• osu!tablet replacement pens are now available from the store. I priced these at the absolute lowest price possible.
• nono keyboards are still a bit further away.
• Working on improvements to the support / ban appeal process. Nothing to announce yet, but this is an area I wish to see improvement in.
• Still not confident enough to release the new stable. Not even sure what the cause of the remaining issues are (really sucks trying to fix things you can’t reproduce yourself).
• Switched from pingdom to statuscake. Not looking back. The osu! status page has changed slightly as a result.
• Almost got back to inbox zero. Is my goal for this weekend!

Fixed BSS connectivity issues and started working with users who are encountering window handle overflows to solve that one. To me, this is the only remaining blocker for getting out the new stable40 build. Caught up on accounting and email. Fixed a few other bugs that I came across while testing the above issues (BSS should be more reliable than ever as a result).

Working through some legal issues at the moment which are stealing away my time (namely Oregon State University not wanting me to file a trademark for osu!). I can see this one taking a long time to resolve, but I’m willing to ride it out and see how things go.

Days like this I wish I had more interesting stuff going on to share with you, but alas.

No releases happening today, but some good forward progress. I took to fixing the scoreboard display – which got a recent font overhaul – to display more logically across different multiplayer modes. Team scoreboards now display symmetrically on the sides of the screens, with hit explosions more subtly placed on top of players' avatars, rather than off to the side. There is of course a lot more that could be improved in areas like this, but the huge UI and UX gains will come with the osu!next implementation. Not quite ready for that (and implementing it in small pieces doesn't feel right). Netcode is looking more stable than ever, and errors reported from the latest CE build are at an all time low. Just need to fix a [few lingering issues](http://puu.sh/kc2Bi/e703656e2d.png) and we'll be good to go. While fixing up the scoreboard, I decided it was about time we have a testbed for multiplayer games, so I created a complete [multiplayer](http://puu.sh/kc1z6/94d5c619a3.mp4) [simulation](http://puu.sh/kc0Fv/47e735a2e5.mp4). It uses real online players but generated random score increases (that *almost* make sense from a scoring perspective) to allow for testing multiplayer matches and result screens. Should help a lot with debugging, going forward. In other news, I've decided to start instagram. I'll be posting a photo a day until I run out of photos to post (likely never?). Should be some interesting photos I haven't yet published anywhere, so if you're into that kind of thing then please [follow along](http://instagram.com/__ppy)! Will end up being a stream of life and events in Japan, since that's where I've been for the last few years.

may start posting huge backlog of photos to instagram. what say you?

A photo posted by Dean Herbert (@__ppy) on Sep 14, 2015 at 9:20pm PDT

Continuing efforts towards getting the next stable release out. Today was general bug-fixing and netcode improvements. Just to be safe, the new net requests now support automatic retrying for all requests game-wide (we were getting some sporadic TLS failures around once an hour, which this solves). Still some issues present with larger BSS uploads for some, but general bancho connectivity should now be fixed in cases it was performing worse than the old code.

Added an extra filter on the old public release stream to ensure that all users automatically updated to the new stable40 release are English speakers initially. This will help smooth the upgrade process and let us fix remaining issues without worrying about language gaps.

I kind of have a plan to push out the stable40 release tomorrow, should nothing come up. There’s still a few lingering issues to work through, but fingers crossed they should take less than a day to solve (new scoreboard font alignment / bss netcode issues).

Not much interesting to say recently! We have started to move towards embracing c# 6 with all its string interpolation and null-conditional goodness. Also working towards automating code style checks in the CI build process. Just another small piece of the puzzle in the move to open-sourcing the client.

Oh, and for those of you who have contributed to the osu-web project via bounties, we haven’t forgotten about you! If you feel like we have, then please bump your issues. If not, wait patiently and we’ll do our best to give you feedback until your code is merge-able. As the osu-web project is still in early stages, there’s still a lot of large changes going on, which makes handling external contributions a bit slower than I’d like. We’ll work on this.

Gonna be a super-quick post today since I completely wore myself out on code.

Big numbers, big changes. All in a very positive direction.

It’s rare I find such an opportunity to focus on code like I did today. I will inevitably regret it tomorrow, when I start playing the catch-up game with the many shitstorms that await me in my inbox.

Best of weekends to you all!