Ephemeral here again (where’s that peppy guy anyway.. this is his blog!). November comes to an end. An unusually productive month for us this time around as the pace picks up like crazy - hopefully a sign of times to come!

Lots to talk about this month, from osu!lazer previews abound as the new client development really starts to hit full swing, to improvements to the new website and much, much more. This month’s meeting was a public one, so there is a handy video log of everything that went down in real time. Follow along if you like - or not, the video is an hour and a half long, after all.

Here’s a summary of what we spoke about:

• Development on the new game client (osu!lazer) is progressing very, VERY quickly, with a semi-playable release of the game available for fiddling with (see a video preview of how things are looking). The core developers have been hard at work over the past month, and between the three of them (and the assistance of many community developers), they’ve managed to knock out the very basic foundations of osu! in the new framework we spoke about over the past few months. While it isn’t exactly competitively playable at the moment, it is a very strong and very visible sign that progress is really beginning to kick into gear as things start to heat up. The new face of osu! may come sooner than you think!
• Significant improvements to the new Contest system have made it significantly easier to host events going forward. nekodex has been hard at work beefing up the system in the wake of the CMC (community mapping contest), soon to be released. Beatmapping contests were previously held on an incredibly dated system that sort of just barely worked. There’s also a nifty contest overview for people to browse if they’re looking for a contest to get stuck into. No more trawling through old tumblr/news posts to get involved!
• moddingv2 (or Beatmap Discussions) has entered small-scale public testing, and has already improved DRAMATICALLY over its last iteration. See it for yourself here. nanaya’s been busting his nuts over the past month to get things done, and the system is lacking only a few cursory additions before it is ready for full-scale deployment. This is really big news, and will permanently alter the face of modding (and therein, mapping) for the future.
• Following on from improvements to big-name systems, work continues in earnest towards eventually phasing out the old website completely. Many systems are basically done or in a usable state on the new website, and it shouldn’t be terribly long before the stragglers are caught up enough to say goodbye to the old site and hello to the new.
• The Featured Artist roster is going to fill out very quickly in the coming months as many new artists are signed on. The roster has sort of been stagnant for the past few months, but will be revitalized and prioritized going forward to hopefully provide the osu! community with a solid source of music from wickedly talented artists to make maps with.
• Loved maps will be accelerated in their addition over the coming months, slowly tapering out as the pool of eligible maps runs out. When this happens, an alternative method of addition will be unveiled, hinted to basically be a flat kudosu-to-star-priority exchange. This will give tremendous weight within the system to prolific modders who have accrued hundreds or thousands of kudosu over the years.
• A new schedule for upcoming events in 2017 will be made available early in the year as we move towards a more structured model for hosting community events. Not much more to say about this other than that the MBC’s (monthly beatmapping contests) will be making a return in January, and there will be consistently more non-gameplay related events to go around as well, such as fanart contests, remix contests, and much, much more.

All in all, 2017’s shaping up to look like a really good year for osu!, and it hasn’t even started yet!

See you next time!