Project Outfox Compatibility

[NikiGHz]

Hello, thanks for your great job!

I've been using your theme in a tablet pc for quite a while with StepMania, but recently I got in the need of running StepMania in Fullscreen Borderless mode, because I'm using an external buttons overlay software, to emulate arcade buttons taking advantage of my tablet pc touch screen.

Vanilla StepMania doesn't have a Fullscreen Borerless mode, but I found Project Outfox has it, so I copied this theme and kinda worked with a few details.

1) I had to skip StepMania version verification on a lua file: (Scripts\SL-SupportHelpers.lua) because everytime I open Project Outfox it sent me to the theme selection screen and displayed a warning.

2) In the song selection menu, difficulties appear with weird names, or with no names at all:

3) When in actual gameplay, arrows look very small:

4) When losing all your health, the screen flashes red, but it doesn't stop the song (in this picture I set hard difficulty).

I know this repository is quite abandoned right now, but I would be very glad if these issues could be fixed somehow.

I am a programmer but I have zero experience on stepmania or sm themes. I touched the code here and there, I even compared the source code of your repository with this:

https://github.com/Tiny-Foxes/Simply-Love-OutFox

But git found more than 200 changes and I didn't know where to start :')

Thanks in advance.

[Sereni]

Hey! Thanks for the detailed report.

First things first: have you considered ITGMania? It doesn't have issues 3 and 4, and they have recently added borderless screen support: https://github.com/itgmania/itgmania/issues/172 After selecting the vertical theme it will look super-ugly, but a restart fixes it, or maybe going into the screen resolution options and re-selecting what is already selected there.

Issue 1: You will still need to bypass the version check. I think it should be updated to whatever wording/versions the Simply Love that ships with ITGMania uses (PR welcome!). Issue 2: That's intended :) This field cycles through stepmaker name, chart name, and comment. That's because ITG chart makers put information about the chart there, such as tech annotations or stamina breakdowns. That's useful info that we don't want to hide. If you'd like to change that locally for yourself, let me know and I can find where that code is.

Let me know if ITGMania an option! Another added benefit is that if we ever work on the portrait orientation in mainstream Simply Love, it will be there. Also, if you have dev cycles, that's a great place to improve both Simply Love and ITGMania. If this doesn't work for you, I can look into the Outfox issues, and find mitigations or fixes if I can.

[NikiGHz]

Hi! Thanks for these great tips! <3

Honestly I only used Project Outfox because it was the first thing I found, but ITGMania indeed works so much better with your vertical template.

So being said that, i'm glad to let you know that I already switched to ITGMania in my tablet pc and managed to get it working with the touch buttons overlay software.

The only annoying thing is that my tablet pc resolution for some reason is not selectable on the configuration, so I have to edit it manually on the ini file every time I change any graphical setting because it overwrites it. Also, when I set it to my exact resolution, for some reason the button overlay hides, even with the borderless option activated, but soon I discovered that putting any other resolution that is not exactly the screen resolution resolves the problem for some reason, so I set it on the ini file to 800x1281 (one pixel more, haha).

It sounds really nice to contribute somehow on implementing vertical functionality directly on mainstream Simply Love and it's current version. As I said before, I don't have prior experience in programming for StepMania or it's themes, but I'm very interested on learning and contributing. Let me know if we can talk more directly through a chat platform or so :).

Also, it would be really nice to find a way of having these touch buttons directly on ITGMania or Simply Love, so I don't have to depend on an external software. I have found that it already has been done somehow by other people. On the Project Outfox changelog, they mention "touch controls" but I haven't seen them, maybe these can be ported to ITGMania. Also, this guy somehow added touch buttons 10 years ago to StepMania: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_pH1_5JwHnk

Let me know what you think.

And thanks again for your help <3