Feature Ideas / Requests?

Hello,

is this the right place actually to request a feature, such as:

currently SM5 features:

Delete songs from Select Music:

Pressing Ctrl+Backspace on the Select Music screen will prompt you to
permanently delete the currently selected song.

The Allow Song Deletion preference must be turned on in the Advanced Options section of the service menu for this to be enabled.

My collection features 600 songs currently, with a tendency to grow further.
All the packs somehow contain only few songs I like :)

My ideas:
a)
How about a feature which preserves the data rather than delete it? I donot want to delete the song - rather I just would like to "hide" the song.
The actual mechanics I haven't thought of, but it could be something like:

- move song out of actual song folder into a different, defined "hide-folder" into a subdir with the song folder name.
same functionality on the songwheel; trigger would be e.g. "Ctrl-Shift-Backspace"

e.g. move E:\AdditionalSongs\ITG\Anubis\* to E:\HiddenSongs\ITG\Anubis\*
Recovery would work actually manually by moving back the song-dir from hidden-dir to non-hidden-dir
e.g. manually move E:\HiddenSongs\ITG\Anubis\* to E:\Songs\ITG\Anubis\*

or

- a hidden song gets referenced in a hidden_songs.txt file in User's SM Data directory
Recovery by manually editing that file (deleting referencing line).

b)
How about a feature to limit the difficulties displayed?
Often I have my children and their friends playing as well. I'd love to hide certain difficulties on demand.

e.g. hide difficulties above 11

this also could be part of a referencing file, e.g. hidden_difficulties.txt
e.g. containing a line with comma separated values of difficulties to hide, e.g.:
"hide=11,12,13,14,14,16,17,18,19,20"


Thank you for maybe considering these in advance.
It would be nice if these could become core functionality.

In theory, for the song-hide feature, the favorites feature in consensual looks like it would be good enough for me,
but then my opengl driver setup is broken, and I am stuck with d3d.
I use Simply Love from Dan Guzek currently, and he has no big plans currently to port over consensual features.
Therefore I actually thought of requesting a non-destructive functionality to remove songs from the song wheel.

Thank you and kind regards!
Alex

bump :)

is this the right place to bring in feature ideaS?

thx /A

First of all, editing config files by hand is the wrong approach. A common user should not have to edit config files, configuration should be done through a good interface in the game.

Short answer: If you want Consensual's features, use Consensual. There is not another viable option.

Implementing Consensual's features in the engine would require breaking compatibility in big ways.
Every theme would have to completely rewrite everything dealing the music wheel, and have menus on Select Music.
Since themers hate change, the only people making themes for the new version would be me, dbk2, and me, maybe 1-2 other people. dbk2 is generally too buried in school (University) and work to do much theme work.
And themes for the old version wouldn't have a working Select Music screen at all.
So there'd be no themes besides Consensual for 4-6 months, or however long it takes themers to rewrite all of their music wheel items and castrate the critically important menus to match what is in arcade DDR (because that's what too many themers do). Then they'd complain about the dynamically generated folder names not having any jackets and looking bad on their cover flow music wheels. Next would be the host of sorting options hosing any theme that tries to have a custom screen for selecting the sorting method.

So at the end of the day, it'd be me investing 100+ hours of work into making it possible for other themes to have all the good features, and get shit in return.


Why does it break compatibility to change the music wheel?
When I first started theming in November 2013, I spent about 3 hours looking at the music wheel trying to figure out how I could use it to do what I wanted. I encountered stupid crap like two of the args to the item transform function being hardcoded to garbage, which forces the theme to fetch that info from metrics. After that, I decided that trying to use the engine's music wheel would be a huge pain in the ass, and probably make stuff I wanted impossible.
So I wrote my own. A complete music wheel, sorting system, and Select Music screen, written from scratch, without touching the engine's trash at all. Things came out rather different from what the engine has, because a system for handling arbitrary sorting and unlimited folder depth has to be rather different from a system meant for ~10 hard coded sorting methods and a folder depth of 1. Also, in some ways, the engine's music wheel is poorly structured and needs to be changed anyway.

thank you Kyzentun for the detailed explanation. much appreciated.

Please share your consideration on following (re-)thought of what i described in idea "a)":

current filesystem operations from songwheel allow:
- ctrl-backspace: delete selected song

a new feature allows "hiding" a song from songwheel using ctrl-backspace
(deleting then gets a more complex shortcut, like ctrl-shift-backspace, as deleting is more destructive than hiding)
- the song dir name gets a prefix, such as _
- stepmania does not show songs in a folder with prefix _

as an additional feature (but detached from main feature) the song wheel "sort" feature could include another one, such as "show Hidden".

thansk!
Alex

another idea:

ctrl-b could simply add the active selected song to a dynamic "Favorites" folder, which either is machine favorites (upon no user profile loaded),
or a users profile favorites (upon user profile loaded).

thinking again on it, this really would make most sense overall.

kyzentun, what do you think?

thanks!
Alex

Consensual already has a menu for changing how a song is favorited.

You can set the favor value to any integer, and there are Favor choices on the sort menu for sorting the music wheel.
It's in a menu you access by pressing Select because I've been trying to avoid interface choices that require a keyboard because I want the theme to fully work for people playing on a pad too.
I can add a special folder similar to the "Recently Played" and "Recent From Random" folders when I have some spare time.

Thank you, I know, but I use Simply Love.
Any chance this will become core functionality, not theme functionality?

thx/A

bumping this feature request.
any chance a dynamic favorites folder can become core functionality?

thank you!
Alex