Project OutFox news posts

Engine Chronicle #7: SereneAudio Across Platforms

Tue, 30 Jun 2026 03:48:21 +0000

Replacing an audio engine does not stop at generating sound correctly inside the game.

That sound still has to reach real hardware through the audio systems provided by each operating system. Those systems do not all work in the same way, and they do not all expect the engine to feed them audio using the same timing or buffering model.

This stage of the SereneAudio work has focused on those output paths.

SereneAudio is now running through WaveOut, RtAudio, PortAudio and PulseAudio. Linux output has also been tested and confirmed working through the new system.

During that testing, we found an ...

Engine Chronicle #6: BMS Playback and SereneAudio’s First Silver Grade

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:44:52 +0000

This work began with a BMS chart that was not loading correctly.

What looked like a small detection problem led us into several older parts of the BMS and PMS support inside OutFox. Some chart types were not being classified correctly, and the engine did not always have a clear answer for how their audio should be handled once they had loaded.

The BMS family includes BMS, BME and BML files, alongside related formats such as PMS. These formats have existed for a long time and have been used in many different ways. That flexibility is one of their strengths, but it also means that older and newe...

Engine Chronicle #5: StillRiver, Measure Before Changing

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 03:47:32 +0000

As Project OutFox grew, we kept finding the same kind of problem.

The engine could appear to be running well while doing far more work than it needed to. The frame-rate counter might show a large number, but it could not tell us whether frames were arriving evenly, whether a system was updating at the correct rate, or whether the engine was repeating work when nothing had changed.

Some of this behaviour had been inside the StepMania engine for many years.

That did not necessarily mean it was broken. In many cases, the original reason for the code had simply been lost as hardware, operating sys...

Engine Chronicle #4: From RageInput to SereneIO

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:57:59 +0000

Input is one of the most important parts of a rhythm-game engine.

Every step, key press, panel hit, MIDI message and controller action has to reach the game accurately and consistently. Small problems in that path can become missed inputs, duplicated events, uneven polling or devices behaving differently between operating systems.

For many years, StepMania and Project OutFox handled this through RageInput.

RageInput supported an enormous range of devices across several generations of hardware and operating systems. Over time, OutFox extended it with additional drivers, MIDI support and compati...

Engine Chronicle #3: OpenGL ES, ANGLE and a More Portable Renderer

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:57:06 +0000

Project OutFox has always supported a wide range of hardware, but supporting many systems is not simply a matter of compiling the same renderer everywhere.

Graphics drivers differ between operating systems, vendors and generations of hardware. Even when two systems claim to support the same version of OpenGL, their behaviour is not always identical. Over time, those differences create extra work, platform-specific fixes and faults that can be difficult to reproduce.

To reduce that dependence on desktop OpenGL, OutFox now includes an OpenGL ES 2.0 rendering path.

OpenGL ES uses a smaller and mo...

Engine Chronicle #2: From Glad-FFP to Glad-Prog

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:55:00 +0000

Introducing Glad-Prog, OutFox’s fully programmable OpenGL rendering path.

Engine Chronicle #1: Retiring RageSound

Mon, 29 Jun 2026 00:36:47 +0000

After roughly 25 years in the StepMania engine family, RageSound has been retired and replaced by SereneAudio.

OutFox Serenity Volume 3 Winter Update

Sat, 15 Nov 2025 17:50:00 +0000

The end of the year comes with the reveal of OutFox Serenity Volume 3 Winter Update

OutFox Serenity Volume 3 Lauching Soon

Thu, 01 Feb 2024 19:25:00 +0000

Serenity Volume 3 is about to launch and we have some updates to share!

OutFox Serenity Volume 3 Season 4

Fri, 01 Dec 2023 17:00:00 +0000

Winter comes with a new OutFox Serenity Season, and with it a unexpected collab!