The state of Lifts

In all my time playing StepMania, I've heard of about 3 files that use them.

I've recently been meddling with them and come to the conclusion that they just flat out don't convey their meaning well enough. It's impossible to sight-read them if they're offscreen, noteskins have terrible support for them, and even ones that do just plain don't look right.

Even with incredibly simple patterns, every single person I've had playtest a file of mine including lifts, I've had to explain what they are, and how to hit them. And these are veterans of 8 years.

Unless there's some underground usage of lifts I don't know about, or some contested reason for not doing it, could you please just give lifts a hold body? They are already essentially just holds with a strict timing window anyway.

I agree that they're poorly presented, but just changing them to a hold type isn't feasible (for existing simfiles at least). Holds are marked by both the beginning and end, but lifts are only indicated as one point. Treating them as hold heads could work, bug we'd need to implement that in a new version of the .SM/.SSC format and it'd further complicate noteskins.

This is worth thinking about after SM5 stable is released, though. I think the only simfile I've ever played that uses them in a fun way is Kimo's Groundhog:

Lifts are what happens when a feature is half-added for a release that never happens, and planning/support for the feature mostly vanishes.

I've experimented in the past with lifts but kinda gave up because it was such a foreign concept and I couldn't really find a way to implement them in a fun way (or maybe I couldn't find them fun because I have no practice at all with them on pad but meh).

I do think it's a neat concept though and has a lot of potential to it for stepcharts.

I do think it's a neat concept though and has a lot of potential to it for stepcharts.

Does it, really? I have tried using them in one or two simfiles where would they fit but people didn't knew how to do them. You can get pretty much same effect having mine after a hold. Lifts are obsolete and if there will be StepMania 6 it would be good idea to not include them in the editor (mind - not remove them to not force situations when build can crash).