Turning Off Player Options

Is there a way to turn off Player Options from being accessible when you hit the Start Button twice on a song? We play primarily on pad and several of us are heavy footed and tend to enter the options when starting a song, and we almost never use them.

There's not a simple and easy way to disable the player options screen in the default theme. Trying to modify the theme to disable it will probably cause you more pain than it's worth.
You say "almost never", which means sometimes you use them. If you disabled the options, how would you get to them in the cases where you need them? Exit all the way out to the service screen to enable the player options?
(this matters for designing a good way to disable the player options)

If modifying the theme is the only way to solve this, then I think I would have to agree that it is probably more pain than it is worth.

I would be happy if the player options were easily toggle-able from the service screen, in the same vein as toggling the song options screen. By "almost never", I mean I have been using Stepmania since 3.9 and there have only been a handful of times I've used the options as opposed to the hundreds of times I've stumbled into it by accident. So if I had to go back to the title screen to turn it back on, it would not inconvenience me in the slightest.

Along the same lines, I just updated to 5.0.9 a couple weeks ago, I don't remember which version of Stepmania 5 I was on before that. Previously, if I entered the player options screen by mistake I would simply hit the start button twice, once to get to the exit button and again to quit out of the options. I noticed that I can no longer do this, hitting start once I reach the options screen keeps me on the speed option. However, if I were to scroll to any other option and hit Enter, it would send me down to the Exit button. Is this a bug? This little inconvenience is what drove me to post my first question.

Thank you!

The speed mod line changed to allow it to accomodate people that want a large variety of speed mods, so enter interacts with items instead of moving down.
The inconvenience of exiting the screen is why I rearranged the options screen when I made my custom theme. I put the exit option at the top and named it "Play Song" so there would be no confusion over it.

I did a bit more research, and surprisingly, there's a metric for turning off the options screen.
It turns out that if you change this line, you can disable the options screen:
https://github.com/stepmania/stepmania/blob/master/Themes/default/metrics.ini#L862

If you change it to this, no more options screen.

OptionsMenuAvailable=false

Fantastic! Just tried it and it works. Thank you very much for your help!

There is an option in-game to disable the song options screen without having to edit the game files.
If I remember correctly it was in "advanced options" at the end, and it had three options that read "ask, never, always" or something like that.

That option is for the Song Options screen, which is different from the Player Options screen. The Song Options screen comes after the Player Options screen. The option you described controls how to get from the Player Options screen to the Song Options screen.

This thread is about disabling the Player Options screen.