The Empress theme tries to pull a lot of images in to float in the background, but it does a really poor job choosing those files. On the main menu screen the font images will cycle behind the logos.

Additionally, in the song select there are no song banners, most of the theme's descriptions are jokes and not real helpful descriptions, and the name entry screen isn't as good as the ones that show you the song banners again.

It's nice to see a change, but there are a lot of problems with that theme, especially for random new players.

Just so there's no confusion, most people I've talked to (as in, 100% of the people I've played with at Acme in the 4 days I've played since sakuracon), myself included, find the Empress theme waaaay too happy and pink for ITG and don't like it, plus the in-song graphics for grading and the combo got changed up and its been throwing off my timing significantly and generally doesn't look as good in my and others' opinion. My USB will also no longer load 3/4 of my songs like it did at and before sakuracon. Also some of the arrow modifiers are missing, and only the single mini option is now available (as opposed to the multiple types of mini/enlarge on ITG3, not that I use this but I've seen others use it). Point is, almost no one seems to like this theme at all and its buggy as hell so it needs to be changed.

In any case I've scoured the issue across those who know what's up with it and the general consensus is that KEVINDDR botched some installation and put the theme in some unknown directory that is making it impossible to remove. So I've been asked by everyone to tell Kevin to tell someone who can make the appropriate deletion where you put the files. Or else do it yourself if it isn't going to take 8 months like every change you've promised.

In any case I can make this one statement with confidence: ASK THE GOD DAMN COMMUNITY BEFORE YOU MAKE CHANGES TO THE ACME MACHINE. And by the community I mean people who ACTUALLY PLAY AT ACME. And Kevin you are god damn careless with the machine, you shouldn't make any more changes unless you're supervised by someone who gives a shit when you fuck it all up.

Look, it took a YEAR of my nagging to get the 10 second change to make custom long songs work like they do now. We STILL can't get hardly any custom songs on because people are so god damn lazy with it and we've been "suggesting packs" for years (and I already volunteered to spend my own money to make hardware upgrades when necessary). Every time we ever hold a tournament the volume gets fucked up and Acme complains and the machine is nigh-unplayable for days-sometimes weeks. The timing windows are still not standardized to "normal" machines so far as I know (yes, I haven't forgotten this minor change from over a year ago that was supposed to be made to fix this). Half the songs are offsync. Need I go on?

Please can I just supervise any changes to the Acme machine? I'll make the drive to make it happen if you want to make changes just for God sake there's been so much carelessness... It was my bad for not taking the initiative at Sakuracon to stay an extra day to supervise the changes, when I knew with absolute certainty that when I came to Acme on Monday that something would be fucked up and sure enough....

Or maybe just finally give me, and not just KDDR and Amber anymore, a key to the machine so I can access the service menu to fix the shit that's continually botched, since it's been me who's called in or called out every problem with the machine for 3 years anyway and nagging about it for months before it gets fixed, and these guys play like once a year.

I know this was a little angry, forgive me, but this continual tedium from others' carelessness is really quite frustrating.


And no I don't give a crap about the cost of playing so I wouldn't jank credits or make ridiculous (or any) changes without asking anyone. I would take very very good care of this machine.

oh man there's still problems with the theme. it looks so pretty too! =(

^ That leprechauns on acid!

Hehe

I don't really care that much about the general look it's just buggy and the in-song graphic changes are throwing my timing off still, even after days of trying to get used to it, and I just don't like how the layout is now with the combo counter all off center and the grading 'words' or whatever in a different spot (up and to the left of where it was). And more than any of those, the fact that most of my custom songs don't work anymore.

I mean, I haven't played Nemeton in days

Gerrak, CALM DOWN WE KNOW YOU LIKE ITG AND YOU PLAY AT ACME A LOT YOU DON'T HAVE TO TELL US EVERY TIME KTHX.

I have a key to the machine, and was at Acme with Laura and Tony last night. Like you said, if the entire community (not just you) agrees to change something on the machine, we can make changes. As I said earlier, I think that the pink theme should be replaced, mostly because it's broken and unfinished.

Tony and I have also successfully SSH'ed in to the machine, and I believe Tony is the one who made all the Sakuracon pack updates via this method. That method lets us add/delete stuff.

And in terms of song packs, there are a lot that *you* want to put on, but I think this again should be a community decision, giving preference first to packs with the most votes.

I do think the machine should be updated, and on a more regular basis. We have a key now, and we can make the changes, but these changes aren't going to be every week.

To reiterate: Jon and I, who are routinely available and actually follow through when he says he'll do something, have a key to the machine and proper modding tools between us.  I can do everything short of a theme change without the key, and I can't explain why changing the theme via SSH didn't work.

Doing SSH-based updates affords us a lot more flexibility, is much more friendly when do things like syncing, doesn't depend on the theme working (or not working) correctly like UserPacks does, and apparently allows us to use more of the HD than UserPacks (though that won't be an issue once the new HD is ready to go), so I'd prefer to do it that way from now on.  It's honestly easier to do updates this way in the first place, too, as long as you know what you're doing.

That said, doing SSH based updates should be left to Jon and I as we both know the machine's credentials and routinely work in Unix command line environments - it's very easy to do very, very bad things when you have root access.


We didn't touch the machine on Sunday - we made all out changes on Thursday/Friday.  The machine was flipped over to Empress on Thursday for a set or two because people were curious about it, but then it was flipped back as to not mess up the tournament.  It can't really tell you why it flipped back to Empress during transport - the machine was rebooted a few times over the course of the weekend and always came back up in ITG3 mode.  OpenITG is finicky, that's all; nobody changes any settings while you we're looking on Sunday.  The only intentional change that has gone through without community input was adding a couple dozen songs for Sakuracon (that and picking Amore as the default song - it was known we needed to set it to something reasonable, but I don't think anyone actually cares what it's set to).

As for Empress, I took a quick look around for a final version of the Empress theme, and can't find convincing evidence that there have been significantly more stable revisions since ours was installed - as far as I can tell, there were only a couple revisions, all in rapid succession over the course of a week or so, followed by the creator saying "this was a lot of work, so unless it's crashing, I'm not doing anything else with it".  Empress does seem to take awhile to load from my USB stick, but not that much more than ITG3 did - the issue is that it's handling single/double/versus before mode select, so the machine gets less menu time to check your drive before it does through the strictly timed loading sequence, so that takes longer is is more likely to fail.

There are a couple buggy things about the Empress theme's actual appearance, as Jon noted, and it makes USB a little tricky because of the altered loading sequence.  Since I can't find a properly updated version, we should probably go ahead and switch it to something else.  I really don't want to go back to ITG3, since our ITG3 has its own bugs, and ITG3's menu sounds are really annoying, so if anyone has some theme suggestions (that is, actual download links, not just "this Youtube stepmania video uses a cool theme, can you try to find it?"), I'd be glad to take a look at them and see if they're practical.  If we can get a reasonable theme identified in the next day or two, we can switch to it without going back to ITG3, since it'll take a day or two for me to get back down there.

Does anyone know if we can just delete the song wheel audio file completely/replace it within the zip files for the themes?  I would think that should work and it'd be an easy enough solution.

Guys, I thought I'd mention that (it sounds like) Lightning (the guy who's developing the ITG3 theme) is close to getting the final build done. I don't have an ETA right now, but I hope in the next few months we'll get the full, FINAL, GOD DAMN ABOUT TIME version.

I'm not totally sure what you're asking here, but you can edit it within the theme's sound folder. I've modded my ITG3 theme to be WAY less annoying than the default version, which has a ridiculously annoying wheel change sound FX.

It seems like the sound effects are the main problem people really have with the ITG3 theme.  Since you know how to make the sounds less annoying, it sounds like we should just do the same for Acme's machine.

Sure, I can let you have my ITG3 theme. It's way more recent than the one on ACME's machine anyway. Warning, you gotta have at least 1GB of RAM on the machine or glitches are likely to occur.

I'll take a look at the machine to confirm how much memory it has before pushing the newer ITG3 theme onto it, but if we could have everything ready to go in case there is enough RAM, that'd be useful.

Affirmative.

Bill thanks for the quick turnaround!

Thought I'd mention, I was there today and it was $1 for 3 songs (bonus tracks cost 3 songs).  Before it was $0.75 for 4 songs (bonus tracks @ 3 songs).  Are you planning to change the pricing scheme back?

Other than that, monitor on DMV3 has color loss on left side-monitor needs to be de-gaussed or whatever you do or is the monitor just getting old?
Thanks,
Chris

http://www.mediafire.com/DevonITG#1pr79rkfb2n4z,1

Here is a theme, its called chromatic. There is two of them but the first one is better. Its a sweet ass theme.

Black Gallagher likes this.

Link to pics/videos of it in action?

Devon's Chromatic Theme

Only one I can find that shows mostly everything

I thought the issue with lag on the machine was due to the ITG3 theme wanting to use a high quality looping video background in all the menus. This theme looks like it repeats that, and would probably be laggy as well?

That scrolling background could be a problem since, like ITG3, it's fullscreen, but it's also visually simpler.  If video decompression is the bottleneck, then it won't be as bad as ITG3, since it should be a less intensive decompression job; if the full layout has too many details (including a constantly changing background), then it's probably an underpowered video card, which will be a problem with any complicated theme (I doubt this is the issue - ITG does a lot of 3D rendering on the fly in marathons while playing fullscreen videos just fine); if the issue is fitting the video file and giant song list in memory (not unlikely - the lag happens in consistent locations on the song wheel, which says it's something about what exactly loads at that point), then we're getting lengthy swap operations during page faults, and need more RAM.

If it is just a RAM bottleneck, we have the option of adding more or modifying the background video to something less intense.  Ultimately, we should get more RAM at some point, but I want to confirm how much machine recognizes first, since it's possible we have plenty, but a stick isn't seated correctly or something stupid like that.

Either way, I'd be happy to throw Suko's newer ITG3 build in addition to Chromatic on the machine to give them both a test drive.

BlueSS CALM DOWN I KNOW YOURE THE ADMIN YOU DONT HAVE TO PLAY MOMMY WITH THE FORUMS KTHX

I've reported almost every problem with the Acme machine for the last 3 years, and I do credit my continual (albeit sometimes "passionate") efforts with a number of problems being fixed

ANYWAY as we've established, the new theme has to go because it's too buggy and makes ITG too happy and pink when it should be INTENSE AND SERIOUS FOR FOURTEENS My vote is for Rudo's suggestion; the Chromatic theme looks awesome

No dissin' on the happy and pink.    I think it looks awesome.

That said, after playing it some more, it is absolutely too buggy and I also vote to replace it.  Whatever we replace it with has to be BETTER than ITG3, though, because the amount of scroll wheel lag there was unacceptable.  I'll take a look at Chromatic.

Edit:  Chromatic looks cool, but would anyone be willing to donate some RAM along with it?  Even in that video, the song wheel lags a lot.

It's clear that someone needs to make a IIDX Sirius theme.

http://instantrimshot.com/

I wish I knew about this sooner. I have only ever had this problem when it scrolls past custom songs I've uploaded via the userpack method. My suspicion is that if the song has an ogg length patch applied to it, openITG tries to foil this "hack" by checking the song length itself to determine if it is a long song or not. So, I believe this is what causes the majority of these song wheel lags.

If it's doing this on ITG1/2 songs in the song wheel, than I have no flippin' idea and ignore everything I just said.

Perhaps I'm missing something, but can someone tell me why we can't add some mods to the default ITG2 theme and call it a day?  Does that one have performance problems as well?