Turns out we’ve had a lot to talk about this July, what-with two dev meeting posts in a single month. Best of all, this new one was public!

To much excitement from the community at large, we held July’s meeting publicly in our dedicated development Discord server, with peppy himself streaming the affair via his twitch channel. While only the people participating in the meeting could actually speak, anyone with access to the server could commentate on the goings-on in a special channel. This was something entirely new for us - and we’re definitely looking at making this a more regular thing.

Here’s what got done this month:

• The new sleek, black osu!tablet has been ordered and will be in the store within a month. Not the month, but a month. flyte proudly announced in the meetings that the new design features less in-your-face triangles and more of his signature design finesse. Whatever that means.
• Work on LAZER continues at a slow pace. We’ve all but given up attempting to put a timeframe on its release date, since the developers are taking things slowly and adhering to strict standards in their work on the refactor. Lots of work is still being done each month (you can see for yourself if you’re a member of the osu!dev discord - #osu-lazer channel has the details), but things are still very far away from even a proper CE release as of yet.
• We released a new set of achievements (and medals) in the Mod Spotlight series. These medals are all about experimenting with mods that some players may never have even looked at before, and are the gentle introduction to the sort of stuff required for the upcoming Hush-Hush 2 medals which will seriously test people’s mettle and riddle-solving skills.
• The new forums are excruciatingly close to being fully released. If you’re fond of the current forums, start saying your farewells, because with nanaya’s work on the implementation almost entirely complete, they’ll not be around for much longer. This will be the most visible part of osu!next that people will see before the actual client, and we’re really excited to see it almost come to fruition.
• A new contest system has been developed that paves the way for community votes and weekly contests of all kinds. nekodex has been hard at work on a brand new contest system that supports not only jury judging, but also community voting as well. With this coming live within the next week for the circles! remix contest, expect more contests coming for all sorts of things within the year.
• Competitive score adjustments for Mania mode (scorev2) will be complete before the MWC commences. smoog might be sweating, but he’s pulling out all the stops to get this done. scorev2 for Mania means a better show for both the players and the audience in the upcoming Mania World Cup.
• We’ve vastly expanded our collection of featured/licensed artists. There’s over 300 songs in the catalogue now, and nearly 100 of those are timed and ready to go. Yes, community favourite Helblinde is among them. All of us love his stuff.
• The difficulty algorithm received a sneaky adjustment to make sliders worth less for star rating calculations. The most obvious example of this (for anyone who followed the Aspire contest in any case) was Monstrata’s winning map going from 8+ stars down to 5~. Don’t expect to see much (if any) change on other maps though, as it shouldn’t significantly affect the rating of pretty much any other map.

If you’ve got a spare hour and want to watch the stream yourself, head over here.

We ended the meeting by playing one of the remixes from the recent circles! remix contest, performed by the masterful BilliumMoto. Note that this track - along with some amazing other entries - will be available for voting in the coming days!

See you next month!