Apologies for the lack of posts! Got a bit lost in nature. Hopefully some photos will make up for it.

Returning to our regular schedule tomorrow, all going well.

I’m out of office but still working on-the-go this week. Will try to keep up the posting as I go. Here’s some questions I answered but never got around to posting on the weekend!

@ppy If I were to go to Japan would I be allowed to meet you sometime or do you strictly differentiate between virtuality and reality? –WiiPlayer2

I’m always happy to catch up with osu! players! Give me a yell on twitter if you are visiting Tokyo and we’ll sort things out :).

@ppy why pp arent always proportional with the stars difficulty? Also are you proud of how became the osu (throught community) ? –MrDestla

That is a question best for Tom. As far as I’m concerned they should be in parity, but this doesn’t account for the drop-off when you don’t get 100% accuracy.

@ppy What do you think was the hardest thing to add in to the game? –JH23_PL

Was, or is? Honestly, the hardest things to implement are those that require consideration of migrations (features where we need to allow for upgrade paths). For instance, osz2 (the new file format which is still only used in beatmap submission) or huge build changes (.NET 2 -> 4, Direct X to OpenGl etc.).

So basically we’re currently at the pinnacle of difficult implementations! It should get easier from here.

@ppy what kinds of features will be implemented along with the teams? –_iDunno

We’ve given a few sneak peaks of what to expect on osu!next and also on the osu!talk episodes with flyte and myself, so I’m not sure I have anything extra to tell you! The basic idea is to make teams fit a very broad scope, so groups can use them for competitive play or just for getting together and having fun.

@ppy my cursor keeps derping out and going all over the place whenever i play osu! it works fine on any other game/in general. your input? –batmanjammies

Try Raw Input, and play with the sensitivity settings. It may be that you are just doing more drastic movements in osu! when compared to other games, and your sensor can’t keep up, so please try the same movements in windows to make sure it’s not a hardware limitation.

@ppy Any osu! player already recognised you in the streets? If yes how was that moment? –italobechepeche

Has not happened yet.. although I have had people stalk my twitter and join meet-ups with other people unexpectedly.

@ppy When is the new osu! update coming? I REALLY wanna see it, just a demo or something pleeeaase –andr813c

It’s coming when it’s done. Honestly, we don’t even have a demo to show. Keep a watch on osu!next blog and my blog for the latest.

@ppy Are you familiar with the @handmade_hero project by @cmuratori? It is very inspiring and wondered if you had any thoughts? –cjwiet

I’m not… I’ll have to look into that!

@ppy Hello there! I just wanted to know something owo ! The limit of qualified maps is reseted every day at 18:00 ? It’s weird here o: –Secretpipe

At one point it was reset at a certain hour, but now it’s a rolling limit to make things fairer.

@ppy What program you use to record videos? –Repflez

ShareX with puush setup as a custom uploader. It’s great.

@ppy Is there any estimate on when the Linux version is gonna be worked on? –YaLTeRz

After OS X is out and stable we can consider that.

@ppy You think to implement a lan multiplayer option for osu? (Useful for osu! Partys with friends and more pc’s) –sebaex

While there won’t be an offline mode, I do plan on allowing local synchronisation for multiplayer games where all players are on the same local network.

Happy Monday to everyone! Another quick update post:

• I managed to stream on Sunday! Thanks to everyone who made this relatively short stream a thoroughly enjoyable one. I hope to do it again soon.
• Making good progress on the next public release. At the point where we can release any time; I’m just figuring the best strategy of release as far as timing goes.
• The Slack team has proven to be useful in not only testing cutting-edge bugs but provoking some very interesting conversations! So far I’m pretty happy with the small community that has gathered there :).
• Made great progress on the next osu!keyboard order. We’re almost ready to beging a production run of 2,000 units, so keep a look out for more information as it comes.

I realise I didn’t post a Q&A post on the weekend. I will be doing some more Q&A from tomorrow to make up for it. Trust that if I miss a post it’s for the best; this weekend that just passed was a very productive one!

Let’s make this week a great one.

Hi there. I spend a good portion of today locking down the new slack team, as it got flooded with people that I didn’t want to be on there (some creating up to five accounts before I got to restricting access). You may say “You should have known better”, but it would seem I don’t think that far forward! It’s a trial and these things are bound come up; whether we can overcome them and achieve a stable environment will be the interesting part.

With that out of the way, let’s talk about my goal for this week: a public release. For those of you not on cutting-edge or beta, you have probably noticed the lack of any updates for 3 months, so it’s probably about time I directly address why it has been so long (and why I’m not going to be able to meet my goal for this week).

Most are aware of the switch to .NET 4 and OpenGL. While we have made amazing progress in compatibility and performance – most users are reporting amazingly better performance on cutting edge – there are still a number of issues to fix. Most of the remaining issues are experienced by only a handful of people, but when you extrapolate that to an audience of over one million players, there are bound to be many more casualties.

What kind of issues are left to be fixed? Here’s an incomplete list from the top of my mind:

• osu!mania performance degradation for some
• Software renderer being returned for users with WHQL (generic) drivers
• OS X compatibility

Apart from this there are a lot of smaller regressions which I am happy to push live, but these few remaining compatibility problems are basically what’s holding things back. They may take quite some time to iron out, too, which is why I am changing my release strategy this time around.

Rather than waiting for everything to be resolved, I am planning an interim public release which has knowledge of the criteria which trigger broke behaviours, and will stop the user from receiving updates in these cases. Something like this was already used for the switch of cutting-edge to 4.0, so it’s not unfamiliar territory. Only through the magic of release streams can it be done with little effort.

So when will the next public release be, you ask? I hope to have it available in the next week. Three months is just too long.

Over the last year we have basically migrated all osu! administration and development communications to Slack. As it has proven astoundingly successful and is a tool we couldn’t live without, I’ve been considering how to expand our Slack usage to include a more wide audience. The next step starts today.

Calling everyone interested in:

• Testing cutting-edge features with us in real-time.
• Contributing art, graphic or sound resources to the project (or getting the core team’s feedback on your creations).
• Getting help working with the API, or just developing your own apps/services which further build the osu! ecosystem.
• Communicating directly with me and the rest of the team in a focused and spam-free environment.

From today you can join us on a new public slack team I created specifically for the more open future of osu!. Internally we will still be using our private Slack team for more of the administration (and private development) side of things, but gradually I hope to make more of this transparent. Think of this as the first step of something larger.

A few things to note:

• Don’t join unless you fit in to one of the above categories. In the future we may extend the scope, but for now people found abusing the new communication media will be gracefully removed from the team.
• This is not a new way to bug the team for account queries. Don’t use it as such; not only will we ignore you, but we will increase your appeal duration an extra 6 months.
• Please register from your osu! registered email address.
• Please set your username and your First Name to your osu! username. The username field is all lowercase, so use your First Name to adjust case to exactly match your osu! username. Leave Last Name blank.
• This is a free Slack team, which means we will have limited history. Make sure to export any important conversations you may want to keep in the future. Going forward I will consider whether it’s feasible to make this a paid Slack team based on the number of users we see active on it.
• Slack has very good mobile support, as well as native apps available for windows and OS X. Figure out what suits you best.

I will touch back on this subject as we figure out how it is going to work, but for now it’s a matter of getting relevant people in one place so we can better discuss the future :).

Don’t know how to join? Read this post again more carefully.