What has happened in the last two months?

• Had an amazing time at Japan Expo, meeting a huge number of French players and hopefully introducing as many new ones!
• Gave an updated talk about the history of osu!, along with Q&A and live play in dual language (French and English). Watch it here!
• I answered even more questions on episode 8 of osu!talk. Thanks to ztrot for having me on the show!
• I received some open source mini-keyboard controllers for osu! from some chinese users. You can already make them yourself, but I also hope at some point we can offer these for sale at a low price.
• osu! saw more development activity over the last month from people who aren’t me than ever before. This is very exciting to see, and makes me a little more confident that the osu! codebase isn’t in as bad a state as I perceive it to be!
• Progress is being made towards an open source osu!. Piece by piece I am separating git repositories of various components so they can be released separately from each other as required.
• We hit 200k likes on facebook. Hooray!
• I completely rehauled the banning system behind the scenes to allow for more automation, as it was getting out-of-hand for us to handle manually. The results are promisingly good (or bad, in a sad way).
• Work continues on a new update/release system which will allow for multiple release streams to exist. Users will be able to switch between stable/beta/cutting-edge. This will also allow for mgiration to dotnet40 while keeping a compatibility branch on dotnet20 while people migrate across.
• A new game intro is in the works, including a long-overdue theme song. You may also notice that sound effects have been improved. This is all already live on test build but won’t be available on public for a while.
• Download and update mirrors are centrally managed and traffic is automatically shifted as servers become available/unavailable. DNS changes are also automated via the Cloudflare API when server issues are detected, reducing downtime to only a couple of minutes.
• I have been a bit busy with boring stuff like restructuring the way osu! is run as a business to make sure I can keep up with the ever-increasing workload. Trying to get more hands on board to get new features out to you guys faster than ever.
• Huge kudos to Tom94 for taking my lead and rehaulling most of the song select code. The result is a more performant and slicker song select screen than ever before. And it’s only going to get better from here!
• My sister made me an osu! stamp!
• Someone used my design documents to make their own version of the osu!arcade unit!
• We are running another fanart contest aiming to create a bunch of stickers, which may be used around the place in the future (both digitally and physically)!
• Someone made a programming problem based on CtB.
• People continue to be dishonest and unbelievably abusive.

I’m sure I’ve missed quite a bit here, but until next time. Follow me on twitter for more regular updates!