Project Moondance is an overall effort to modernize and revitalize the open source rhythm gaming engine "StepMania". It is led by Team Rizu, a development team led by community veteran Squirrel, as well as many other prominent members of the current community.

It was originally conceived as being a complete fork of the engine. However, we have since gained the support of its current lead developer, and are currently working on an experimental branch codenamed Project OutFox – based on version 5.1. OutFox focuses primarily on refactoring low-level portions of the engine in preparation for future development, including code modernization to improve performance, as well as changes to its graphics architecture to provide more complete support for modern hardware.

However, OutFox is only the first stage of our plans: “Serene” is a future project that will significantly refactor the engine to make it a true video game engine for rhythm games, with wide support for various game play styles and input schemes, including touchscreens.

## The Team

### Crystal Squirrel

Squirrel is a game developer and veteran member of the community, dating back to the late-1990’s. His main interests include C++ and OpenGL.

### Jousway

A member of the community, who has primarily worked on themes and noteskins.

### MrThatKid

A member of the community involved primarily in improving compatibility between 5.x and OpenITG and NotITG gimmick simfiles.

### Cube

A member of the community involved primarily with use of the software on arcade hardware. He is currently working on arcade and profile-oriented features for Project OutFox.

### JoseVarela

An ambitious man from Veracruz, México who tries to do something new everyday, no matter what it is, whether is animation, music, art or programming. He mainly creates 5.x content in the form of themes, utilities, stepfiles and more.

### Lirodon

A creator and member of the community from Saskatchewan, Canada; he is involved primarily in UX design, having designed the current “Lambda” default theme introduced in 5.1

# About Project OutFox

Project OutFox is a development branch focused primarily on the internal codebase to improve performance, adhere to modern coding practices, and enhance its capabilities on modern hardware and other platforms (including single-board embedded systems such as Raspberry Pi). Improvements to uncapped frame rate have also been recorded on older hardware, as far back as the Pentium E2180. It also incorporates a new default theme with more integrated features than previous versions, and new internal functions that can be used for future content.

As Project OutFox is a continuation of the 5.0.12 and 5.1 codebase (not “5.2”), it remains compatible with almost all existing songs, themes, and noteskins that are supported on these versions (if you do encounter odd behaviour or other issues with older content, please report it to us as a bug).

5.3 is unrelated to 5.1 -3 (sometimes written as 5.1-3), which was a prior build of 5.2 before it was renamed