I’ve probably mentioned this before, but in recent times I’ve been pushing to get more original content in osu!. As in music we can call our own; Tracks we can stream and share without worrying about licensing; Songs we can map into a diverse range of difficulties to suit all.

After bugging cYsmix for almost a year about helping out with this initiative, I seem to have finally convinced him. Welcome him onboard as one of the first official osu! artists. Here is the first batch of songs:

cYsmix - Manic

A complextro track with many fine details which should suit to an extremely wide range of difficulties. 150bpm fast.

Download your pre-timed osz here.

cYsmix - House With Legs

A disco house track at a (relatively) laid-back 128bpm. Plenty of fun rifs and rhythms to map in this one.

Download your pre-timed osz here.

cYsmix - Dovregubben’s Hall (New Ver.)

Our first classical throwback of a song known to many as “In the Hall of the Mountain King”. Written originally in 1867 by a Norwegian artist; remixed by a Norwegian in 2015. 140 bpm.

Download your pre-timed osz here.

We have run mapping contests over time, but the general overhead with these is pretty high. Gathering judges, setting deadlines – you know the drill. This time I’m going to try doing an open bounty, instead. 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 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!

Some users were reporting loss of all connectivity since the new netcode in CE and beta. I added fallback support for cases where IPv6 isn’t working correctly which should solve this issue. If it affected you, please give it another try. Apart from this, we’re still hard at work trying to get the new stable release out.

So, what to do with recruiters who are just a bit too persistent? This guy Tony Morris insisted that he added me to his DNC list. Yet only two months later here I am hearing from him again.

fun fact #1: If you take a close look at his messages, you can see some sloppy copy-paste format mismatches.

fun fact #2: he also contact other people I employ with the same email. maybe he’d be interested in buying my company..?

Have a pleasant weekend!

Missed a day’s blog yesterday, but won’t let that get me down. Things have been a bit slow this week. Picking up pace today with some welcome changes.

The account appeal process has received the start of my planned overhaul. This will bring more conformity to how we collect information from affected users, and allow us to attend to the cases that need more immediate attention better than before.

You can give the form a whirl here (but please don’t actually complete the submission unless you are actually in need of appealing!). Note that in actual usage, a lot of the fields are pre-filled for the user, and it includes an account ownership verification code.

I can’t show you the admin side of things, but take my word that it is feeling better than ever.

To those of you reading this who have previously submitted an appeal which has not been granted yet (and not denied), feel welcome to resubmit your appeal using the new form. Even if you don’t, you will likely receive an email telling you to do so in the near future anyways.

Secondly, I’ve finally found a design I’m happy with to replace my old “ppy” brand logo (and avatar). Have had a stale taste in my mouth with the old logo for quite some time, but it’s taken a while to come up with something that fits the current design climate while also preserving the feel I was going for with the original. Meet the new ppy logo, which you will no doubt get familiar with over the coming years:

Thanks to flyte for the design work.

First large community contribution for osu!web is now live! Check out the user card display (click your avatar at the top-right to activate it)! Thanks to @claudiodekker for his contribution!

Spent today going through pull requests, fixing CE bugs, catching up on emails and customer support (sorry to those of you that have had lingering issues with payments… they should all be resolved now!) all while pondering over whether to update to iOS 9 and lose jailbreak.

Had a 28 minute downtime due to the master DB server’s hypervisor host needing a reboot. Ah well, these things happen. I took the opportunity to share exactly what it sounds like for me when servers die. Try and sleep through that ;).

Spent today retargeting osu!stream to support iOS 9. Not as straightforward as I hoped (and as always with the apple ecosystem, many hoops to jump through) but it’s done and out of the way. Not sure if anyone here still follows along with osu!stream, but it should be playable again is of later this week. Assuming it makes it through the review process!

What’s the future for osu!stream? I’m still not sure. As it’s a really solid app, abandoning feels wrong. At the same time, I don’t have the hours in a week to maintain both osu! and osu!stream to the level I’d want to – hell, i struggle with just osu!. I have tried to find people on multiple occasions to take over the project and breath some fresh life into it, but it’s hard to find someone with the drive to make things happen.

At some point in the hopefully near future, we will be in the position to release the full-fledged osu! experience on iOS. It is actually already in a state it compiles to the platform, so that may be closer than expected. Until that point, osu!stream is the best (the only?) osu! experience available on iOS, so it’s a real pity that there haven’t been any new map releases in over a year and a half.

If this update goes through without too much hassle, I might spend a bit more time on it, remove the paid bundles and make it a completely free app until something happens otherwise. I feel bad having it make money when I’m not dedicating any time towards it.