It has been a while since I’ve posted on general osu! progress, so here’s a cumulative update for January! It’s safe to say we’re making good progress in a lot of areas, though personally I still want to see more happen faster.

Infrastructure Improvements

There has been a pretty large spike in concurrent users over the last couple of months. In order to keep things working smoothly with the increased demand, I’ve begun to add additional servers where they didn’t exist before. The first of these to be introduced was a dedicated score submission server, decoupling it from the main private API backend server (previously handled score retrieval as well). Deployment of specific web-based tasks has always been quite modular, so adding new servers fortunately comes with little overhead, apart from the added cost. Work continues this week as I prepare servers for the added load caused by Chinese New Year.

In addition to processing servers, I’ve also been expanding the download mirrors to make sure the osu! game client, updates and associated resources are streamed as fast as possible to the various regions of the world. More to come on this, since I find content distribution quite an interesting area to discuss!

Skin Preview

Now live on cutting-edge, skin gameplay preview has finally come back. Rather than a specifically crafted game mode, it will randomly choose a beatmap, set the mods to Autoplay and seek to an area of the beatmap where you can see some action. The options menu is now able to stay open in this mode, allowing you to make changes to the skin (and other settings) while instantly seeing how it affects gameplay.

New Interface Sounds

I mentioned these at the end of last year, but they are now added on cutting-edge. You can go check them out yourself. They are also all skinnable.

OWC Prizes

We got our workflow sorted for sending tournament prizes out. The main osu!store’s fulfillment centre is already under enough load, so we had to setup a second fulfillment centre specifically for handling these prizes. Everything is going smooth now, and all OWC 2015 prizes have now been sent out to the winning teams!

New osu!web releases

The new osu! website is slowly beginning to take form! The beatmap listing is now live (ignore the low quality thumbnails please), along with new sections on user profiles including history, beatmaps and achievements. Livestreams are also visible, though the design is in need of severe revision.

Progress on the new web is about 10,000x slower than I want it to be. I’m still trying to figure out how to improve this without sitting down and completing it myself. If you are someone that has seen the bounty system we are running but something is holding you back from contributing, please let me know so I can do everything in my power to help increase productivity on the project! I will be announcing many more bounties over the coming weeks, so keep an eye out here and on the github repo.

Reddit Presence

I threw some effort into trying to get some degree of order in /r/osugame (to the point I would be personally happy to return there). Things are looking good, with cheating reports separated into a new dedicated sub-reddit. There’s a lot of unique conversation, content and meta that doesn’t make it on the official osu! forums, so if you don’t already frequent that place, you may want to check the sub-reddit out once in a while and see if it’s something you want to follow along with!