OutFox-alpha.4.15.1 Build - Pump or Dump?

image


(Incorporates Internal Builds 4.15.1-rc0 to 4.15.1-rc1)


Hotfix release!

This is a hotfix release to address a few bugs that escaped testing, and we thank our players for taking the time to report and help us debug them. The news for the release last week is also updated in this build.

ALL:

  • ❕✅ Fixed crash on beginnerhelper when loading next song on courses - Closes #560
  • ❕✅ Fixed mal-aligned column positions on para, ez2, be-mu, techno layouts - Closes #563
  • ❕✅ Fixed crash on board being set outside of gh - closes #559

If you see a message that says The board texture has not been set. Good job. it means that the metric ShowBoard=true has been set. You can undo this to set it to false in modes that are not gh. It may show a message at the top of the screen if you have errors enabled, this will be here just as a temporary measure to see how often that metric was being set.

  • ❕✅ Fixed crash on playback when revert from disk was used in the editor
  • ❕✅ Fixed bpm > 100000000 to be warps again
  • ❕✅ Fixed minefields flashing on the receptor - Closes #558
  • ❕✅ Fixed quirk with autoplay not ignoring release
  • ❕✅ Fixed check with type != group - Closes #557

Due to there now being a limit on the length of our changelog reports they will be mirrored at our OutFox Wiki.

PLEASE, IF YOU FIND ANY BUG IN OUR GAME REPORT IT EITHER BY MAKING A ISSUE ON OUR BUG TRACKER REPOSITORY OR IN OUR DISCORD SERVER, WE WON'T BE ABLE TO FIX BUGS THAT ARE NOT REPORTED TO US!

pump mode updates.

This month has has a plethora of updates and fixes added to the pump mode; we have been working a lot in the background for this mode, but it required a lot of other things to be implemented beforehand, so it has taken a bit longer than planned to get these stuff off the ground.

This release has fixed a lot of the music length issues, charts ending early, charts not ending at all, charts having missing notes due to the song finishing at the incorrect time, and charts ending after 2 seconds (single) / 7 seconds (double). The reason for a lot of all these quirks was due to the charting methods used in stepf2 and stepp1 being based off an older version of StepMania which then had some custom code added by xMAx for those versions targeting pump only. We would like to thank xMAx for the insight and assistance with implementing some of those features into Project OutFox, but due to the fact we are a multi-modal simulator we had to heavily rewrite and redesign a lot of the functions and systems behind the original ideas they had.

We have written a custom parser for the stepf2 charts which internally is called NotesLoaderPIU. This focuses on only parsing charts using the old editor and targets pump mode, including the custom note types, and the effects and systems the mode needs. The parser uses the SSC header #VERSION: 0.81 to initialise this pathway for those charts.

This can lead to a few issues if you have any dance charts using version 0.81, if you get any quirks, you can just change this version number to 0.83 and it'll use the normal SSC parser.

New for this alpha, we have also added the feature for charts not set to 0.81, where you can create a blank file with the title ForcePIU in the group folder, and the game will use the PIU loader automatically. This is case sensitive, so use it as written here for it to work.

This alpha also begins to add support for notes within braces { 0 | h | 1 | v }. At the moment only h notes are implemented, with s and v planned for the next main alpha.

pumpholds have also had a major rewrite this release as well, with the stepping and judgement logic being more appropriate to the game system, with ticks and head logic being fixed as well. There are still likely to be a few quirks with it, as it's new code, and do let us know if there are things you notice that are incorrect.

Warps and how they are hit were also reworked, along with some notes and rows overflowing which caused a lot of the issues on how the game calcuated some of the file/song lengths in the musicwheel and evaluation screens. The values sometimes recorded in the #LASTSECONDHINT and #MUSICLENGTH in the cache file may not actually marry up - the game has several options internally for ensuring that songs do not go crazy on time. Again, this logic is new, so there may be edge cases that need to be ironed out. If you find a chart that is not behaving, let the team know so we can see what is happening.

There was also a lot of older code removed from the ScreenGamePlay branches of code that we inherited from older builds (3.x era) that we have removed as it was not really doing anything, and in some cases actually caused the new pump code to not function correctly. A few tweaks were also done for older .sm and .ksf charts and we fixed a lot of the math overflows due to the way the charts were implemented into the older SM build.

You can have a better experience than the 'default theme' by downloading the new pump theme that is being developed called Infinitesimal from here; it will be incorporated into Project OutFox as a default theme for pump coming in Alpha V. The theme is created to give you a faithful experience, using original assets and textures.

We hope you guys have fun with the fixes, and we have more planned in time!

be-mu (and po-mu) fixes

We had reports of the game being very unhappy with a lot of the earlier community charts from the BMS of Fighters series, and charts mainly created before 2009, so we have fixed a few of these not being parsed correctly.

We also have restored the 4k "DDR in BMS" chart support that Squirrel accidentally broke when adjusting the channel support. This has now been fixed and those simfile are recognised as dance charts once again.

There were also several crashes with the vs modes of po-mu and be-mu as well and these have been fixed as well, so 2 player works as intended.

rtMIDI and portMIDI driver updates

We have had a few requests to reimagine the midi drivers for those with DJ controllers or systems which use channels but send the same notes. The MIDI standard states a controller should be able to do this with the client application supporting the note/channel sent data, so we have changed the way this is done to ensure we are compliant. Crossfaders and rotary controls, as well as some pitch bend triggers do have some weird quirks at the moment, but as we don't have any modes that support these at the moment do not try to map them as a control.

We added up/down jog wheel support for those who play be-mu on MIDI, so this works as designed now for everyone using midi for their jogs.