I’m probably going to need a dance game sub-blog at this rate.

I really wish Stepmania didn’t crash (silently!) whenever it failed to find a file somewhere.

I’d love to write my own file loaders that didn’t fail on a missing file. Maybe simply shim everything to check if the file exists first?

TLDR:

  • SM(table) in Simply Love that pretty prints tables and whatever strings you want to print. It will write to crashinfo.txt, log.txt, and to the command line.
  • debug.debug() will cause the game to hang until you hit enter in the command line.
  • Warn and Trace seem not useful: they write to a text log in some random directory.
  • print is just Trace.
  • error will bail out of your actors/functions on error, and print at the top of the screen.
-- I think this is built-in Lua functionality.
-- The fallback theme init script makes some shortcuts for this.

-- https://github.com/stepmania/stepmania/blob/27fdfb38718474253aeb33e9f9c7fd1a91ed823a/Themes/_fallback/Scripts/00%20init.lua#L11

-- aka print/Trace as defined in _fallback
lua.Trace('string') -- Writes 'timestap: string' to log.txt.

-- It looks like crashinfo.txt's partial log is the last few things that
-- were supposed to be written to log.txt, before they were written.

error('reason') -- Bails on the current actor. Will prevent it from loading
-- any further (basically exits out of it) and displays the error at the top
-- of the Stepmania screen (if error reporting enabled).

lua.Warn('String') -- aka Warn
-- Prints the following to log.txt:
-- /////////////////////////////////////////
-- 02:14.132: WARNING: String
-- /////////////////////////////////////////

Logs -> ~/Library/Logs/PRODUCT_ID