OutFox Alpha 4.16.0 Build

This 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.

• ❕❌ ISSUE Playing 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!
• ❕❌ ISSUE gh mode: Some charts may cause a crash when loaded into the game
• ❕❌ ISSUE gddm/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 parsing
• ❕✅ be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with charts that skipped a column or player channel not loading
• ❕✅ be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with charts that used 2 less than the chart style being parsed wrong
• ❕✅ be-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 channel
• ❕✅ be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with sound effects missing on player columns > 8
• ❕✅ be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with keysounds missing on dance 4 panel / 8 panel charts
• ❕✅ be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug with parser discarding keysounds for player lanes without a hittable note
• ❕✅ be-mu & po-mu: Fixed bug in game manager which set some 5k charts to dance ones
• ❕✅ po-mu: Fixed bug with some pomu9 charts parsing as pomu4 due to ‘beginner’ charts
• ❕✅ po-mu: Fixed bug with some pomu9 charts not being parsed at all
• ❕✅ po-mu: Added the ’extended pomu’ pomu9 support from nanasi and other simulations
• ❕✅ dance: Fixed bug with some .sm files having a different length than what the chart shows
• ❕✅ dance: Fixed bug with some charts never ending
• ❕✅ dance: Fixed bug with some charts ending 10 seconds too early
• ❕✅ dance & pump: Fixed bug with LastSecond sometimes overflowing on pump/dance charts
• ❕✅ pump: Fixed bug with lane layouts, these are correctly set in the engine now
• ❕✅ pump: Fixed bug some gimmicks setting LastSecond to a ridiculously high value
• ❕✅ all: 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 LaneXOffset
• ❕✅ all: Fixed bug with mismatched rotation in player/notefield
• ❕✅ all: Fixed bug with miscalculated reverse on backplates
• ❕✅ all: Fixed bug with zoom on backplates

Engine

• ❕✅ Fixed bug with board texture log output spam
• ❕✅ Fixed namespace redefinition
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with legacy networking breaking new code pathways
• ❕✅ Fixed quirk with FoxClock sometimes being called from the wrong place on old 5.0.x themes
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with input on NetworkOptions
• ❕✅ NEW Added new PandaArray and PandaVector for the optimising of x64, without breaking our 32bit legacy support
• ❕✅ Fixed font translation oopsie
• ❕✅ NEW Added new logging skeleton
• ❕✅ Fixed millisecond counting on FoxClock
• ❕✅ Fixed error in crash message
• ❕✅ Fixed louder audio in customise profile screens (Closes #390)
• ❕✅ Fixed case with lang items comparing returning 1 all the time
• ❕✅ Updated Discord SDK to version 3
• ❕✅ Fixed 18 year old bug with dead code
• ❕✅ Fixed double to float math in SetPercent
• ❕✅ Fixed sum order in Timer
• ❕✅ Fixed bug in style for Def.NoteField()
• ❕✅ Fixed bug in column value for Def.NoteField()
• ❕✅ Fixed crash within Def.NoteField()
• ❕✅ Fixed bug in set style for columns per player in Def.NoteField()
• ❕✅ Fixed bug in resetting hidden notefield too early
• ❕✅ Added new debug info to column range error
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with some edge cases in Def.NoteField()
• ❕✅ Fixed bug on resetting notes on notefield
• ❕✅ Fixed bug that wasn’t applying noteskin when reloading notefield
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with no notes being inserted into a table on Def.NoteField()
• ❕✅ Fixed crash on new cache generation when timing has not been initialised
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with 2001 alias system causing crashes
• ❕✅ Fixed crash with older Vorbis files
• ❕✅ Fixed bug in SDL for win64 compiling
• ❕✅ Fixed RageSound oob crash
• ❕✅ Fixed crash in Enum
• ❕✅ Update SDL2 to 2.23.1 and add OutFox Patches
• ❕✅ Fixed bug in SDL mouse code
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with SSC Writer overflowing
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with SM SongLength

*Windows 7+ (Win32 and x64):

• ❕✅ New x64 optimisations added to the engine
• ❕✅ Fixed NSI quirks pulling in wrong 32bit libs on 64bit creation
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with missing LIBC calls in 64bit
• ❕✅ NEW Added new 64bit Windows Memory debug information
• ❕✅ NEW Added support for 64bit pacdrive (pacdrive32.dll for win32/pacdrive64.dll for x64) (Thanks Simon!)
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with 64bit libusb support - we still need to test python etc!
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with driver calls in rage breaking on x64
• ❕✅ Reworked a lot of the variable memory usage for x64
• ❕✅ Fixed bad libc problems compiling win32 with our build system
• ❕✅ Fixed missing ‘graphic’ fonts
• ❕✅ Added flags for better 32/64 bit support in Windows
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with some 64bit code not being compiled correctly causing crashes on win7x64
• ❕✅ Fixed bug with the memory value on x64 overflowing when swapping from OutFox 32bit to OutFox 64bit
• ❕✅ Fixed bug where the client type was not recorded in the log for debugging purposes
• ❕✅ Fixed bugs with win32 compiling due to MSVC quirks
• ❕✅ Fixed memory display for Win32/X64 on the debug stats

Linux:

• ❕✅ Fixed bad calls crashing new discord RPC on linux
• ❕✅ Fixed bad log output calls crashing older hardware

MacOS (Universal):

• ❕✅ NEW Updated Discord RPC to support Arm M1 MacOS (Thanks HeySora!)
• ❕✅ Updated Discord libs for MacOS 12.x

ARM32/ARM64: (Raspberry Pi etc)

• ❕✅ Fixed bad log output calls crashing older hardware
• ❕✅ Fixed timeout on loading on some slower SD cards

• ✅ Added OutFox category to the LuaDocs XML

• ✅ New classical3d noteskin for pump
• ✅ Add 3D rolls to paws-simpleholds

• ❕✅ Added KBX / BMS judgments from MDR
• ❕✅ Added Infinitesimal judgments

• ✅ Translations updated from Moru, SHRMP0 and SheepyChris (Brazilian Portuguese)
• ✅ Translations updated from Moneko (Polish)
• ✅ Translations updated from Hanubeki (Japanese)
• ✅ Translations updated from Jose_Varela (Spanish)
• ✅ Translations updated from Daniel Rotwind (German)
• ✅ Slovak translation by jose1711