It's cool that there is new songs on there, but when I tried using my flash drive it wouldn't work. Plus, picked one of the new song for my first song and the system froze and reboot so... I didn't want to risk trying any of the other ones out. Pads seem fine though. :/

New songs and flash drives have both worked fine in the past so I don't know what's up with that.

Not sure what was up then. Loaded my profile but not my songs. The song that I picked was in the Sukura Con folder, near the middle, didnt have a high score.

Regarding the USB's, they have been checked, and are functional.  But something with the program changes is causing them problems.  Allan let us know they needed to be checked, and the system is reading them.  Beyond us now. 
Is the volume at a good level now?  thanks for the heads up Sunday, Gerrack.

Ah fuck...it was working fine at the con...I'm down in California so it is hard for me to do anything for a couple of weeks. Still, I'll ask the OpenITG guys what could possibly be up tonight. I might have to install that last GB of RAM after all. Damn...worst case possible...

I thought that RAM was bought for the purpose of putting it in...  Why didn't it get put in already?

USB failures at the con were completely a function of the machine's cache overflowing and reboots did wonders.  If I ever have time, I curious to see just how the caching code works, because it doesn't seem like redirecting USB data to a secondary file which is deleted after a few sets would be that hard to add in, but I also have no knowledge of Stepmania/OpenITG's code.

What specific song caused the crash?

I'm amazed that this didn't seem to get addressed with OpenITG. I've seen many oITG machines still require restarts after a few hours of constant play. Like you, I have no idea how difficult this task is, but I imaging having it clear the oldest cached files after 1 hour or so to keep it from getting terribly glitchy with the USB drives.

rebooting the machine doesn't help after a period of time. Unless we can build in a code, we'll have to manually have the machine reload the songs which takes some time. Though it does get rid of the lag for a little bit.

Here's the thing I propose. I say we put the song limit to 20-30 songs that the machine will load from a USB, that's a decent amount in my opinion. I usually don't see people bring in 50 songs the CAN'T pass.

Also, Tony I think you can find the stepmania source code on stepmania.com
since OpenITG is based of off that, it probably shouldn't be hard to figure out once you take a look at it.

edit:
http://www.stepmania.com/download.php?file=stepmania_v390_src.zip

here's the source code for stepmania 3.9
I'm not sure if this'll help, but here ya go.

Do you think it would help matters any if we reverted to the ITG2 theme?

no, it's the same game just a different a skin over it.
For now it's something we'll have to just get into the service menu and do. It's an inconvenience, but we've been dealing with it for over a year now, so I'm sure we can all deal with it some more.

Well, I was just thinking that the theme itself was responsible for some of the lag. But meh.

If Bill's techs would be cool with coming down to ACME, I'm sure Tony could look at it a bit.

Themes modify the settings of the engine (hence why you can get custom mods, etc), so they can, and do affect the stability of the machine. I've heard on multiple occasions that the themes can cause unforeseen problems within the ITG/OpenITG engine. The ITG3 theme is notoriously unstable because there has never been an "official" release, so every version you find is slightly different than the other.  The ITG3 group really needs to just get this thing officially released and be done with all these half-finished charts and incomplete themes.

P.S. We are still running the ITG2 theme on our machine because we've had some buggy problems with the multiple ITG3 themes we've tried. There always seems to be something tweakin out in them.

As far as I know, ITG3 charts are done. honeslty look at them, there's not much to change. Also, we tried the ITG2 theme, it still lagged through Rebirth and everything else. The only thing that is going to fix the lag, is either reloading the songs every now and then, or sticking 1GB of RAM into the motherboard and BAM! FIXED!

For us it's more of a hardware issue than a software issue. Trust me on that. The theme isn't done, but we could make it done. I can't even tell you how many custom themes are on peoples machines. It's ridiculous.

Kevin, nobody said anything about the charts.  The theme is not refined enough.

Yes James, I believe he did say something about the charts.

Anyways I think the best option for anybody is to hack custom speed mods onto either your USB, or just directly put it on the machine and then run it in the ITG 2 theme. I like that one better anyways, the fantastics don't give you seizures.

Couple things.

First off, it's set now at 3:30 because that's what "Acme's staff wanted" but a week ago it was set to 4.5 min. I recommended the song lengths be set at 1 song at 4min 2 at 6 3 at >6 because it seemed reasonable, however as-is many of the songs I could play for one round before sakuracon, such as 'I Can Walk on Water' and others, are now either unplayable or take two rounds. I wouldn't mind them taking two rounds if the majority of my songs were now playable, however now there are more unplayable songs than there were before, and I think this is ridiculous. I had thought we fixed the long songs for multiple rounds thing at sakuracon but evidently not, so it would be nice if someone could actually look at it and extensively test it this time to make sure it's not just working on event mode or free play or whatever. Since we've been notoriously bad/lazy about doing this, I volunteer. Just let me know a time and I'll be at Acme to fix the problem.

Second, the volume is great! Inevitably I'm sure someone will say it's too loud so when the time comes, please be gentle, however in the meantime thanks for the change

Lastly, the USBs are definitely not working like they are supposed to. Almost every time I go to Acme now it will not read any songs my first set, so I take out and put in my USB, and it reads the same 4 songs every time, and then the next set after reloading it's maybe 10 songs, and it slowly goes up until finally it rests on a collection of maybe 20 of the 40 or so songs on my USB. Most certainly something is up. Again, I offer my services to take a good look at it and fix the problem once and for all...

As a savvy logician, as well as someone who wants this damn machine to work fairly and correctly, I guarantee I can get this thing working up to specs. Just let me know when and I'll take a look...

Allan: Just to clarify, I have no idea what the previous song limit was or why it was set the way it was. All I know is this, which was a direct quote from an e-mail Bill sent me:

"I know they cannot be too long as Acme wants the max song length at 3 minutes 30 seconds.  If they will work within that perimeter, the more the better I would say.  :-)"

Maybe ACME changed their minds? :<

I don't know what the deal with USBs is. They were, for sure, working at the con, and since it's not hardware it has to be something with the machine settings. Was ANYTHING different at the con other than the machine being on freeplay? Do coin settings themselves take any RAM?

Also, regarding the ITG2 theme VS the ITG3 theme - I appreciate what you're trying to say, Kevin, but I think that if several people suspect the theme might be contributing to the lag at all it might be worth at least testing. If we do nothing, we can guarantee we'll continue to have problems; if we do something and it doesn't work, we can always change it back. Edit: Oh nvm you agree with me anyway. No worries, then!

Edit: Also, did we set a limit for what the machine will read off of USBs at the con? I wasn't involved in that, but if somebody did set a limit and your R21 files are above a certain length, maybe that's why it's not reading them? :O

Allan this is how song length works.
There are two options.

One for MAXIMUM song length.
Another for setting long song and marathin cut offs.
We put it at what ACME wanted, we can't change that, because it's in their venue.
it was set at 4:00 minutes not 4:30 seconds, how do I know this? I tried playing Holy Orders and that song is barely over the 4:00 minute mark.
Right now the absolute cut off is at 3:30 meaning anything above that limit will not play. I cut the limit of songs you can load onto your usb be for one reason.
Bringing in 50 songs everytime you go to acme will make the machine lag a lot faster than 20 songs. That and really, I think we need to start putting more popular songs on the machine itself. For instance, Loituma and stuff.
We should make a folder called PNWBemani or something.
Since I know how put songs on the machine, I volunteer to do this.
Also, with song length, if it's really a problem I would gladly go back and change everything to make sure it works if Bill will let me.

Laura, changing the theme doesn't make a difference with lag, it's the machine not cleaning the cache is the problem. Personally I wish we could have the ITG2 theme with al the custom mods, but eh, whatevs.

On a happier note, I changed the file size so songs over 5mb can be loaded.
Because if any of you know a thing or two audio, 5mb is shit....absolute shit for song quality.

Doesn't the machine use .ogg?
Your *good sounding audio* (remember, this is a noisy arcade we're talking about) will easily fit in a 5MB .ogg if you're doing it right.

God do you think or pay attention at all? The ABSOLUTE time limit should then be at 10:30 for 3 songs x 3:30 each, and the threshold should be <3.5min for 1 song, <7min for 2 songs, 7-10.5min for 3 songs, or else somewhere within that. Acme never had a problem with how long an individual song was, why the hell would they care? They only had a problem with entire sets being too long and hence generating less revenue per hour. We were supposed to fix this entirely like 9 months ago by establishing the thresholds correctly and we have continually failed to do so. You effectively didn't change anything at all except reducing the song lengths by a little with sakuracon, not fixing the whole problem in the first place....
It takes practically the same time to load if you've just restarted the machine, certainly a negligible difference. And you would have to restart within 2 hours or so anyway if you want to use your USB in the first place. So botched settings again -.- It should be set to unlimited or whatever the maximum is. At least I know why half my songs won't load...
I agree, but I'll believe it when I see it.

Anyway I didn't mean to be mean about this but can we please get it right? Maybe have me as part of fixing it for once to make sure, considering I probably play on it right now more than everyone else here combined...

So basically everyone is demanding that the machine be configured in their favorite way.

What else is new

The issue isn't the cost of compiling 50 songs worth of metadata from a drive nor is it saving that data.  It's the fact that Stepmania caches a catalog of metadata for every song deemed playable until the catalog is purged and rebuilt.  Reboots aren't doing as great a job as they used to, because, for one reason or another (probably the cache not actually clearing on reboot and the slowdown being partially due to another bug which is remedied by reboots), going in to the op. menu and ,manually clearing the cache completely fixes the USB issues for a short time, whereas people still see issues immediately after a reboot.

The issue is demonstrably that too many files are being cached too quickly, and cutting your USB library from 50 to 20 will, logically, make it take a lot longer for the cache to get out of hand.  The core issue is that Stepmania was not designed for our use case and OpenITG does not address the resultant slowdown.

No... It was supposed to be fixed at sakuracon and absolutely nothing changed except the max songs for USBs are now down to 20 and the song length was reduced from 4min to 3.5. This isn't about configuring it 'my way' it's about getting the song length thresholds correct. Acme only ever cared about entire sets taking too long; if the 1 song length was unlimited it would result in potentially 15+min sets. When this whole debate started when the ITG3skin was installed and song length caps came into effect we were supposed to set the threshold such that songs over a certain length just took 2 or 3 rounds in order to fix this and make everyone happy. Sets were supposed to be kept under a reasonable time limit and all songs were supposed to be playable in one way or another. Somehow this keeps not getting fixed. So don't try to call me out for making my personal desires the issue, I'm trying to get this fixed for everyone and to do it right for once....

I GUARANTEE if I get 15min looking at the settings for the machine every set will be under 10.5min and every song on my or anyone else's USB will work, assuming it loads correctly. If that isn't what everyone has wanted for the last year in the first place, including making both Acme and the players happy, then please let me know...


   Tony, thanks for clearing up the cache thing. I hadn't realized this particular problem was so extensive. However I'm still not sure the symptom of slightly (and in my experience negligibly) longer load times for the USB cards is worth the inability to put more songs on the card. Maybe reduce the max number to 30 or 40, this would presumably still make it take significantly longer time for the lag to build up without the annoying task of changing out songs so often.
   That being said, I'm still not sure I've even noticed a difference after the machine's settings being left alone for months, and I'm curious as to where the idea that something was wrong here in the first place came from. Unless it's related to whether or not songs show up, which is doubtful considering supposedly this was cleared at sakuracon and now right after my songs still aren't loading right. I honestly hadn't noticed any difference whatsoever in load times whether the cache had been cleared recently or not.

In any case, I really hope I can just have a look and get this cleared up... As I said, unless the problem is VASTLY more complex than has been expressed on these forums or in-person discussions, I guarantee I can get this all working right and make everyone happy...

I don't think my USB stick has worked on the machine since it was ITG2...but that's probably an issue with the device itself and not the machine (it's a Lexar stick...can't remember what type).