Although sometimes the future is bright, sometimes it’s, well, not so much. Due to an announcement made today, TrotMania Euphorius for StepMania 5.1 has been postponed indefinitely, so it will exclusively target StepMania 5.0.12 instead.

In other words: Due to recent complications that have impeded its development (long story), StepMania 5.1 in its current form has been postponed, and its changes are being held over to a later release which will be named StepMania 5.2. In turn, 5.1 is being revised with different and more incremental goals, and will not break existing content and themes made for StepMania 5.0.

I was planning on releasing the TMIV theme on both versions, with the versions for 5.1 alphas/betas possibly carrying a few “exclusive” features, and 5.0.x remaining an option for those who wanted to remain stable, but now that it’s been effectively postponed, we’d rather just target the stable branch. If the new 5.1 requires minor theme changes, I’ll patch for it, but I may still do a separate theme version for 5.2 once it reaches a sufficient state I didn’t make this decision on a whim, given that I was one of the first people to propose such a holdover, but now that it’s official, we’re going to follow suit.

A more important factor in this change is that TrotMania attracts many casual users who are not familiar with the nuances of different versions of SM. We just want to make something that just works, and not confuse people with inconsistent distributions that just fragment things further. The 5.0.x version of the theme is exactly the same as what was being made for 5.1, except with the 5.1-specific changes removed. It is nearly identical.

You’re not really going to miss much: the only SM5.1-specific thing we officially teased was the new options menu (which, by the way, you had to use in order to correctly implement certain things), but we did have some plans for content that, ahem, leveraged one of its bigger changes. Internal concerns over this was what one of the catalysts that led to the aforementioned long story to begin with, but we are not going to take any sides because this is a rather controversial issue. I’m not going to say what it is, however, because it’s a massive spoiler.