Proposal to remove option to turn off line bonus and/or change what it controls

[barbeque-squared]

TLDR: 2 questions:

1. Can we get rid of the possibility to disable line bonus as far as scoring is concerned?
2. Personally I'd like the line bonus popups to not be there, but I'm undecided if toggling them should be a game option or something in the theme file, because at least my extremely minimal theme literally doesn't have the space to show them anywhere.

1: remove disabling line scoring for scoring purposes

Currently, line bonus (Options -> Advanced -> Line Bonus) is enabled by default. Issues, weird things, and observations I've made so far:

• turning it off has impact on resulting scores (which is especially problematic for highscore plugins)
• the translations for it are actually duplicated. it probably got moved from one to another screen at some point, or maybe at some point it was purely a graphical option instead of also affecting scores, but leftover (duplicate) translations are an indication of things done in a hurry.
• the score screens always show line bonus, even if it's turned off
• I have never, ever seen anyone play with line bonus disabled, so why is this even an option

The oldest references to the existence of line bonus I could find are:

• an IGN SingStar article: https://www.ign.com/articles/2006/11/03/singstar-rocks-preview
• cross-referencing https://www.ultrastar.de/download_us_en.html with https://sourceforge.net/projects/ultrastar/files/UltraStar/

2: line bonus popups

Note: the line bonus popups are also problematic in multiple ways:

• they're hardcoded to certain theme element names that they shouldn't be (read: your game will just crash or at best do very weird things if you don't define these elements)
• they hide notes (or iirc lyrics if this is a duet) (this also happens with the avatars for certain amounts of players)
• I also hate them from a player perspective. they're distracting, the yellow and green ones are almost impossible to read, and currently the only way to turn them "off" is disabling line bonus altogether

Personally, I'm undecided yet if it should be a game option to turn these on or off, or if it should be controlled by something in the theme file itself. because very minimal themes like the one I run literally do not have the space to show these anywhere without getting in the way of more vital information (and most of that theme will eventually start making its way into Modern, which is why we need to figure out if it's a game thing or a theme thing)

[dgruss]

i would be in favor of keeping them and removing the option to turn them off and instead let the theme show them or not show them.

[barbeque-squared]

Yeah it being controlled from the theme is the way to go I think. I'll make a PR for question 1 and then leave this issue open until I've done something about number 2 as well -- might be a while, but I've put a link to this issue in my local builds so I'll see it when the time is there. There's some other issues in this part of the code too, but there's other low-hanging fruit to address first.