be-mu (and po-mu) fixesThis month we have been polishing the modes ready for their Alpha V debut with proper themes. We have stabilised the way keysounds are loaded, and in this release we have also fixed hidden 'lanes' that the mode supported that were not played.
The parsing system has also seen another update, moving away from the legacy SM5 method and utilising the new OF style of properly defining and enabling all the lanes. In the past, StepMania could only mainly play a number of sounds related to the number of columns (lanes) and as the BMS reader was created for the historic DDR in BMS style charts, we had a lot of work to do to ensure proper expansion. In this release, the mode has seen some spring cleaning, enabling full keysound range, and properly displays and parses charts as it should.
po-mu mode now also supports Player 1 11-19 channel modes, featured in nanasi and some other simulators from the early 2010s. This is sometimes known as 'extended pomu'. be-mu now can also play back the correct keysounds, including the player hidden, and any effect channels that can be used.
Charts which did not use all the lanes for their mode, (7k o2j inspired lanes without scratch are an example) would often also not show up correctly, or be shifted by an entire column, or just parsed incorrectly. This has been fixed in this release, so 5K / 7K / 10K / 14K (no scratch) charts now read correctly. Thanks to Daniel and our friends at the BMS international community for reporting this to us.
We have been testing the 64 bit windows builds for some time, but have yet to publicly release a build alongside our normal release programme, so this month changes that! The community have heavily requested the need for a 64bit build, especially with our multi-modal support system in place, which needs more songs/packs installed. Moving forward to our Steam integration, we needed to have a 64bit build for the users available on that platform.
Moving forward, as a lot of you will have questions;
No, we will not be discontinuing Win32.
Yes, we will continue to provide Win32 builds as many of you with cabs will need them
Steam will default to the 64bit build unless your system is 32bit.
This month we have done several parity pulls from our upstream dependencies, as progress has been made on a lot of the bugs we had in the past. Vorbis and our other sound readers have enjoyed several bugfixes, as well as a big jump in bugs fixed in SDL has meant performance in this build has increased, especially for those on pre-2016 hardware, although everyone should see an improvement.
We have begun to add a few back-ports from the Alpha V Panda collection, designed to build stability as we look to sunset Alpha 4 next Spring. Alpha 4 Officially goes into LTS this month, being limited to only stability and bug fixes only. The main development push from August will be into Alpha V.
We will continue to support Alpha 4.xx until March 2023, but maintaining two separate branches would be too much to deal with for such a small volunteer team, and as a result, it'll be retired properly when Alpha V has matured and stabilised enough to be considered a suitable replacement.
be-mu/po-mu songs on Endless Mode may have a crash on song loading. Please be aware that course mode for these modes are a bit temperamental at the moment!gh mode: Some charts may cause a crash when loaded into the gamegddm/gdgf mode: We do not support the XA codec at this time, it'll play those keysounds silently.Mode Specific
be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with wry columns being selected by mistake on initial parsingbe-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with charts that skipped a column or player channel not loadingbe-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with charts that used 2 less than the chart style being parsed wrongbe-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug where wrong style would be selected for 'no-scratch/no button' charts (02jam/ez2/etc)be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with missing hidden keysounds not playing on charts with no player 'chips' in that channelbe-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with sound effects missing on player columns > 8be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with keysounds missing on dance 4 panel / 8 panel chartsbe-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with parser discarding keysounds for player lanes without a hittable notebe-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug in game manager which set some 5k charts to dance onespo-mu: Fixed bug with some pomu9 charts parsing as pomu4 due to 'beginner' chartspo-mu: Fixed bug with some pomu9 charts not being parsed at allpo-mu: Added the 'extended pomu' pomu9 support from nanasi and other simulationsdance: Fixed bug with some .sm files having a different length than what the chart showsdance: Fixed bug with some charts never endingdance: Fixed bug with some charts ending 10 seconds too earlydance & pump: Fixed bug with LastSecond sometimes overflowing on pump/dance chartspump: Fixed bug with lane layouts, these are correctly set in the engine nowpump: Fixed bug some gimmicks setting LastSecond to a ridiculously high valueall: Changed LaneLocation in noteskins to new LaneXOffset, noteskins will need to be edited if you used this!all: Added theme support to allow setting of LaneXOffsetall: Fixed bug with mismatched rotation in player/notefieldall: Fixed bug with miscalculated reverse on backplatesall: Fixed bug with zoom on backplatesEngine
*Windows 7+ (Win32 and x64):
Linux:
MacOS (Universal):
ARM32/ARM64: (Raspberry Pi etc)