just as an interim update, i have been super-busy making awsome and decided to continue making awesome rather than post about it. once things are done i will make a couple of posts to make up for it.

Catching up on bug-fixes, I have finally been able to work on a few new features which are visible to the end user. Let’s get right into it!

• The user panels display now adjusts to display four columns on all widescreen modes. This solves the long time problem of having a gap to the right on some widescreen aspect ratios.

  

  It also allows for over four columns on super-widescreen resolutions, should you be running across two monitors using something like eyefinity.

• osu!mania now support vertical flip, making gameplay similar to that of DDR/o2jam. This should help people coming to osu! from said game systems adapt quite easily, instead of resorting to flipping their monitors upside-down. I was planning on adding this one, but woc beat me to it ;).

  

  The skin you see above is available here.

• Skinning now supports double-resolution sprites, allowing for very high resolution gameplay. osu! now uses these sprites when the window width is greater than 1600 pixels.

  To add support to a skin, add images with double the width/height containing the “@2x” suffix before the file extension.

• The editor now supports widescreen resolutions more elegantly. The biggest change is allowing selections outside the play-field grid. This works even when the current placement mode is not select, meaning you can start a selection while in circle or slider placement mode as long as you begin the selection outside the grid area.

• I completely restructure Bancho to allow for usergroup authentication on a per channel basis. In the process, I was able to combine the osu!stream and developer channels into the main bancho server, reducing the overhead to get people into the chat rooms. In the future, this also means we can have chat rooms pop up for teams in the case of tourneys or similar. Much more flexibility :).

Got more awesomeness already in the works. Stay tuned!

p.s. Sorry for the slider issues in the editor. Hopefully all the bug fixes made up for it.

Yet another busy week (and a bit) still catching up on support queries, combatting increasing amounts of cheating and putting some extra time into osu!stream. Making good forward progress, though!

• The in-game chat FAQ system has now been moved to the more manageable google docs format. This means that anyone can contribute both FAQ entries and localisations to other languages. Currently you can query specific languages by adding the language code before your !faq command.

  !faq ask will return the first language found (defaulting to english)

  !faq it:ask will return the same faq entry in italian, but fall-back to english if not found.

  You can find more details about contributing and localising in the osu! localisation project thread.

• BanchoBot now has a profile! Keep a watch as we build this up into something which will hopefully help people harness his power.

I thought I had more to say, but it seems these are the only recent changes that have been made which are of a nature I can make public. I can say that I am now up-to-date to the point I can hopefully clear out the open bug tickets and push some new features I’ve been working on out into the public :). Stay tuned.

I’ll make no excuses for my lack of updates. Let’s move straight on to what has changed over the last couple of weeks!

• The osu! website now makes use of SSL for all communications after logging in. This happens on the next login attempt, so if you are using a stored cookie, you may need to re-login once to get switched over.

  I am providing ssl support via a cloudflare issued certificate on a trial basis. My reasoning for doing this is that they (via globalsign) host the fastest SSL resolution available, beating the competition by ~50-80% depending on location, and allowing for almost no overhead in SSL negotiation time.

  As a result, the whole site is also being served via cloudflare’s piping service. Looking at analytics since enabling this, there has been negligible measurable change to performance (client-side load time), so it looks to be a keeper. It also allows me to throw up a custom error page should there be connectivity issues with data-centres or servers, which came in quite handy with recent data-centre troubles.

• Speaking of data-centre troubles, I am currently monitoring the situation after the downtime experienced over the last month. The issue was quite a serious one, and while I don’t believe Softlayer’s resolution was completely correct, they were trying hard to get things back online.

  The one area I am not happy with is the delay in communication from their end, and the lack of public acknowledgement (all ticket details are available only to clients via private support tickets). I will be considering my options, but likely won’t move from Softlayer this time around. They have a very stable network usually, and this may likely be the first major disaster at their end, so I am willing to give them a second chance.

• woc2006 has been working hard on a new version of the osu!mania editor (let’s pretend the last one didn’t exist). It has a proper osu!mania layout and controls which allow for both real-time and manual mapping. Currently available on the test build for those who wish to check it out!

  

• I pushed fixes to taiko backgrounds, by giving taiko mode a “metadata” bar below the playfield. This displays common information like the song artist/title, and replaces custom-baked backgrounds which were becoming quite prominent in taiko maps.

  

  In order to make this work correctly, I shifted all taiko backgrounds based on the standard “taiko map template”, which not only provides a better default alignment, but makes sure the metadata in the background is not visible. The taiko playfield is no longer transparent, so any custom skins should be updated to take this into account and avoid artifacting.

  The font used on the “metadata” bar defaults to a system font, but can be overridden on a per-skin basis by adding a taiko.ttf file to your skin. The taiko skin has been updated to reflect this (and should be automatically downloaded by the updater if you previous grabbed it via this method).

  Oh, and the taiko playfield bar now fades in and out of kiai time :).

• The osu! wiki has now been integrated with the main site design, and the old FAQ decommissioned as a result. The transition isn’t complete yet, with some styling looking a bit off and some basic javascript not working, but it is much better than what we had before. I hope this will

  

Stay with me here. I’m trying my best given circumstances.

The observant will notice that I have been a bit less active over the last couple of weeks. This is partly due to the fact that I have been moving/settling in to a new living and office environment, and catching up with a lot of people I haven’t seen in a while. Things are getting back on track though, and I have been busy not only working on my own new features/fixes, but also merging the contributions from Ephemeral and woc2006.

• Added the ability to reset key bindings to defaults. This is one of those feature requests I see and instantly wonder why it isn’t already implemented. I then proceed to drop everything and implement it immediately.

• Fixed remaining issues with “Loading…” players in multiplayer games. This was being caused due to a constant not being the same on server and client, meaning if a certain number of presence requests were made at once, they would be silently ignored by bancho (causing those players to remain in a loading state forever).

• Widescreen support in Match Setup thanks to Ephemeral. This means that as far as I can tell, every game mode/screen in osu! is now widescreen compatible. Quite a good achievement!

• A few futher tweaks were required to hyperdash after getting feedback from pro players. This was an interesting one to follow up on, because while a lot of players voiced how much they disliked the new changes, they could not say why. Luckily I did find someone who could pinpoint the issue at hand – specifically the behaviour of the “dash” button during hyperdash – and it will be pushed out as a fix in the next release.

• I did a lot of internal clean-up on error handling scenarios, to make processing error reports a lot less painful. Also fixed a few scenarios where osu! wouldn’t automatically restart after it says it will.

• “Finally” updated the main menu copyright graphic, which is no longer really that. I removed the (in my opinion) unnecessary copyright text and made it more friendly and compact.

• I did also start work on a “Free Mod” mode for multiplayer, allowing each player to choose their own mods. There’s still quite a bit of implementation and testing to get this working perfectly, but expect it to hit the test build in the next couple of days!

Touching back on the start of this post, I am now in Japan for the near future. Give me a yell if you are in Japan (or planning to be over the next few months) and we may be able to catch up for a coffee, or game of jubeat ;).

As a side note, I was able to write this entry completely on my iPhone using the newly released Textastic code editor. Pretty awesome stuff.