some bg effects no longer work?

This really only affects two songs for me: "Sweet [Frieza Remix]" and "Sonne", both obtained from the old Stepmania site.

Sonne displays no errors, but none of the visuals work. They seem to be stored as BGAnimation.ini files and images.

Sweet displays a few still images, but the BGAnimations fail. At least I get an error there: "Error playing command: /BackgroundEffects/StretchNoLoop.lua:5: attempt to call method 'loop' (a nil value).

Is it possible for support for these changes to be added in the future to help ensure compatibility with old files? Gonna miss playing Sweet with visuals.

BGAnimation.ini support was dropped years ago.
Send me a link to a pack of songs that use BGAnimation.ini for backgrounds and I'll run them through my converter and send you the results if they appear to work.

The error in StretchNoLoop was fixed on Oct 19. You can upgrade to a nightly build or Beta 4a. (going to bug Shakesoda about putting Beta 4a on the downloads page again)

https://www.dropbox.com/s/2ebkqig4l7gy54f/Originals.zip?dl=0

Two songs.

Welp, guess my converter is too unfinished to work on them. I'm too busy this month to spend time hunting down what the effects were supposed to do and figure out how to convert them.
Sonne had a readme in the folder with the author's email, you could try contacting them.

Here is as far as I got. As you can see, stuff isn't appearing in the right place, or for the right amount of time. (at least, I assume it's not supposed to look this way, I have never seen the originals)

Also, Sweet is extremely offsync. Hitting on the beat lands me in the late great window half the time.

Both were from the starting days of Stepmania and were from the official site.

I never had a problem with Sweet being offsync. I wish I knew why the support was dropped in the first place.

It's a shame because they had some pretty nice visuals and it's terrible to think that they'd just be lost to time.

Just for reference, here's how it should look.

Sweet: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U7x0IJKcwYs

Sonne: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKj56yZVEGg

More flexible and powerful ways were created for making things happen during a song. Supporting two different ways of doing something is more of a hassle, especially when the older method is incapable of doing many of the new things, so several years ago ini support was dropped.

Eh. Hopefully at some point the converter will be done or I'll find somebody willing to fix them up.

Mainly because they're Stepmania history, and I don't feel right not having them. I guess I'll keep Stepmania 3.9 around for those two files. Everything else ported over to 5 without a hitch.

I don't have any plans to work on the converter any further. There aren't any simfiles I'm interested in converting that I haven't already taken care of, and I'm more interested in making new things that expand the limits of what can be done in Stepmania.