Back at you with another week of updates!

Rulesets are now completely modular

Until now, adding a new ruleset (previously known as a game mode) required manually changing the osu.Game project in many places. Now the registration and tracking of rulesets is completely automatic. For the time being, any ruleset following the standard naming structure (osu.Game.Rulesets.Taiko.dll for instance) will be loaded at startup. This will likely change going forward, but it’s a step up from what we had.

This is part of the ongoing refactoring to make things as flexible as possible, so implementing future game modes can be done seamlessly. It should make those few people out there working on their own rulesets very happy too, as they no longer need to maintain custom forks of the main project to load their modes for testing.

Continuing on this path, smoogipooo is working on the conversion system between multiple rulesets. We are working towards a point where conversion is possible on two directions, based on defining some basic conditions which are required before conversion can take place. This should be ready over the next few days, completing this refactor.

Quite a bit of work to make this happen. Didn’t get much else done today!

No release today

While there’s a few bugfixes that could have been pushed out, I’m hoping to get these modular changes in before doing the next build.

Bringing you the latest in osu! development

A slightly shorter post today as I have been busy with non-lazer tasks and drinking (it’s a friday after all!).

New HUD layout

While the visual finish pass is not complete yet, this build completed movement of HUD elements to roughly their final locations. Do keep in mind this will be user customisable, before you start complaining about change. The largest change here is that the combo is now at the top of the screen in a more centered display.

The main reason to get this in even without polish applied was to also allow for…

Song progress display

Not only tracking the current position in the song, this control will also show map density (may be configurable as to what it shows in the future) and also has a draggable seeker, which will be hooked up to replay control in the near future. This control is also lacking visual finish, but I am currently pushing to get these components live in a working state then iterate on the design to bring it up to scratch with my own expectations.

New release with all the above (and changes from yesterday)

2017.415.0 is now available from github releases (or via auto-update if you already have lazer installed)!

Bringing you the latest in osu! development

Fixes to screen interoperability

I had a lot planned today, but ended up spending most of my time following a yellow brick road to fix a reported bug which saw the game in a state of both paused and failed… at the same time. This, as you’d expect, should not be possible!

I spent almost five hours resolving this! It involved some very complex intertwined threading logic (which unfortunately is unavoidable in this context) and saw me finding at least three vaguely related bugs in the process:

• Game screens were handling escape keys even when they were not the active screen.
• The actual threading issues, caused by escape key presses being handled one level higher in the draw hierarchy than expected, in tandom with audio objects (when trated as an interpolating clock source) not correctly querying a cached IsRunning value.

If you didn’t understand any of what I just said, don’t worry! Explaining in words is hard… this was a complex situation.

Thanks to ocboogie for helping test this and finding an easily reproducible test scenario!

Fixes to gameplay cursor positioning

Until now, the gameplay cursor would start in a default position, not correctly updating it to the user’s current cursor position until the next time the input device was moved. This is really ugly, so I spent some time figuring out how to fix it up.

For a bit of background: all of our input events are event based. This unfortunately means that we can’t get an “initial” state for new screens/objects which are created, like the Player’s HitRenderer. As a temporary solution, we added an interface called IRequireHighFrequencyMousePosition. Anything implementing this interface would be guaranteed at least one MouseMove event per frame, regardless of whether the cursor was moved or not.

Inside a Player instance, we have a nested InputManager which is used to do key mapping (keys to mouse, mouse to keys etc.) and replay handling (injecting input frames from an external source). The bug here was caused by the fact that nested InputManagers weren’t implementing this interface correctly, which meant they wouldn’t correctly propagate it down to their children.

Before:

After:

May seem insignificant, but every detail counts!

Fixes to cursor trail display

Until now, the gameplay cursor’s trail has been using the audio clock, which can lead to some unexpected results, especially after pausing or on retrying a map. I decoupled the trail from the audio clock in order to fix this, so it should behave a lot closer to how you’d expect it to, regardless of the state of audio playback.

API in the background…

Have been working with nekodex on bringing the new API up to speed so we can begin to populate more data in-game. This includes beatmap ratings, fail/retry times, user flags, personal best scores and more. We’re almost ready to set things up for testing, so stay tuned for further progress on that.

Oh and yes, these API changes will eventually be exposed for public consumption. We’re aiming to provide a much more feature rich API and address the concerns people have with the existing public API over the coming months.

No release today

While fixing the above issues was some major forward progress as far as stability is concerned, the code has not yet been reviewed so there will be no release today!

Bringing you the latest in osu! development

Sliderbar sound improvements

Fixed sliderbars making sounds when they shouldn’t, and added extent-specific sounds, so you know when you’ve hit the end (minimum or maximum) value of a setting.

Beatmap details page goes live!

After an arduously long code review, things are finally in a usable state. Note that there is code present for online stats, but as the API isn’t yet prepared to send those to the client they are not yet visible. You can see a preview in my post yesterday.

Fixes galore

• Fixed a long-standing issue in OpenTK where the game window would receive keyboard input when it wasn’t focused. This generally happened when the window was not focused at startup.
• Added more searchable fields at song select (tags, source). #621
• Fix crash when typing in chat overlay while not logged in. #620
• BufferedContainers no longer run needless updates on their children when they are in a cached state. framework #637

New release with all the above (and changes from yesterday)

2017.412.0 is now available from github releases (or via auto-update if you already have lazer installed)!

Bringing you the latest in lazer progress!

Results screen

One of the few elements of “osu!next” design we haven’t yet made public is the results screen. I’ve been working on this in the background whenever I get time, and am almost ready to reveal the first iteration. Keep in mind this will still be missing some design elements which we need to add more framework support to make work.

Part of the work I did today was a refactor on loading rankings into a leaderboard, as we will be reusing the leaderboard display on the results screen.

You want a preview? Ok, fine.

New HUD design

While the visual effects aren’t in yet, I’ve started moving the HUD elements to the correct place on screen. This include finally moving the combo from the bottom-left location. Keep in mind you’ll be able to customise all of this.

Beatmap details at song select

jorolf has been working away on the beatmap details panel which will sit in song select. I’ve been reviewing the code and trying to mould it into a usable state and I think we’re almost there. You should see this live very very soon.

Fixes galore

• No more crashes when clicking the “restart after update” notification. You won’t see this until the build after the next build, obviously.
• Fix combo being incremented twice in osu! mode. THis was a regression caused by the work we did on game mode modularity for osu!taiko.
• Fix off-screen transforms sometimes not being applied correctly. I’m not sure if this was visible in normal game execution, but we’ve triggered it a few times in test cases.
• Adjust cursor appear/disappear animations. They took too long and looked a bit cheesy before.
• Improvements to transition when retrying or leaving play mode. Minor changes, but things should look a lot smoother now (mainly from hiding the broken gameplay cursor).

No release today

Unfortunately there was no one available to review my code so there won’t be a new build going out today.

For those that haven’t been following, we are enforcing strict code review guidelines which means that no build can be published without one other core developer approving it. Currently there are only three of us with the knowledge of the larger picture (and how the framework works inside-out) but I hope to add more people to this group as they pick up the project and become adept at identifying potential issues with peoples’ code.

Spring fan art contest

Entries for the fan art contest we announced recently have closed and the results are up for voting. There is some amazing work, so I urge you to go check it out.