Error Reporting

On screen error reporting has been added to SM5. This means that when an error occurs, it will be reported on screen in stepmania, pop up a dialog box, and record the error in the log file. Previously, if you wanted to know if there were errors in your theme, you had to open up Logs/log.txt and look at it. Adding on screen error reporting should make finding theme mistakes much easier.
Errors will appear at the top of the screen, wait a few seconds, then scroll off the top. If more appear before existing errors are dealt with, more of the screen will be covered.
Keys will be added to the debug menu for showing/hiding the backlog of errors, in case they scroll off before you finish reading them.
This is now in the latest nightly build. Have fun.

It's important that people give feedback on this, so if you do any theming at all, you should use the latest nightly build.

This has been helpful so far in knowing when something has failed. However I'm still going back to the log file since I'm testing on a piu MK6 machine and the font being output is unreadable for me. Is this a theme setting?

Is there an option I missed in the menus to disable the on screen logging? It's great while I'm working on the bugs for the theme I'm planning on using, but I'd like the option to disable the on screen output temporarily for when I have parties.

I'm still working on figuring out themes by looking at other people's examples. This feature has helped a lot as well. Thank you.

edit: Here's a quick link showing the output I see on the screen.
stepmania debug output in VGA. As you can see only about half the text is legible.

I've pushed a commit that adjusts the code that scales the text, so it should be more readable at low resolutions. It's just a small change to _fallback/Scripts/02 Utilities.lua, so there's no need to wait for the next nightly build, just pull the latest from the repository or copy the highlighted area from the link.

There is not an option to disable error reporting because one of the goals I have for it is to force themers to fix the errors. If it were easily disabled, then people would just turn it off and forget about them.

The cons of having no option to disable the on screen logging/error reporting is when having a lot of simfiles with background changes compatible for ITG/OITG which I am having right now.

When I play simfiles w/ those background changes, I always get "Tried to switch to a background that was never loaded <BackgroundDef File='flash'/>" and other sorts of background errors.

Took me hours to erase the "background change" codes for every ITG1 simfile. Still have ITG 2 & 3, and a ton of other simfiles with background changes for ITG/OITG that I have to fix. T_T

http://www.stepmania.com/forums/general-questions/show/1535