Project OutFox 5.3 Alpha 4.9 has been released! This is our build for October on our roadmap. Alpha 4.8.6 (September 30) did not pass QA on Windows, and it ended up containing changes signifigant enough to justify a bump to 4.9.

We have sorted out the misunderstanding that required us to temporarily rebrand as Project OutFox, so we will be returning to the StepMania name on the next alpha. It was all resolved amicably, and it had to be acted upon due to it being reported, so no problems there.

Gaining Imhotep's Favour

Alpha 4.9 contains major changes to fonts within themes. Since we began the project, we had become aware of numerous issues, such as missing glyphs and language support. To fix this, we have created a new release of the the Texture Font Generator, fixing the missing characters for Cyrillic and Extended Latin, Kanji GBK for Traditional Chinese, Kanji Hojo, Kanji JIS, Kanji symbol characters, Korean basic characters, and Korean Hangul. It has separate versions for Chinese, European/Latin, Japanese, Japanese supplemental, and Korean fonts, as well as "Legacy" for Windows-1252 character maps (seen, in particular, in OpenITG/NotITG).

We used the new generator to create updated font textures, including the IBM Plex fonts used within Soundwaves, Noto fallback glyphs used for rendering foreign characters not covered by fonts in a particular theme, and an improved version of a font texture often used within In the Groove 2-centric content. All these fonts have been rendered at a higher resolution, with a more consistent size and wider character support.

As a result, you may notice that the default theme's typography looks a little different on Alpha 4.9 (and in some areas, has also been refined), but that it appears much sharper as well (Alpha 4.8.5 on top, 4.9 on the bottom).

As they do not work properly with Unicode, we are also deprecating the string.upper() and string.lower() functions in favour of the new Lua functions ToUpper() and ToLower() -- which performs the same operation in a manner that correctly handles capitalization of these characters. The previous functions remain supported for compatiblity reasons, but be forewarned that text may not always capitalize properly.

Full screen

On all operating systems, we have added the ability to use Alt+Enter to toggle full screen mode. But be warned: the SDL window does not scale modes which your monitor does not support in full screen. It will draw a border around the window if the mode is not a suitable mode. You can find these modes in the log.txt, as SDL is kind enough to display everything supported there.

We have allowed other operating systems this function for familiarity, and the fact we didn't think it'd work on macOS/Linux, but it did.

Download

As always, the download links and a full changelog are on the release page. Be sure to report any issues you find.