Hi, Ephemeral reporting in with updates from the latest meeting. This time around it may have been closed to the public, but that doesn’t mean that things didn’t happen!

Before we get stuck into stuff, we’ve decided to hold every second dev meeting in the public format we trialed last month. Hosting public meetings means we don’t always get to discuss everything that we need to, so we’re cutting back on them for the meanwhile as a bunch of projects start to reach their final stages all at once. Never fear though - we’ll be back with one next month!

We’ll also be taking a few vetted questions at the end of the next public meeting, so if you’ve got something you want to ask, you might want to consider fleshing it out before then!

Now, onto the things:

• The backend behind the medal system received a significant overhaul. We ran into some issues with implementing the recent batch of Hush-Hush medals stemming from a bunch of organizational and production shortfalls. MillhioreF spent a bunch of time rewriting the existing system to fix a lot of long-standing issues with achievement detection, and also made it significantly easier for us to draft new medals in the future. Which we will be doing a lot of, by the by.
• Changes are coming to the ranking system which will see a greater variety of maps equipped with scoreboards. Vague, but exciting. There’s not a lot more that we can say about this right now, but we’ve got something fairly big planned, and we think it will fix a lot of long-standing issues with and complaints about the ranking system as it currently stands.
• The titular open-source osu! project has been released to the public. This is important as it is the first truly visible fruit from the long labours surrounding the LAZER project. peppy showcased a quick game(mode?) recently using the framework, and thanks to the hard work of several key contributors from the osu!dev community, the framework also builds cleanly under Linux and OS X as well. This is a pretty big deal, so expect to see a full-length peppypost on this blog about it sometime soon.
• The Ranking Charts will be significantly overhauled in the near future. The Charts system has sort of been a red-headed stepchild since its inception - never really receiving the love nor the attention that it desperately deserved. Going forward, we’re looking to merge the old “map pack” bundles into “Spotlights” which will then form the bulk of what currently represents the monthly Ranking Charts. New Spotlights will be released on a monthly basis by much the same people that currently do the Ranking Charts, and we’re also looking into a new format of prizes for people who compete in them.
• The new osu!tablet model has arrived and is available for purchase in the store. Check it out for yourself!. Boasting a stronger, rechargeable pen and some firmware differences from the base HUION model that improves the usability for “hover” style players, the 2016 osu!tablet is as mean as it is sleek.
• The osu!tournament client will soon be available to everyone, all the time. This is coupled with a number of changes to our tournament support back-end which will make it significantly easier for us to manage player-run tournaments going forward. The wiki has the details on how to enable the tournament mode if you’re curious.

It was a very productive meeting this month. Things are starting to pick up a little bit overall, even if we have had a few slow months so far.

See you next month!

(or maybe sooner?)