June might be mostly done, but that doesn’t mean we all forgot about our monthly meeting! Just the person responsible for writing the summary did. Oops.

As our monthly development meetings continue to be very much a revolving door of ideas and formats, June continued the trend of everything being pretty much completely different from the month before. Instead of discussing grand, overarching goals that we’d like to see completed, we turned our efforts towards keeping each other updated and involved about our respective tasks within the team.

That being said, June was not a very productive month for us, unfortunately.

Here’s a summary of what went down:

• osu-web development continues, and the forums draw closer to being ready for a complete switch-over. It is something of a recurring theme for these posts to contain things that are almost ready for deployment, but the new forums (henceforth referred to as jizz in memoriam of its early working subdomain) are pretty much done. Granted, we said we’d get this out last month, and the month before that too. Things are progressing slower than we’d like, but they’re getting there. This includes the elusive moddingv2, as well.
• LAZER is getting closer to a final, public release candidate. The final phase of the open-source plan for osu! approaches completion, and once the bulk of LAZER is done, development can be entrusted not only to just the in-house developers we have currently, but the entire community. It’s slow, arduous work (as highlighted in this blog post by peppy), but absolutely mandatory for pretty much everything else to get done.
• New designs for a sleek, black osu!tablet are entering full production soon. Some of you might’ve already seen peppy’s tweet about the design. A few early issues with the prototype unit were identified and sent off to be fixed, but we hope to get a stock of these new, improved tablets in sooner rather than later.
• Beatmapping contests will be held more frequently from now on. We’ve had a bit of a dearth of these in recent months, bar the recent Aspire contest, but we plan to host many more of them in the remainder of the year. These new contests will be across all gamemodes, and will include a shift from solely a jury-type judging system to a full community voting system.

The next dev meeting will be held on the public osu!dev discord in real-time. Spectators (listeners?) will only be able to listen in to our feckless banter, but we will have a small section towards the end of the meeting where we take some questions from those listening to mull over.

The date is not yet solidified, but it will be at 16:00 UTC on a given date between the 29th of July to the 1st of August. We’ll post with more details when the exact date is ironed out. Anyone with approved access to the osu!dev discord is free to join and listen in. We might even release a recording of the meeting afterwards if all goes well. We’ll see!

See you there!

– Ephemeral