Hello there! Ephemeral here with a long-awaited meeting guestpost. This is my blog now. The holiday season around December pretty much vacated most of the office (the actual osu!office and the virtual one too), so we opted to skip the December meeting and hold a private one in late-January instead.

Big one this time (even though I say this every time), but especially so since we’ve got two months of content to roll into one post. We’ll be holding the Feburary meeting in the public, potentially even on osulive (ooh, fancy). To help break this up a bit, I’ll be splitting the post into two categories, namely Development and Community.

Development

• osu!lazer progresses nicely, with some very basic elements of gameplay already implemented, and more coming. This is significant because laying down the groundwork for these “universal” elements (hp bar, health, failing logic etc) means doing most of the work for multiple modes at once. As far as usability goes, robust filtering will soon be in the song selection menu, and we hope to get the osu! gameplay functionality largely intact (or at least somewhat usable) by the time the next meeting rolls around. Kind of a big deal.
• A somewhat ambitious aim, but we plan to get the next major World Cup running on the osu!lazer tournament client. Still somewhat up in the air, but it is a short-term goal of ours and something to (hopefully) look forward to. This being a thing means that the spectating backend for lazer would be largely complete, as well as rudimentary connection to Bancho - two pretty hefty milestones for a project that has so far been purely client-side. smoog’s got the fire in his eyes though, so keep your own eyes peeled!
• Some infrastructure improvements on the server side of things should solve the performance hiccups we’ve had lately. Introducing multiple scores per beatmap wasn’t as simple as it sounds, and ended up contributing to some extra load on the backend. peppy hit things with hammers and got it all working again.
• The osu!wiki backend has received some significant improvements, and more will be coming. nanaya has been hard at work making the new wiki system tick (you can see a little of it here) whilst a team of contributors have been busy porting the old articles over, most of which will be completely rewritten.
• moddingv2 (or beatmap discussions) has entered its first large-scale public testing. Over the coming weeks, we look to test several dozen beatmaps across all modes and categories in the new system, hopefully paving the way towards its full-scale implementation later in the year. Big news.
• More achievement badges are planned, including some very difficult ones. Unofficially titled “Elite” badges in their development phase, we think that these new tasks will tickle even the most jaded osu! player looking for something new. If you enjoyed the fortnight-long hunt for Equilibrium, you’ll like these new badges - but there will only be one per release, alongside some other more “ordinary” medals.

Community

• We’ve made some pretty serious headway on the Featured Artists initiative. Outside of adding 4 new artists and over 60 tracks since the last time we mentioned it, the system itself saw some pretty gnarly improvements, ranging from more buttons for artist linkback to a fully-fledged album display for categorizing songs. sakuraburst’s listing is a supremely pretty example of this working excellently. We’re nowhere near done with this yet, so keep your eyes peeled for much much more on this front.
• Loved is moving out of its “voting” phase and into a new phase of testing before proper implementation. Mappers will soon be able to manually apply for Loved status to be applied to their maps, assuming that they meet a few criteria. We’ll discuss this in more depth in a dedicated newspost.
• 2017’s events will be much more regular. We’ve drafted a schedule for official events throughout the year. Previously, only the World Cups were held with any sense of actual organization - MBC’s were more like “whenever someone felt like it” beatmapping contests. Oops. We haven’t forgotten about the CBC either (Nadeshiko Sensation), we’re just waiting on a few things to be complete before we move ahead with the relatively herculean task of assembling a collaborative mapset from 15 individual users, including some backend changes to make it a little easier for us, and maybe for you too in the future.
• Expect more use of the osulive Twitch channel going forward. Nothing concrete is ironed out at the moment, but we have designs to support the streaming members of the osu! community much more than we historically have, and hopefully produce more livestreamed content for everyone to enjoy. Things like the osu!talks, so on, so forth.

There were a lot of ideas and the like thrown around during this meeting, but don’t mistake some of the relatively lofty goals listed as a sign that we’re aiming too big or too far out of our bounds. Things are starting to pick up properly, and the hard work of dozens of contributors is beginning to bear fruit.

If there was a time start being excited, it’d be around about now.

See you next month!