StepMania beta 4a is annoying

Well, poop. If I had any experience with themes I'd consider writing up another guide. LuaDocumentation.xml is pretty well commented out, though. I guess there's something that might actually be within my reach. Github has some nice wiki features, too.

But, I digress. I've given my $0.02 and maybe I can help out beyond that. We'll see. :)

Thanks again.

I've thought about it some more, and I'm not having this discussion ever again. If some error filled theme is that important to you, put this code in "BGAnimations/ScreenSystemLayer error.lua".

return Def.Actor{}

Then hit the "Do not show again" checkbox on any dialog that appears (or play on Linux, which doesn't have a dialog driver. But people tell me that the checkbox works).

Since themers obviously don't want to fix their broken mistakes, I'm done trying to make sure stepmania is stable for everyone. Have fun guys.

For waiei, stick this line in the metrics section for ScreenTitleMenu:

ChoiceGameStart="applydefaultoptions;text,Game Start;screen,"..Branch.StartGame()

That will make it skip ScreenCaution, which is their attempt at a version checking screen, and you can go play.

Hm? I'm not sure how many people before me griped about it, but if that far exceeds the slow traffic on the forums then I guess I understand your frustration. On the other hand, I wasn't trying to say screw stability. It just seems to me like a line could be drawn somewhere upon which anything after the line should be expected devoid of errors. Sorry if you feel otherwise.

You seem dead set on believing it should be all or nothing, and you were also the one to ask for feedback on the change over in your post about it in the dev section. I don't know what you were expecting. Its not like this was some kind of heated attack on your being and goodwill. In any case I'll try what you suggested once I rebuild beta 4a. Thank you.

The long and short of it is that the feedback is "We don't want to fix shit" from themers and "We don't care if shit is broken" from users, not just in this thread, but in multiple other threads since Beta 4.
If you check the date on the post in the dev forum, you'll see that it's from July. In addition to the dev forum post, I posted on ZIV to point themers there towards nightly builds and suggest using them for the feature.
Nobody who is not a dev said anything until Beta 4 was released.
Since then, there have been several threads of people less polite than you complaining about it, and not a single non-dev themer coming forward in support of it.
I find it extremely irritating when people choose to do things the wrong way, and I think mistakes should be fixed where possible, thus my hard-line stance. But in the end, people are against it and it's becoming clear that its outright harmful to the health of SM5, so I'm backing down.

Here's a screencap of a facebook thread on the topic. (bonus joke: Aldo posts a fake solution that breaks everything. He's a masterful troll, good thing nobody fell for it.)

It seems like most of the strife in that thread is the common rabble inherit in most facebook communities. Still, those who seem like they might have had their hand in theme creation are just feeding the fire, and that's legitimately not cool. Users (not just SM users, mind you) just don't like stuff to say its broken even if its better for the sake of improvements. Especially with things like stack traces and whatnot, its just annoying jibberish to them. I'm sure a solution will come about that leaves you guys absolutely blameless, but leaves the user rabble squarely on the shoulders of the theme creators.

(bonus joke: Aldo posts a fake solution that breaks everything. He's a masterful troll, good thing nobody fell for it.)

Haha oh man, that'd be like me stubbing half of the .NET core API because I didn't want IO exceptions.

Disabled if any dialogs are ignored committed.
Themers that want to use error reporting can choose not to ignore dialogs (and clear the "IgnoredDialogs" preference if they have chosen to ignore them in the past (Lua code to clear the preference: PREFSMAN:SetPreference("IgnoredDialogs", ""))), and users can hit "Do not show again" on the first dialog.

At least you understand the problem, but I really am bitter over this and many other things.

Well, I'm sure it'll work itself out. I'm serious about helping improve the documentation, though. Lua isn't an obstacle to me, I just need to find some time to read up on what there is about themes and perhaps put some of it to practice first. It might not force hands to eliminate errors, but it could mean one less excuse. I'll continue that topic on github when I can contribute something.

I guess that's that for now. Thank you for explaining the situation better since it really wasn't all that apparent where discussion had gone just sifting through the forums here.

Ouch, Kyzen. Sucks to be blamed for stuff like this, I've seen this kind of situation happen in a lot of other communities and projects over the years. People don't want to accept the fact that something they like is flawed, and will lash out or grasp at straws to try to avoid admitting it.