I was just wondering, about the updates of this program. I saw that the latest update being release years ago and some things left un-completed and in some cases some songs have bugs. So I was wondering is there a fan update, or another version of ultrastar with more features?
There was a spinoff off the original Ultrastar called the Challenge Medley Duet, or CMD edition, but that was abandoned before some vital upgrades like the UMT-8 character set were implemented. Because of this, you couldn't run most foreign language songs on it.
IIRC, the programmers of Ultrastar DX later moved on to either Performous or Vocaluxe, both very ambitious projects but poorly optimized for now.
So we don't have anything new for now and have to use an very old version of the program... Right...
Exactly. Stability is a must, and UltrastarDX still got the upper hand in that regard despite its age (the only real issue so far is that it still requires libavcodec (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libavcodec)52 on Linux, and most distros have switched to libavcodec53 which is quite a major upgrade of this library). There's also the issue of file compatibility: the song pack can essentially be used with many alternatives engines, and the modifications done in CMD are not really "standardized" and widespread enough.
The two main alternatives to UltrastarDX are indeed Performous and Vocaluxe, still under development.
- Performous: very active project, made a lot of progress over time, especially considering rendering performance. IMO the menus are still lacking (one of my main gripe is the absence of sorting options, all songs are displayed randomly). With the target of being an all-in-one music game, it also supports Stepmania and Frets on Fire file formats. Bonus: it runs on Windows, Mac, and Linux. I use their side project, Composer, quite a lot.
- Vocaluxe: haven't had significant updates in a while, but is still being worked on and the team has interesting ideas too (ie picking players before each songs start). Definitely not stable enough; I could run it fine on my previous Windows install, but currently any version of their software simply crashes on my machine for an reason I haven't investigated. My main issue is that despite the use of many Linux / Cross-plateform libraries, it's written in C#, which is a Microsoft-made language - essentially tying it to Windows only.