How to navigate courses in Marathon mode?

[ctrueden]

I have been using Simply Love for a long time, and it is really great. Thank you to everyone who has kept it alive and improving over the years.

I have a question about the course selection screen in Marathon mode. Here is how mine looks:

I have a lot of courses in different subfolders of Courses, as well as some custom courses I generate+update programmatically with shell scripts. In order to keep them all straight, I prepend a [group-name] prefix to each course's name. This helps, but StepMania does not fully sort them alphabetically, so I find myself needing to scroll a lot to find courses, especially after I regenerate them and the ordering changes. My questions are:

1. Unfortunately, the left+right shortcut to bring up sorting options does not work in Marathon mode on my installation (StepMania 5.1.0-b2 + Simply Love 5.4.0). Is my setup broken somehow? Or is this feature not implemented?

2. Would it make sense to add an option to group courses by subfolder, similar to the default sort of Normal mode?

3. I notice that courses utilizing the #LIVES: feature (i.e. Oni courses with battery bar) do not appear in the list at all. Does Simply Love support this feature? If so, any guesses to why they are not listed for me?

4. Any suggestions for a better way to manage Marathon courses? I haven't encountered other posts online with these sorts of questions, so I feel like I'm missing something basic. Or is just that people don't use Marathon mode that much?

Thanks for reading! 😸

[quietly-turning]

Hey! Thanks for asking these questions — they're all very reasonable. I don't maintain Simply-Love-SM5 any longer, but will do my best to answer each from a historical perspective.

1. Simply-Love-SM5's SortMenu is not shown/allowed in CourseMode because, to the best of my knowledge, there is no MusicWheel sorting implemented in CourseMode by the base StepMania/ITGMania engine.

   I can imagine this stemming from DDR Extreme's Oni Mode MusicWheel not being sortable, and CourseMode receiving the most programmer attention around 2003 when StepMania was more ostensibly a DDR clone, but that's just speculation on my part!

2. I think so, yeah. There are many ways CourseMode could be improved by anyone interested in and willing to do the work.

3. I never implemented support in Simply-Love-SM5 for #Lives in CourseMode.

4. See my response to question#2. :^)