criticisms here instead, that's fine. Anyone that wishes to flame should probably take it elsewhere. Try the product out, give opinions and requests, etc. We want this to be a successful product for all communities.

My question is how open will the development be to outsiders writing code?

I heard a story long ago about someone who overhauled the dancing character system and the code was rejected because it wasn't written the same way as the rest of the code (e.g. not less than pretty like the rest of StepMania at the time) and what was already in place was "good enough".

I've heard of those stories before. Heck, I was involved in one or two myself. For now, I'll just address your question.

One of the main advantages of sm-ssc is that the code is hosted on Google Code using a mercurial/hg repository. This allows for multiple people to both contribute to the source code (once added to the committers list at least) and make branches for any special features they want that could use some testing or two.

Another thing that is being worked on is the documenting of code using the doxygen javadoc style. I'm well aware that the code base can be complicated, and having a uniform documentation system would help with that. Unfortunately, I could use some help with some of the documenting.

The final point for now is that sm-ssc is run by players that wish to see StepMania evolve. We're looking to implement features that forks had to do on their own without official support in the past. We know of the commercial opportunity of the engine (see ITG and Pump Pro), but we're also trying to make it better for all game types too.


Hopefully that answers some of your questions.

Point 4: Glenn Maynard is not on the sm-ssc team so things are less likely to get rejected. ;)

Point 5: If we ever came across a similar situation to the one Aeron posted, we'd just rewrite the code to fit the codebase. However, this is the first I'm hearing of this specific instance; mind telling me more?

This is really exciting. Should I dig up all my ranty "I wish Stepmania 4 had included this thing that they vaguely promised" rants?

That sounds like a good idea to me.

Tyma: Still remember SM3.9 themers quitting when SM4 was in its alpha stage (ie, waiting for a final release) and today 5 years later SM4 is still beta...

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I could only find one of the posts, so hopefuly someone still cares about these things as much as I do ^^;


Tyma's Stepmania Wet Dreams :

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Song reviews

SM4 had this crazy idea that after you play a simfile, you can press a button on the keyboard to "rate" the song, on a scale of 1-5. The ratings you give to every song are stored in a cache file somewhere, and let you do neat things things like sort the songlist according to songs you like, or filter low-rated songs out of the songwheel.

This was the one thing I was most excited about in SM4, and it never got implemented.. For some reason, it *DID* show up in Rock Band 3, though, with the exact same functionality as promised in Stepmania.

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Marathon Modes That Don't Suck

I want to play Stepmania for 30 minutes a day, and in that 30 minutes, I want it to throw random songs at me, without throwing anything stupid. I want to be able to give it a set of logical arguments, such as :

If one of the random songs in the course has over has over 500 steps, skip it.
If the difficulty value is higher than X, skip it
If the BPM is higher than X, skip it.

I'm sure the course format is capable of doing this. An in-game UI which just lets you set random arguments (ala the Player Options screen) would just be perfect.

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Pass Lamps

Stepmania needs pass lamps on default theme. This sucks so many hours of obsess-compulsive enjoyment from my life, it's unbearable. It's so simple, and yet adds so much to the home experience.

I'm sure this is already possible via theming, but the default theme is so nice, I think the only thing it's missing is pass lamps.

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Profile Switching On The Song Select Screen

Playing for Pass Lamps (Or pretty letters to the right of the song title) is a huge part of playing Stepmania-based games at home. Stepmania Profiles are awesome, and it's cool that my housemate and I can track our own scores on each song. The only thing that would be better is if we could hit a key to switch our profiles from the song select screen, for when we're taking turns playing songs (or "credits").

SM4 went from alpha to beta to alpha actually. The "beta" has turned into stagnant work for SM 5. sm-ssc is not stagnant by any means.


This one I cannot speak for. The idea sounds intriguing, but would require some work. Make a branch and see if you can implement it.


Hmm...with metrics/lua, this could theoretically be possible. To be honest, though...we would probably need to change our cache system to use a sqlite database backend of sorts to make it easier to search for this data. Sounds like a job for another branch.


I don't understand what you mean here at all I'm afraid. Again, though, branches are the key.

I wasn't talking about SM-SSC, I was referring to the download page on stepmania.com STILL showing 3.9 (although with a butchered theme) for 5-6 years and counting. Glad to hear people are still working on SM, and hopefully sm-ssc will remain backwards-compatible to existing 3.9 and 3.95 themes.


I take it you are not familiar with DDR save data on home versions and pre-SN arcade games (via Playstation memory cards).

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Pump Pro does a great job with it, too. I think Pump Pro is the best example, since it uses USB profiles.

Yeah, that's never gonna happen. Your best bet is to hope people port your favorite 3.9 themes over.

I've already ported and released versions of PatrickDDRX's DDR 5th Mix and k//eternal's PROJEKTXV (Epsilon) for sm-ssc. There is an unfinished (and therefore currently unreleased) port of Khoa's StepMania LiteBlue 4, among many other projects which I shouldn't name due to no real permission yet.

I'd like to get this working eventually; my only problems are storing the ratings (possibly an ini/XML/JSON file in the player's profile directory?) and the user interface-side stuff for modifying ratings.

Yup, this is theme-side. Pump it Up Pro has pass lights, as does (the currently unreleased) Selling Out Made Simple 2... In the default sm-ssc theme, the letter grades kind of serve this purpose. If you mean something else, though, please let us know.

This is something worth implementing, but I'm not 100% sure what issues it will bring up. (Also, the user interface/controls for it...)

Per-profile global offsets. To connect two pads to a computer, usually two different adapters (and two different kinds of pads) are used, resulting in different lag per player.

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This request would be a long shot.

A UI to allow players/users to place their songs in any particular order on the song wheel.

This request would be nice:

Regular updates and a decent website with proper tutorials and the like?

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Fully. Documented.

What can I make a theme do with this version of StepMania? What are all of the announcer triggers available? What mods are available? etc.

Letter grades kind of serve the purpose, but function differently. I think neat and tidy colour-coded Pass Lamps are a more attractive (and therefore addictive) way of "lighting up" the songwheel, and keeping track of how close you are to "beating" a folder.

I love the idea that people will download a pack of 50 songs from the game simfile maker, and have incentive to play and beat every single song, for the sake of completion. Having pass lamps in the default theme is a great way of encouraging players to do it, and I think it looks a lot more attractive when scrolling through a songwheel, than having half a dozen logos of different shapes and sizes, to represent which songs you have and haven't cleared.

We have a Google Moderator series set up for people to vote on and request things now, check it out at http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=5f83d

As for pass lamps, they will be considered for a possible theme redesign.