20151029

published 29 Oct 2015

At the expense of my inbox piling up to record heights of unread mail, I’ve been making some good forward dev progress.

Shared Project

I mentioned this some time ago, but in order to better support multiple platforms, we need to have slightly different bootstrapping processes for each operating system. To allow for this, the osu! project needed to be migrated to using a shared central projects, with separate full-fledged projects for each OS.

This code is now mature enough to push live build to cutting edge. Nothing for you to see, really, but it works and that’s a good step forward!

Separate User Data Directory

Another change which needs to be made for OS X native support is to move all user data away from the executable and game data. This allows us to properly sign our code while still allowing you to load beatmaps and skins into osu!.

This will be deployed to windows eventually as well, likely splitting most of your osu! installations into two pieces. A lot of you might be shocked and against this, but think of the advantages this offers:

  • You can access your osu! folder by Start > Run > .osu .
  • Your data will be cleaner, without being poluted by osu! system files.
  • There’s no chance you will break osu! accidentally.
  • You can easily migrate just your user data to another PC.
  • You can reinstall, uninstalll, or repair osu! without worrying about losing any of your important data.
  • You can move your user data folder to anywhere on your system.

The final release of this will include a new option to let you relocate your user data folder. For existing users, it won’t automatically migrate your data away to the new folder, but will give you an option to do so (which will be highly recommended).

Draggable volume controls

You can now drag up and down to adjust volume. Not much more to say!

Also fixed a few further regressions with spinners. New beta release going out tomorrow. New stable this weekend. More osu!keyboards this weekend. Next focus is fixing remaining performance issues with stable40. Anyone experiencing such issues get on slack and idle as much as possible.

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20151028

published 28 Oct 2015

Has been a busy couple of days. What’s new?

Volume Control

Reworking of the volume control to match the final osu!next design. Say all you want about osu!next taking a while to get out, but if you’ve been keeping up with the changelog you will understand exactly how busy myself and the rest of the dev team have been on other more critical tasks. Consider that this element was completely reworked in less than a day, using our newer shader architecture.

Needless to say, progress should be fast once we get started! Most of the building blocks are coming together.

Spinner Fixes

Anyone following closely will know that spinners have been a bit broken on cutting-edge recently. They’ve actually been blocking new beta/stable40 builds going out, so I spent most of today figuring out exactly what was going on and ensuring we repair them in a fair way.

When approaching this issue – which was introduced by attempting to fix sub-60-fps spinners giving too much score – the everyone agreed that we really need to rewrite how spinners account for score, removing acceleration and a lot of special cases from the scoring algorithm and only using it for display purposes.

Unfortunately, this would likely create disparity with previous plays, so I put it on the bucket list for when I find enough time to do a proper analysis.

I did happen to come across and fix a weird bug involving replays on maps with lead-in time.

New changelog metrics

I got around to publicising some of the metrics I use on a daily basis to get how the current releases of osu! are propagating out to the community. You can find this new display on the changelog page. Follow me on the journey to get everyone to move across from StableFallback to the Stable40 branch!

Note that some release stream information is missing for older builds. This will be populated going forward (I didn’t add it for older builds because it would break existing disqus comments).

osu!keyboard shipping

We are working through shipping of the first batch of keyboards. They have been labelled and boxed and should be going out tomorrow! Expect more to become available on the store this weekend.

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Mapping With Rewards (Oct. 2015)

published 27 Oct 2015

Thanks to everyone who participated in the last round of Mapping With Rewards. I still haven’t had time to go through all the submissions, but I’ve come up with some which I really like. I’ll get around to finalising the results this week or weekend.

Coming at you with round 2 of our original music selection. cYsmix doing what he does best, delivering a spooky selection of three tracks that are perfectly fitting for Halloween.


cYsmix - Fright March

This one’s an electro/trance hybrid, 160 BPM (which I think is a nice tempo for osu!) With this song, I wanted to both challenge seasoned players, as well as provide a fun and simple melody for newcomers to play - and I think I did a good job!”

Download your pre-timed osz here.



cYsmix - Moonlight Sonata

This is, naturally, not an original by me. The original was made in 1801 by Beethoven, and I wanted to put my own Trance spin on it, and it fit well with the halloween theme this month (since it does kind of have an eerie atmosphere around it!) I think this has a lot of potential for the majority of map difficulties, and I’m looking forward to seeing this one mapped in particular. It’s 128BPM, Trance.

Download your pre-timed osz here.



cYsmix - Classic Pursuit

Back to a somewhat fast-paced 140BPM Tech Dance track, heavily inspired by a lot of retro sounds, which I still managed to sound somewhat eerie somehow. Since there’s a lot of variety on this one, I’m not sure what to expect from the maps to come from this - but I’m excited! It was a lot of fun to make, but gave me a bunch of trouble.

Download your pre-timed osz here.



I’ll be offering rewards similar to last time:

Anyone wishing to map these tracks can go ahead and do so (in your mode of choice). Once you get it completed to a rankable state – preferably actually ranked! – we’ll check your map and if it is amazingly awesome you will get the bounty for it, and your map will be bundled/marked as an official map.

Bounty offered for a full set (non-collab / single game mode):

  • Song bundled with client (for a limited period of time)
  • $50 osu!store credit
  • 6 months supporter tag
  • Unique profile badge

Conditions:

  • There will be one winner per song. We may choose the first to appear if it’s mindblowingly amazing, or wait for other entries to compare before making a choice.
  • We reserve the right to choose the background image for your map when ranked (we are trying to get an artist to make a themed set for these releases!).
  • Collaborations are not allowed. This is a personal decision; I feel single-creator sets give the most conformity.
  • Unlike standard contests, I have the final judgement on winners.
  • Please don’t map the 8-bit/piano outros! They are supposed to play at the result screen.

I’ll keep an eye out for ranked submissions, but you can also post your map in the comments here once you are done if you want it looked at. Note that we are planning on adding new tracks every month, so if none of these suit your style then stay tuned!

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20151026

published 26 Oct 2015

Today we pushed out some design updates to the new forum system to allow for easier navigation when browsing threads. It should help those of you out there that are feeling the need for pagination. Go check them out.

Also pushed out a new stable (fallback) release which prompts users to switch to stable40 (latest) in a more in-your-face way. If your PC meets the requirements, you will now see a banner on your main menu urging you to update. You should totally give it a try!

Yes, we are aware there are still performance issues for some users on the new stable release. I have made a thread specifically for those which are still affected so we can try and get enough information to track down exactly what is causing these remaining issues. Keep in mind you can always find us devs on our public slack network if you’d like a more real-time interaction.

osu!keyboards have been selling like hotcakes, forcing us to close down new orders while we catch up on shipping them out. We’re doing our best, so please be patient :).

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20151022

published 23 Oct 2015

Pushed out some recent changes to sliders today. These change the way sliders are drawn for better consistency and readability.

1. The start and end circles are no longer included in the slider body. This means that after you hit them, they will explode away and you will only see the slider body remaining.

Reasoning: A lot of people already skin slider circles out. By drawing circles on the body texture as well, this introduced scenarios where skinning would result in unwanted side-effects. It also made little sense from a visual perspective to have hitcircles remain when they weren’t actually hittable.

2. Slider bodies now fade out gradually when playing with hidden mod. This allows for better readability (ability to see notes underneath the sliders) while also feeling more in-line with what hidden mod actually stands for.

Reasoning: Up until now, it didn’t make sense to have the slider bodies remain completely visible. With the change above, having the bodies remain visible looked especially out of place. We tested various ways of approaching this, and this was the best we came up with.

I know there will be some of you out there jumping up-and-down complaining that this makes HD harder, but please, try playing with it for a few days before you make a judgement. Many of those testing have said it actually increases readability when playing hD. The body is still visible almost until the end of the active time, so it is in fact quite playable!

These changes will be left on Cutting Edge stream to simmer for a while. We won’t be pushing them out to stable until OWC is over, so rest-assured it will not affect the imminent competitive scene.

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