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.