And so we approach the end of another year. We got quite a bit done this year, but as always seems to happen some “deadlines” have slipped past us. For those that still have a glimpse of hope, sorry but the osu!next design implementation will not be complete this year. Some people have been mentioning it recently like it’ll be a huge drop (basically like a new product) but let me stress that as with everything I do, it’ll be a gradual update of what we currently have, and you will be able to follow along on the Cutting Edge release stream.

With that out of the way, I have a few updates.

• OWC winners (1st 2nd and 3rd) will actually be getting a limited edition mug on top of the aforementioned prizes! It completely slipped my mind that we had already completed the design, and were waiting on production run to complete. Will reveal it on here as soon as we receive them!
• The osu!store has officially shut for this year. Thanks to everyone for your support. We truly hope your purchases have improved you quality of life in some small way. We do have a lot in store for 2016, with many new products in planning or production currently, so if you’ve been after something we don’t yet offer keep an eye on the store or my blog!
• I put some work into the background saving system (which handles writing beatmap and score databases as well as all the configuration files to disk). Where previously saves would only happen when osu! was made inactive for a certain amount of time, now they will happen a lot more often, while still avoiding any performance degradation during gameplay. As a result, it should now be a whole lot harder for a single crash to result in data loss.
• Due to a few remaining issues with keyboard sounds, the new sound scheme I said will be pushed to cutting edge probably won’t happen until next week. In its current state it would likely piss the majority of users off, so that’s probably for the best.

This may be my last blog for the year (no promises) as I will be spending Christmas with family and friends, so if you don’t hear from me again, have an amazing Christmas & New Year. Make sure to take occasional breaks from osu! and spend some time with your real-life acquaintances - they will definitely appreciate it!

Let’s make 2016 the best year osu! has seen yet.

I’m going to be mirroring a few recent updates I made on twitter, but there some more exciting new content too!

• OWC 2015 was a blast. Amazing tournament to watch. Thanks to everyone who participated and everyone who watched on! We announced the physical prize that in my eyes is even cooler than the money prize: a unique pin badge set that is exclusively produced for 2015-2016 official tournaments!

• So congratulations to USA taking away around $2,500 in prize money, China with $1,600 and Poland with $800. Prizes will be distributed early next year once we have the logistics in place.

• Thanks to the 1,266 people who supported the tournament through a profile banner purchase. You managed to cover half of the prize pool, which is a huge help!

• We’ve had a few issues getting tablets through the docks, but it looks like they should be back on the store tomorrow. Keep in mind we won’t be able to ship too many before Christmas, and the osu!store will be taking a brief break over the holidays.

• osu! mugs are on their way early next year! We have a few other new products coming mid-to-late January, so keep your eyes open.

• I rewrote BSS storage logic once again to improve reliability. It seems that the C# AWS SDK just wouldn’t live up to its name, so I’ve switched to using a command-line alternative. Been keeping a close eye on the server and it hasn’t fallen over once, so this is looking promising. We also have a patch incoming to the stable release tomorrow which helps with slow internet connections failing BSS uploads.

• Currently have someone working on revamping the osu! interface sounds to make it feel much more awesome. I’ve always felt that for a rhythm game, osu! really doesn’t pay enough attention to sound effects. Keep in mind this is a work in progress, but consider it an example of the level of detail we plan on applying to the whole game as we move forward.

Looks like I’ll be falling back to a weekly entry once again!

• Received the final sample of the yet-to-be-announced OWC prize! Make sure to follow along with tomorrow’s stream of the grand finals if you want to see what we have coming! Very excited to reveal it :).
• Been working through some import issues to get the latest batch of osu!tablets on the store. Amazing how much trouble a few incorrect numbers can make on documents. Hopefully they’ll be back up on Monday, but do keep in mind the osu!store will be taking a break over Christmas again this year.
• I put aside some time this week to improve the osu!store admin tools to be able to modify orders and addresses. Saves these issues falling back to me to complete at a lower level.
• Still receiving your feedback about remaining performance issues. We’ve still got plenty to try out, so keep the logs coming on slack! As expected, Optimus architecture systems still seem to be an issue (low performance on dedicated GPU).
• A new history architecture went live for the osu! editor, thanks to TheVileOne. This fixes the memory consumption issues of the old system and should make restoring undo states (and placing new notes on very long beatmaps) a much smoother experience.
• Spent some time (as I do each month) reviewing server security. Strengthened server firewall rules and centralised logic for distributing these rules to each server.
• Moved our cloud-based development environment to Singapore (used to be in the US) to allow for lower latency access from the main locations our devs work from. This reduces latency from 110-280ms to 60-110ms. Makes for a much smoother experience when not using local deployments (sometimes we need to test on more active live data).

I realise I haven’t streamed yet this week. Will try to fit some in tomorrow before the OWC finals! Better be there for those ;).

I may have somehow gone a week without updates, but I did manage to stream at least once! A lot has happened so let’s get straight into it.

• NVIDIA performance issues are basically resolved! I couldn’t be happier to announce this. The culprit turned out to be the way we render sliders, and the fix (albeit a temporary one) was just a matter of limiting the updating of slider track textures to be less often. The amusing part is that the issue here only occurred for users which had hardware that was rendering simply too fast, and as such did not affect lower-end users.
• We’re working on a more permanent solution which involves a lot more underlying changes to the way sliders are rendered. This is already partially implemented on cutting-edge, so feel free to help us out by testing the performance difference between beta and cutting-edge builds over the next week!
• I’m looking for NVIDIA optimus users (people with dual-GPU laptops) to test further. Still not sure if we’ve resolved all problems with this hardware combination, so if you are still being affected on cutting-edge by bad performance when using the dedicated GPU, get on slack and ping me.
• OWC 2015 is rapidly coming to an end. As we approach the finals, we are also reaching the cut-off for the ability to purchase a profile banner to support your favourite (remaining) team. Remember, if you have the banner of the winner, it will display for some time beyond the end of the tournament with a special winner design!
• We’ve begun rolling out osu! client email verification requirements in a hope of making the game (and your account) more secure. Starting from the highest ranked players and gradually increasing the users covered by this protection over the coming weeks. Keep in mind if you are always playing from the PC, you may never see this come into effect as we know you are the true account owner already :).
• I’ve been spending some time debugging an issue with outgoing email delays to google apps domains. If your osu! email address is a google apps one and you are experiencing delays, please let me know in the comments. This tends to happen at certain times in the day and usually resolves itself within 30-60 minutes.
• We’ve learnt that some osu! nono keyboards have a fault LED in one of the keys. If you purchased one recently and your right-hand key LED backlight is consistently dimmer than the left, please get in touch with the store staff (reply to your order confirmation email) and we will send you a replacement LED you can drop in place.
• I plan to try and stream at least once a week going forward, so keep a watch on my twitch channel if that interests you!

Mid-week update ahoy! Gonna stay brief since I’m absolutely worn out from multi-tasking.

I’ve been mostly focusing on improving the general account security offered from our end. It is clear that we weren’t doing enough to ensure users protect their own accounts, so I increased the minimum password requirements and am taking many furhter measures to reduce the possibility of accounts being reposessed by bad entities. Not quite ready to give full details, but I will when I can!

The hardest problem is finding a balance between convenience and security. While I now have everything in place to require two-factor verification across the board, I’m still working out fine details to ensure it is only presented when of upmost necessity. A fine line, but I’m getting to the point where I have a bit of confidence in my strategy.

Along the way, we found out just how many people used fake email addresses or didn’t keep their osu! account up-to-date, so no longer have access to their registered address. While we initially handled these queries manually, it became clear by the point we received over 1,000 support tickets in 24 hours that this was not a viable solution.

Therefore I’ve been working on a semi-automated email recovery system, which should (in most cases) give us enough information to ensure only the actual account holder will be able to take full control over the account.

As always, I strive to have everyone’s best interest at heart and want to continue to provide a safe and enjoyable environment for people to connect, relax and recover from the daily grind.

I hope to finish work on account security modifications this week so I can once again focus my development time on things that matter… like getting osu!next out by the end of this year (I’m sure you’re all aware how unlikely that is now >_<).

A few things to note:

• Next batch on tablets is on its way to our storage. We SHOULD be able to send a few our before Christmas icks into action, but our store staff will be taking the holiday off. If you are looking to order something from the store for Christmas, I’d aim to do so in the first week of December at the latest.
• osu! USB sticks are in! I’ve been running some tests on them and need to modify some parts of osu! to get perfect performance when running from the USB memory itself, but it’s looking promising. 80MB/s write, 200+MB/s read consistent. They feel amazing, too. Look for them on the store in limited quantity either December or January depending on how things go.
• World cup exclusive merch is looking amazing. I really want to share this with you guys, but I’m going to do my best not to give anything away until OWC comes to an end!
• Someone returned to osu! and bancho has yet to fall over. Probably means they haven’t played yet. Interesting times, though :).