Our second public meeting was a pretty resounding success. Read on to find out what we spoke about!

Despite the majority of the core developers being absent for this meeting, we still got a lot done. The core team spent a lot of time together in closed-group coding sessions during the last month, meaning some pretty huge progress was made overall.

• Work on the osu!framework (and LAZER implementation) is nearing its end stages. A lot of the ground-level stuff required to build the game within the new framework is now done, with peppy showcasing a number of the core features of the new engine during the dev stream. We’re really getting close to the culmination of all the work that has gone into the LAZER refactor over the past few months, and while the end is still a few months away, it isn’t anywhere near as distant as it once was.

  On the topic of the osu!framework, peppy is proud to report that the rework will also boast significantly improved performance compared to the old engine due to a complete overhaul on how input handling and drawing are processed at the game level. The particulars of this were featured briefly on his stream of the meeting.

• smoogipooo has been hard at work on the titular scorev2 reworks for osu!mania, osu!catch and osu!standard. Community feedback on the proposed score changes is vital to this process, so head on over to those threads and give your input on the slated changes.
• A full rework of the community wiki is underway, porting existing articles from the dilapidated MediaWiki format into Markdown on Github. The wiki has been closed to contributions for a while, but was fairly complete in its content before that point. Intrepid contributors can head over to the repo, fork it, and port any missing articles across into Markdown, then submit a pull request to have their work added to the wiki. The new wiki design will be congruent with the osu!next site design, and an entirely new system in its own right.
• A big push to move the forums over to the new version is being made, and expected to be completed soon. The chief web developer for the new site was on a break during the past month or so, but is expected to return shortly. LiquidPL has been hard at work on various redesigns as well. Say your farewells to the old software, because it won’t be around for much longer.
• The osu!tournament backend that supports community tournaments continues to improve. We still plan to allow full access to the osu!tournament client (but not the !mp player command suite) for all supporters in the near future, pending some internal changes to allow that to happen.
• We’re trialing a fairly complicated form of community collaborative beatmapping using the new submission system. Head on over to the news post for more details. This new format of all-mode, all-difficulty contests judged by popular vote is expected to be a replacement for the select-judged beatmapping contest, though the old format will not disappear completely.
• More details about the upcoming Spotlight system were revealed. Spotlights will replace the old “map pack” model that was famous in the earlier days of osu!, and will reward individual medals for completing a pack fully.
• More Hush-Hush medals incoming. They’re harder than the last set, too. Not necessarily in actual game-skill difficulty, but some of them are very heavily riddle oriented.

• We plan to hold more media-related contests (fanart, videos, storyboards, etc) in the near future. The overwhelming engagement by the community for the Taiko mascot contest was a pretty strong indicator that people definitely enjoy these sorts of contests, and that we have some amazingly talented individuals in the community who will compete in them. We’ll be bringing back the main-menu background rotation contests that were popular a few years ago.

  Oh, and fear not - the Taikonator will be making an appearance somewhere.

• We’ll be looking at the other non-standard gamemode mascots for potential redesigns in the coming months. flyte has a very specific vision for the standard to which our mascots will be held, and some of them do not really fit that vision as they are now. Keep your eyes peeled!

That’s about all for now, but if you’d like to hear the dev meeting in its entirety, peppy recorded the whole stream over on his youtube channel. Hearing flyte discuss mascots by how they appear naked is probably the highlight of the stream, so make sure to give it a listen if you’re interested.

See you next time!