Ephemeral here with the latest progress from our meetings. Last month was a big one, whew. A reasonable bit to go over this time.

We had a pretty eventful end of the month for October, with the Halloween Update being pushed out so quickly. It was originally slated to just be a simple main-menu fanart contest a la Christmas 2015, but rapidly became something so much more as we all started adding ideas on to it. Eventually, we ended up with a full client mod with custom sounds, a brand new circles! remix, a new set of Hush-Hush achievements, a themed Spotlight release and a big release of Loved maps at the same time. Yowza.

Anyway, time to get into the grit of the meeting:

• Moddingv2 live trials have started happening in earnest. We’re really eager to get this new system pushed out and fully operational since it just completely revamps the modding experience to be much better for everyone involved. You can see the running tally of issues over at the osu-web github, and check out the first map we’re trialing over at the new moddingv2 page.
• Optimisation and general development on the osu!lazer client has advanced in leaps and bounds. Tom’s been doing some crazy stuff on the weekends as far as shader wizardry goes. The project is hitting performance targets of 10kfps without lifting a finger. Gameplay is in to some extent (although limited to hitcircles only) ans song select is looking quite sexy!

• Loved maps became a thing, to universal approval. This was a big step for us. There’s a lot more forthcoming, including a potential system that translate SP obtained via kudosu from other players into direct progress towards attaining Loved status. This would introduce a palpable economy for kudosu, which is something that will in turn, massively revitalize the modding community. We’ve got a lot of ideas for this system going forward, but in the meanwhile, we’ll be sticking with keeping map additions to a community vote until all the backlog of good abandoned/unrankable maps are cleared out.
• More featured artists will start appearing soon now that the feature is live on stable. For those unaware, there’s a button at the edit screen which takes you to the featured artist portal, providing pre-timed oszs from a variety of musicians who’ve all licensed their work to be free to use for mapping.

Next month will probably be a public meeting, though several hours earlier from our usual time of 16:00UTC. DST has kind of screwed with our schedule fairly significantly. More details will be announced as the meeting date gets closer.

See you next month!