Spent this last week finishing up work on widescreen background support during play mode, and took the opportunity to improve the transition between song select and play mode, along with the loading process.

• All loading is now done asynchronously on a separate thread. This means there is no visual pause when loading beatmaps. While this doesn’t mean much for most people with fast hardware, it was a prerequisite to the changes I wanted to make to the transition into play mode.

  For the time being, I added a fixed one second delay to the loading process to make the UX how I envisaged it working (especially important for fast PCs). I have further plans on what will happen during this loading process to make it more than just loading, but that will come in a future update.

• Fun Spoiler has been renamed to Visual Settings, and buffed a bit. It is now possible to dim background images to black after playing maps at least once. The new dialog is also featured in a much more prominent place, hopefully meaning more people will see and make use of it.

  

• Widescreen support for play mode, with aspect fill now used for all backgrounds and videos. Automatically detects when storyboards are present and falls back to 4:3 display, to ensure alignment is not broken as a result. There are still a few cases where artifacts can be seen here, suck as storyboards which used to have hidden elements due to letter-boxing now being visible. This will be fixed and improved going forward, along with the option to make widescreen storyboards.

  As a side note, you can now start using widescreen backgrounds and video and they should be recognised appropriately.

• I made some fixes to opengl display – especially to the initialisation process. This means that opengl should load faster than ever and no longer flicker on load. I also looked into getting context sharing over multiple threads, to bring opengl up to the same level of threaded performance is direct x. One more step forward towards dropping direct x support completely – part of my master plan of ridding osu! of XNA and supporting more platforms more natively than ever before.

• Added the ability to set custom refresh rates (for fullscreen mode) and custom fps targets for frame limiter mode. Should be useful for people playing osu! on 120hz monitors, or those who are after a frame-rate limit somewhere between unlimited and 120fps.

• Best of osu! 2012 voting is now open! Make sure to check it out and vote for the beatmaps you enjoyed the most over the last year.

I have quite a bit of stuff to organise over the coming weeks, so updates may be a bit slower than usual. I do have plans for a small osu!stream update, including a new map pack, so keep an eye out if that kind of thing interests you :).

Running a bit late with the post this week, due to an all-weekend LAN event which involved updating and taking along my two osu!arcade units! Currently playing catch-up with both sleep and work.

• I again spent some time optimising the tourney spectator client during the weekend’s OWC matches. Mostly just some minor tweaks to ensure smoothness and reduce buffering.

• Made some UI changes to the updater – mainly that the “use test build” checkbox has been removed. Some people seem to have been accidentally clicking this without understanding what it means, and locking themselves into the test build. Also looking at changing the update process a bit. Not too happy with how the updater is such a context switch out of the game.

• Switched CDN/static content over to https with SPDY support. As most major browsers support SPDY, there is no need to distribute content over multiple domains to achieve parallel throughput, so I also moved all javascript resources locally. Based on my own performance tests, the difference was not discernible, but I have had positive feedback from countries such as China, where this kind of thing matters.

• Improvements to lobby layout, making better use of available screen space. The filters toggle is no longer available, with filters always being shown instead. I have plans for further changes here, but still brewing in my head. The users list is no longer displayed, saving on a bit of network traffic as well.

  

• I rewrote the in-game chat link parsing algorithm. This was a pretty big endeavour, replacing some at-times-hacky character counting for link styles like [http://test.com test words [may contain brackets]] with single regex match-and-replaces:

  \[([a-z]+://[^ ]+) ([^\[\]]*(((?<open>\[)[^\[\]]*)+((?<close-open>\])[^\[\]]*)+)*(?(open)(?!)))\]

  Explaining this would be require a separate post, I think. Let’s just say that chat links now support line breaks, cases where multiple links are on the same line, and gracefully display erroneous links. They also look a bit nicer!

  

• Messaages in chat by silenced users is now removed from in-game chat history. This ensures that bad behaviour – especially linking inappropriate content – has minimal effect on other users. Took this idea from twitch/justin.tv’s book.

• Hosted osu!arcade units at RFLAN yet again. This included adding experimental support for conversion of osu! maps to osu!stream, which is working pretty well! I spent about half the LAN watching people play and modifying the game to provide a better experience based on this feedback.

  Make sure to check out this highlight of an osu! map being played with a straw, or dive in and watch some of the recorded stream of the 24 hour event!

• I also released an osu!stream update on the App Store with iPhone 5 support.

I’ve got some interesting stuff planned for osu! updates in the near future, so stay tuned :).

This week I set aside a good block of time to replace the registration and activation process for osu!. The main reasoning behind focusing on improvement in this area is the number of emails I receive each week from people who have issues with either the captcha or email verification/confirmation, requiring manual intervention.

• Registration process was completely rewritten to be as simple as possible. Rather than hinging on standard verification methods, new users are now only asked for their username, email and password (and only once for each). Once these are validated, they are asked to login to osu!.

  

  The login to osu! not only double-checks they entered the password they think they did, but it also means they are instantly logged in without any annoying email checking getting in the way.

  

  The main disadvantage to this change is that anyone who cannot access an osu! client will not be able to register. This means that (for the moment), osu!droid or osu! iPhone users will not be able to participate in the forums. I may provide a solution for these people in the coming week(s).

  For a limited time, you can test the new registration process for yourself on the test server. Note that you will need to run the test build of osu! to complete activation. Accounts created here will be deleted around every three hours, so don’t worry about making more than one (or entering valid details).

• When creating new accounts, users are now warned if it is likely they are about to (unknowingly) create a multi-account.

  

• The download page got a much needed redesign. I plan on doing some more work here, but it is already feeling a lot nicer.

• Next up is fixing the email change, password change and forgotten details processes to bring them in line with the quality and simplicity of the new system. I hope to complete these next week.

• Tournament spectator client has some upgrades! It now synchronises playback between all clients, which looks pretty damn cool in practice. I can’t wait to see what people think during the OWC matches this weekend.

  The spectator setup process is now completely automated, meaning streamers no longer need to track player or song changes. On providing a multiplayer match ID, osu! will handle the rest. Automation Ho!

• Previously mentioned bancho protocol optimisations have gone live and have reduced overall outwards traffic by around 5-10%. This is quite a substantial improvement – especially since this saving occurs during game client connections, reducing the delay before users can enter multiplayer etc. by around 20%. I still have a few more improvements up my sleeve for further down the track :).

• I changed the file structure of avatar storage to allow for easier access from multiple sources. File extensions are no longer provided, and as such file types are determined during client-side display logic. As a result, there are no longer conflicts when users upload multiple formats of avatars over a period of time, and the logic for displaying avatars is super-simple. As an interesting tidbit, osu! has over 5.6gb worth of 128x128 avatars in its store!

Going to be another busy weekend with OWC matches throughout Saturday and Sunday. Make sure to tune in and witness the improvements to the streaming setup!

With the OWC tournament ongoing, I have been helping out in that area and further improving broadcasting tools. As a result, not much visible progress was made this week.

• Multiplayer history pages on the osu! website now update in real-time! I really wanted to provide an up-to-date version of scores without forcing people to mash the refresh key, and am happy with the result. Updates propagate within 5 minutes of in-game events. I also re-designed these pages to be more readable, and use the new beatmap info panes.

  

• I have made further improvements to the tourney spectator client, removing file access conflicts when downloading new beatmaps and/or processing the beatmap database. Each of the clients now communicates with each other to schedule updates, with the first client being the only one to perform the grunt of the work. Country labels were also added, so streaming plugins are no longer required for these details.

• When making some web changes, I found some code which was used for user rating of maps that had not yet been updated to using the latest database API, so I spent some time fixing this up. In the process I removed a good 0.5gb of redundant data and improved the efficiency of beatmap ratings by a whole lot!

• A lot of new localisable fields were added including newer options screen text (by woc) and main menu tips (by me). I made further improvements to the usability of the localisation spreadsheet, as well. There are at least three new languages this week which went from non-existent to 100% completion. Let’s say I am very impressed with this outcome – although I’m not as impressed that the Japanese translation is completely stagnant at lower completion than the existing v1 translation (any takers?!).

• I have started automatically reporting beatmap corruption to the server so I can figure any remaining causes of this and iron things out.

• I have begun micro-optimisations on the bancho network stack to reduce the size of user presence packets and hopefully speed up the initial osu! server connection – which can be seen struggling when there are 8,000 users. It is currently sending about 250kb of data, and so far I have reduced this by 35%, and hope to gain further reductions before making this live.

• I received my t-shirts and hoodie order from the osu!market, and am thoroughly pleased with the quality! We have also recently added some mugs to the store with the same designs, so go check them out if that is your kind of thing :).

  

As a reminder, we have been streaming the osu! World Cup via twitch, and hitting around 3.5k viewers at peak, so make sure to check out some of the matches (the schedule is listed below the stream, and you can also access recording as well in the “Videos” tab).

Another relatively busy week on the server maintenance side of things, switching out the old bancho server with the new one. There also seems to be a sudden surge in tournaments being organised, which triggered a temporary change in priorities!

• Bancho is now running on the new server. The switch was made at low-peak on the 19th, and there was no downtime experienced. This did require an osu! client update, which was rolled out over a few hours beforehand. Non-updated clients will not be able to connect, but as always, are automatically updated.

  The new server is provisioned for an extra 66% bandwidth (allowance, not speed), and should be able to handle increasing traffic for well into next year.

• I shifted server monitoring to a hosted service (ScoutApp). This was primarily done to alleviate the risk of failure (and maintenance) involved in running monitoring myself, which was previously done using Cacti.

  ScoutApp was my choice for monitoring because it offers reasonable pricing and easy setup. I am still running my monitoring using their one month trial, but am happy enough to continue using it into the future.

  

  The ability to log many stats and create dynamic graphs at any point in the future makes ScoutApp super powerful. It also has an open plugin architecture, which allowed me to graph .NET metrics even though they don’t actually support Windows Server as an OS.

• The screenshots page now shows a selection of relatively-popular user uploads (those things that come from hitting Shift-F12 in-game).

• I implemented a new spectator mode for tournament use, which automates the process of setting up an array of spectator clients to live-stream tournaments. This will be used for streaming the upcoming osu! World Cup #3 (starting in just over six hours, running for a month or so) and a smaller Japanese osu!mania tournament running this weekend (Saturday UTC11:00~).

  I have plans to further improve this functionality and make it semi-public, so anyone wishing to use it can apply for temporary access. It is currently available via private applications. If interested, please make sure your tournament is well set-up, has a thread and reliable staff and is fully scheduled before contacting me via PM for access.

• While investigating performance issues (latency occurring on the last hitcircle of a beatmap), I accidentally found other areas of osu! I could optimise. This ended in a rewrite of texture handling which means that when running in Direct X mode, osu! no longer needs to store a copy of textures in RAM when they are already sent to video memory. This resulted in ~33% decrease in memory consumption across the board – and even more in some cases.

  The reason textures were stored in RAM was due to XNA allowing developers to be more lazy in how they choose to load textures, meaning if a graphics context is lost (window changes to another monitor, resolution is changed, full-screen toggle etc.) there is no extra code complexity to reload textures. osu! already handles this correctly and having XNA still managing textures was completely useless. I was very happy to find this one, as it was a quick win which will help users with low-spec machines across the board!

• I found and fixed a memory leak occurring when loading custom hit-sounds. After loading any sample, the sample was being freed using an incorrect call, leaving some resources hanging on to invalid memory references. This may have caused crashes or excessive memory usage after several hours of playing maps using custom samples.

• Localisations for osu! have been updated to use the new Google Sheet localisation method. This should allow for very speedy changes and additions to localisations. A total of 26 languages are now available for selection in osu!.

  Every time I build a new public release of osu!, new translations are automatically pulled from the shared spreadsheet. I do take the time to look over changes and make sure there have not been any malicious modifications/additions (since it is publicly editable) before pushing them out to users. That said, localisations are not tied to individual osu! builds, and will be updated automatically when available.

  The code to integrate reading from google docs was handily borrowed form osu!stream, where it has proven to be a very efficient method of localising in-game text. I do plan on adding more localisable text in the near future, including eventual editor support.

That’s all for this week! Let me know if you want less or more detail; if you want to know about different aspects I have failed to cover; even just that you enjoyed this post :).