ppy blog

due to tumblr not supporting ssl for cnames (custom domains) i have moved my blog to jekyll/github. this feed will no longer be maintained, and the blog url is restored to blog.ppy.sh.

should allow for more frequent posts, so stay tuned.

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.

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!

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.

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.

Hi, Ephemeral reporting in with updates from the latest meeting. This time around it may have been closed to the public, but that doesn't mean that things didn't happen!

Before we get stuck into stuff, we've decided to hold every second dev meeting in the public format we trialed last month. Hosting public meetings means we don't always get to discuss everything that we need to, so we're cutting back on them for the meanwhile as a bunch of projects start to reach their final stages all at once. Never fear though - we'll be back with one next month!

We'll also be taking a few vetted questions at the end of the next public meeting, so if you've got something you want to ask, you might want to consider fleshing it out before then!

Now, onto the things:

The backend behind the medal system received a significant overhaul. We ran into some issues with implementing the recent batch of Hush-Hush medals stemming from a bunch of organizational and production shortfalls. MillhioreF spent a bunch of time rewriting the existing system to fix a lot of long-standing issues with achievement detection, and also made it significantly easier for us to draft new medals in the future. Which we will be doing a lot of, by the by.

Changes are coming to the ranking system which will see a greater variety of maps equipped with scoreboards. Vague, but exciting. There's not a lot more that we can say about this right now, but we've got something fairly big planned, and we think it will fix a lot of long-standing issues with and complaints about the ranking system as it currently stands.

The titular open-source osu! project has been released to the public. This is important as it is the first truly visible fruit from the long labours surrounding the LAZER project. peppy showcased a quick game(mode?) recently using the framework, and thanks to the hard work of several key contributors from the osu!dev community, the framework also builds cleanly under Linux and OS X as well. This is a pretty big deal, so expect to see a full-length peppypost on this blog about it sometime soon.

The Ranking Charts will be significantly overhauled in the near future. The Charts system has sort of been a red-headed stepchild since its inception - never really receiving the love nor the attention that it desperately deserved. Going forward, we're looking to merge the old "map pack" bundles into "Spotlights" which will then form the bulk of what currently represents the monthly Ranking Charts. New Spotlights will be released on a monthly basis by much the same people that currently do the Ranking Charts, and we're also looking into a new format of prizes for people who compete in them.

The new osu!tablet model has arrived and is available for purchase in the store. Check it out for yourself!. Boasting a stronger, rechargeable pen and some firmware differences from the base HUION model that improves the usability for "hover" style players, the 2016 osu!tablet is as mean as it is sleek.

The osu!tournament client will soon be available to everyone, all the time. This is coupled with a number of changes to our tournament support back-end which will make it significantly easier for us to manage player-run tournaments going forward. The wiki has the details on how to enable the tournament mode if you're curious.

It was a very productive meeting this month. Things are starting to pick up a little bit overall, even if we have had a few slow months so far.

See you next month!

We've been doing a lot of work behind the scenes on the framework osu! runs on (the lazer project). Today I took a step back to test a week of intense coding changes with smoogipooo to see how things feel and work.

I made a little game which took 5 hours and 375 lines of code to write. Would have been 2 or 3 hours if I didn't find some bugs along the way with the framework (this was my intention, so I am very happy).

Download here (30mb because it contains osu! resources, sorry)

Controls:

W to move up

S to move down

D to boost

tab to autoplay

I'll release the full source for this in the near future. And yes, this will likely appear as a game mode for osu! in the future (maybe a just-for-fun one like target practice :).

We are making great progress here. Big cogs are turning!

I've mentioned this in previous posts, but wanted a single post I can link to when inviting new people to the discord network, so here it is!

Recently we moved our public dev chat from slack to discord, and it has been working quite well so far. Anyone is welcome to join, but in order to talk there you will need to follow the instructions in the #announcement channel to get approved. This is just to keep things safe and secure for all participands.

If you're interested in following what is happening in the world of osu! dev - whether you want to participate or just watch over what we are doing - please follow this link to join the network.

Turns out we've had a lot to talk about this July, what-with two dev meeting posts in a single month. Best of all, this new one was public!

To much excitement from the community at large, we held July's meeting publicly in our dedicated development Discord server, with peppy himself streaming the affair via his twitch channel. While only the people participating in the meeting could actually speak, anyone with access to the server could commentate on the goings-on in a special channel. This was something entirely new for us - and we're definitely looking at making this a more regular thing.

Here's what got done this month:

The new sleek, black osu!tablet has been ordered and will be in the store within a month. Not the month, but a month. flyte proudly announced in the meetings that the new design features less in-your-face triangles and more of his signature design finesse. Whatever that means.

Work on LAZER continues at a slow pace. We've all but given up attempting to put a timeframe on its release date, since the developers are taking things slowly and adhering to strict standards in their work on the refactor. Lots of work is still being done each month (you can see for yourself if you're a member of the osu!dev discord - #osu-lazer channel has the details), but things are still very far away from even a proper CE release as of yet.

We released a new set of achievements (and medals) in the Mod Spotlight series. These medals are all about experimenting with mods that some players may never have even looked at before, and are the gentle introduction to the sort of stuff required for the upcoming Hush-Hush 2 medals which will seriously test people's mettle and riddle-solving skills.

The new forums are excruciatingly close to being fully released. If you're fond of the current forums, start saying your farewells, because with nanaya's work on the implementation almost entirely complete, they'll not be around for much longer. This will be the most visible part of osu!next that people will see before the actual client, and we're really excited to see it almost come to fruition.

A new contest system has been developed that paves the way for community votes and weekly contests of all kinds. nekodex has been hard at work on a brand new contest system that supports not only jury judging, but also community voting as well. With this coming live within the next week for the circles! remix contest, expect more contests coming for all sorts of things within the year.

Competitive score adjustments for Mania mode (scorev2) will be complete before the MWC commences. smoog might be sweating, but he's pulling out all the stops to get this done. scorev2 for Mania means a better show for both the players and the audience in the upcoming Mania World Cup.

We've vastly expanded our collection of featured/licensed artists. There's over 300 songs in the catalogue now, and nearly 100 of those are timed and ready to go. Yes, community favourite Helblinde is among them. All of us love his stuff.

The difficulty algorithm received a sneaky adjustment to make sliders worth less for star rating calculations. The most obvious example of this (for anyone who followed the Aspire contest in any case) was Monstrata's winning map going from 8+ stars down to 5~. Don't expect to see much (if any) change on other maps though, as it shouldn't significantly affect the rating of pretty much any other map.

If you've got a spare hour and want to watch the stream yourself, head over here.

We ended the meeting by playing one of the remixes from the recent circles! remix contest, performed by the masterful BilliumMoto. Note that this track - along with some amazing other entries - will be available for voting in the coming days!

June might be mostly done, but that doesn't mean we all forgot about our monthly meeting! Just the person responsible for writing the summary did. Oops.

As our monthly development meetings continue to be very much a revolving door of ideas and formats, June continued the trend of everything being pretty much completely different from the month before. Instead of discussing grand, overarching goals that we'd like to see completed, we turned our efforts towards keeping each other updated and involved about our respective tasks within the team.

That being said, June was not a very productive month for us, unfortunately.

Here's a summary of what went down:

osu-web development continues, and the forums draw closer to being ready for a complete switch-over. It is something of a recurring theme for these posts to contain things that are almost ready for deployment, but the new forums (henceforth referred to as jizz in memoriam of its early working subdomain) are pretty much done. Granted, we said we'd get this out last month, and the month before that too. Things are progressing slower than we'd like, but they're getting there. This includes the elusive moddingv2, as well.

LAZER is getting closer to a final, public release candidate. The final phase of the open-source plan for osu! approaches completion, and once the bulk of LAZER is done, development can be entrusted not only to just the in-house developers we have currently, but the entire community. It's slow, arduous work (as highlighted in this blog post by peppy), but absolutely mandatory for pretty much everything else to get done.

New designs for a sleek, black osu!tablet are entering full production soon. Some of you might've already seen peppy's tweet about the design. A few early issues with the prototype unit were identified and sent off to be fixed, but we hope to get a stock of these new, improved tablets in sooner rather than later.

Beatmapping contests will be held more frequently from now on. We've had a bit of a dearth of these in recent months, bar the recent Aspire contest, but we plan to host many more of them in the remainder of the year. These new contests will be across all gamemodes, and will include a shift from solely a jury-type judging system to a full community voting system.

The next dev meeting will be held on the public osu!dev discord in real-time. Spectators (listeners?) will only be able to listen in to our feckless banter, but we will have a small section towards the end of the meeting where we take some questions from those listening to mull over.

The date is not yet solidified, but it will be at 16:00 UTC on a given date between the 29th of July to the 1st of August. We'll post with more details when the exact date is ironed out. Anyone with approved access to the osu!dev discord is free to join and listen in. We might even release a recording of the meeting afterwards if all goes well. We'll see!

See you there!

It's been a while since I've posted, but trust me that it is for the best! The progress we've been making recently has been amazing, and I am very excited for the future! Let me bring you all up-to-date with what has been going on behind the scenes.

osu!lazer

The lazer build has been my number one focus over the last few weeks, diverting my attention from everyday operations to actually writing code. I've been changing upwards of 2,000 lines of code a day (consider that the whole osu! project is only 72,000 LoC) in order to bring osu! into a state which prepares it for the future.

We've made some huge advances in technology and infrastructure of the client which are absolutely necessary as a solid base for the features we plan to implement going forward. Just to give you an idea of the things I've been working on:

Until now we used some XNA code for input handling and low-level structs. These dependencies are almost compeletely removed from the project now, with OpenTK or similar open-source frameworks replacing them. All that's left is Vector2, Vector3 and Matrix. These last few are a bit more complicated to remove than the rest, but should be gone soon.

The audio subsystem is now in a better state than ever before. What was previously a mess of co-dependent classes and statics is not a lean Clock hierarchy. Each clock performs a specific task, allowing for very logical control of things like interpolation, frame-based time separation, offsets, rate adjustments and virtual time (intro/outro time).

The input subsystem has been rewritten multiple times in order to create the easiest and most understandable framework for how we plan on handling user input. Hard to show this visually, but definitely a step in the right direction.

What was previously a mess of independent static classes is now a since static OsuGame which acts as the root for things that need regular game-wide access, like Config, Audio and Skin subsystems.

The text input system received a huge overhaul, allowing for proper text selection, keyboard shortcuts like ctrl-a, shift-home, ctrl-shift-rightarrow and mouse shortcuts like double-click or drag selection.

The new draw and transformation hierarchy is capable of doing some pretty cool stuff! Below is a quick demo idea stolen from anime.js stress test that I replicated in about 5 minutes.

osu! can now be resized to virtually any windowed resolution without completely falling apart. Going forward this will probably no longer require a mode reload, which you can see in the current example.

Online support has been added back using the new osu-web client API. This will replace bancho going forward. So far, only basic login and chat (read-only) is available, but you can see already that chat can fetch previous history when connecting, unlike bancho.

The startup sequence has been modified to get an OpenGl context as soon as possible (for me, this is about 300ms for the osu! window to first display). The splash screen is therefore no longer necessary and will be replaced by the game intro sequence, during which other components will be initialised. I really hated the splash screen anyway, so good riddance!

We are targeting .NET 4.5 and are already deploying live with dual-targeting binaries (32 and 64-bit). Check it out, but don't expect too much. A lot is broken and we are aware of this. note that this installer will install alongside your existing osu! install, and should NOT be used to replace your existing one.

I was hoping to open-source the project last week, but in the process of doing so I came across a lot of very old code which should not be seen by anyone. I'm therefore delaying the open-sourcing until I can first tidy things up a bit more. That said, read on for an opportunity to help out before we go open-source if that's something you think you are capable of!

As you may have realised, the lazer project has increased in scope since I set out. What was originally supposed to be a 2-3 month project which would be released to cutting-edge (and subsequently as a stable release) is now turning in to closer to a full rewrite of the game. This is not a bad thing in my eyes, but it will affect the update schedule of osu!. You won't be seeing any large updates to the stable branch (bug fixes being the exception) because it would mean implementing things twice - which we definitely want to avoid!

That said, osu!next (the design concept) is no longer a dream but a reality that is starting to piece together!

osu!dev discord

In my continuing effort to make osu! as close to 100% transparency as possible, we've moved all development efforts out of the private/public slack networks and into a new public discord network. I hope this will eventually lead to more collaboration from outside the team, but for the time being it lets anyone who wishes to oversee our development efforts in real-time.

If you are interested in helping out with the lazer project, make sure to let us know. We are accepting private contributors to the project on request, so come in to #osu-lazer and let us know your qualifications and github username if interested.

A new month dawns, and so too does another dev meeting guestpost. Like clockwork, or calendar-work, if you're so inclined.

This month's meeting was probably our largest yet, as the some of the new early-bird contributors (affectionately dubbed the LAZERhawks.. by me) were invited to sit in and give their piece on the way their projects were going. Many a warm welcome was given. Here's what went down:

LAZER development continues at a steady pace (still), but a little slower than was originally hoped. The LAZERhawks and the core developers hope to get a usable build (without online features) onto a CE release stream at some point within the next month. The conclusion of the LAZER project is pretty much essential to future osu!next development as it makes a lot of systems and features significantly easier to implement later on down the line, so time spent getting it right is ultimately better for osu! as a whole. This isn't going to turn into another "osz2" type Soon(tm), we promise!

A number of performance improvements for general OpenGL use on the Windows platform are slated to be merged in later this month. Not much else to say other than all the performance, all the time.

The new forums continue to draw closer and closer to full release. With the addition of a last set of moderation tools, the new forum system is teasingly close to being rolled out fully, pending a few other features in osu!web that are yet to be done. Expect it to happen soon! That being said..

osu!web development is not happening as fast as we would like. We're always looking for new web developers to contribute towards the web face of osu!next - simply consult the github issues page for the current outstanding bounties to see what work needs to be done, if you're interested.

Within the next month, new beatmap submissions will be moving over to using the "moddingv2" system that was trialled earlier last month. The QAT will oversee this new system (as was their role's original intent) and will help the developers by providing feedback from users and anything else that could be used to help make the new system better.

Lots of new achievements incoming. We've got one "showcase" planned for a bunch of entry-level medals, and then we'll start unveiling the new fiendishly difficult "hush-hush 2" type achievements on a weekly basis. Some of them are easier than others. Some are going to need serendipity for people to even get them. One thing is certain - and that is people are going to love them. Oh, and there's a bunch of progression achievements slated to be released for every gamemode seperately within the next month, so look forward to that, too!

We'll be significantly broadening our scope for music artists who are willing to work with us. We have plans to provide the community with hundreds of official tracks (eventually) on the back of a long-held vision for creating a unique music scene around osu!. If you know of any artists who produce high quality music that could readily be mapped (or is just suited for rhythm games in general), please, let us know in the comments!

The Chart system as a whole is being considered for a massive overhaul. Inspired by the "courses" the Mania community has taken to making for itself, we're thinking about introducing new relevance and meaning to the charts in a similar format, though the idea is very much in its infancy at this point. Keep your eyes (and ears) peeled!

Meanwhile, flyte is slowly dying under the creative strain of drafting hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of medals. I regret nothing.

In our efforts to release the osu! client as open source, we still have a lot of clean-up and refactoring that needs to be done. I've been putting in as much of my own time as possible to make this happen, but things are still a bit slower than I'm hoping for.

Last meeting I made the decision to fork what is known as "lazer" into a new git repository. The purpose of this would be to remove all history, confidential code, deprecated systems etc. and provide a new starting point for the open source future.

While we are not ready to make the open source project available, I am now seeking developers who are interested in helping out before this happens. Because this is an effort to increase efficiency, applicant criteria are very strict, so make sure to read the carefully before applying:

Agree to work under a non-open source licence (all contributions would be copyright ppy Pty Ltd).

Have a confident knowledge of c# 6.0 and be able to prove it with github projects.

Have a confident knowledge of tree-based rendering.

Willing to work on specific areas we require you to focus on.

Be an amicable person.

Happy to work without rewards (though as always, I will try to reward significant contributions at rates beyond expectations).

Have enough free time over the next few months to contribute at a decent rate.

If interested, contact using a plain text email at [email protected]. Include a link to your github profile and any reasons you want to be included on this project. I will give precedence to people who I am familiar with.

Don't necessarily expect a reply; I'll only reply to those people who we decide are good fits for the team. Also keep in mind that we are not ready to accept contributors so replying may take a week or two.

Guess who's back again with another set of delicious monthly meeting notes? Ephemeral, that's who.

There's a fair bit to get stuck into this month, so let's get cracking straight away. As always, these notes only encompass a tiny portion of what is actually going on behind the scenes, so get hyped!

Progress on the open-source branch known as "LAZER" progresses at a good pace. Additionally, one portion of osu!'s performance metric calculator went open source in the days before the meeting, allowing the technically inclined members of the community to create their own pp calculators.

The osu!tournament client is slated for a number of improvements in the coming months, ranging from performance upgrades to new feature additions. One such addition is the inclusion of a "score drift" bar, which will let viewers see a clean representation of the score difference between the two teams. This sounds little, but is actually a huge increase to the readability of a match when viewed as a spectator. A live prototype of this concept already exists, and we're just waiting for a final design to get it out!

The final days of the current forum system draw near. The list of tasks that need to be completed before the move to the osu!next forums grows smaller and smaller with each month, and we're well on track for full deployment of the new forum software by the end of the year, probably even a lot sooner.

New options will be added to the game client when playing qualified maps. These options will hinge around the new reporting system introduced in the wake of the recent QAT changes, allowing users to quickly and effortlessly report issues with qualified maps on the fly.

More progression achievements are slated for release later in the month. These new achievements will be tiered and available to almost everybody from the get-go. So far, there's over 24 achievements in the set to be released, and the number is likely to increase. We'll be looking at more map-specific achievements in the future, as well.

Mapping bounties for official tracks will make a return this month. Once the old bounties for the cYsmix tracks and the circles! track are sorted out, we plan to release a bunch more and get the system governing them working a lot more smoothly. Map awesome music and get cool shit for it!

More video content will be coming out for the osu!academy later in the month. We've also merged the ailing osu!news channel into the osu!academy so that people do not have to subscribe to multiple channels to get their osu! fix. There's also a few series from last month which have been delayed, but should be released later on as well.

There was also a slight incident involving an airhorn bot, but we shall never speak of it again.

There's been a bit of talk about the future of osu!, specifically in relation to my plans to open source the client going forward. There have also been a few misconceptions so I thought it was time to take a moment to explain my intentions and reasoning behind this goal.

Transparency

I want to provide as close to 100% transparency as possible with everything we do. No real reason for this, just how it should be done, in my opinion.

While I think we've done pretty well over the years in not screwing users over, there are those occasions we can all recall where some disgruntled guy starts a protest against something we are doing in an internal process (the team) or in our code (osu! client) which people were not aware was a thing.

Contribution

We run osu! with a pretty small team. The only full-time developer on the game client itself still remains just me. Others regular contributors are students so they have limited time, and I myself have many other things to attend to than just the game client.

All in all the progress we are making is slower than I'd like. Open sourcing allows us to grow the "team" without the overheads that come with expanding a company. I have no interest in employing more people, but by rewarding contributors for only what they commit, this can remove those overheads while still reaping a fair amount of reward.

We've been trying this with the new osu-web project and while the number of contributors is still lower than I'd hope, it has helped speed up development. We've already paid out a total of US$2,120 to open source contributors at the time of writing this.

Code Quality

By making said processes and code open for criticism, at worst you are able to see how we are doing things and just be annoyed; at best you can see how we are doing things and then give constructive criticism (or offer your helping hands) to improve for the better.

Indestructability

If I was to disappear against my own will, I would like osu! to live on. Releasing the source increases the chances of this happening by not only providing a public awareness of how things work, but increasing the number of people familiar with the project. Optimally I'd like to have a clause in the licence which removes any restrictions in such a case (that the official servers are no longer usable).

Now, to address some concerns and common questions I've heard.

Will osu! be released under a free licence (such as GPL or BSD) or will you have your own terms?

At this point dual-licencing is looking like a good way forward. To be honest I would love to just release the code as public domain but am not yet decided on a final licence. This may by far be the hardest decision when making the final move open-source.

Won't people just rip osu! off and make clones? Can I make a clone?

The way I see it, if we all do things right there shouldn't be a need for clones. We will accept features and fixes into the main branch to cater to the largest majority of the community possible. While we haven't yet finalised a licence choice, it will likely NOT be legal to re-release osu! as your own game, but you could potentially use portions of the code to make your own unique game.

Basically there's nothing stopping people in certain countries from ripping osu! off, but I don't see this as a threat. Unlike other companies trying to protect their revenue streams, I couldn't give a fuck.

That said, my final opinion on the matter is that I personally do not condone making osu! clones or private servers as long as the official server implementation is up and running smoothly. If at any point I can no longer provide what the community wants for whatever reason (and no one is able to keep things running) I fully condone using the code however you want. As I mentioned above, hopefully this can be reflected in the licence we decide on.

In summary, yes making osu! open source is a "risk", but people have already reverse-engineered the source and made clones. if you want my approval, you're not going to get it, but I probably* won't take legal action as long as you don't use any of the osu! graphic resources or names (which are copyright and trademarked).

Can I contribute? Will you include my changes?

Yes you can contribute whatever you want! Keep in mind that your code will have to be up-to-standard to have your pull requests merged. Make sure before you attempt that you have an understanding of our coding styles and the git and github ecosystem.

We will do our best to pull in any changes that are for the best. If you want to know whether a specific feature will be approved by us, feel free to ask on public slack or open a github issue before you start working on it so we can discuss further.

Can we use small portions of the code for our own projects?

Yes! We have a pretty nice framework set up to create games. The licence will definitely allow use of our code in your own projects (just make sure to understand the licence chosen before doing so).

Can we "port" osu! to x platform?

You can help us get osu! running on a particular platform. As has been mentioned elsewhere in this post, you can't just release osu! on a given platform (this falls in the "make your own game" clause) but you can invest efforts into making osu! run better on a particular platform. This is one of the core areas I'm hoping to get contributions from open sourcing (linux, OS X, mobile compatibility).

Once osu! works on a specific platform, we will consider releasing it in an alpha/beta form based on the merged changes.

Will there be a bounty system like osu-web?

Yes. I plan on rewarding any contributions.

Will you still hire people?

I have no real intentions on expanding the team, but if any regular contributors from the open source move show promise, I will definitely consider expanding the team, should they be willing!

If someone forks osu! and makes a new game mode that becomes popular, are you open to the idea of making it "official"?

Of course! Do keep in mind that making a new game mode requires more changes than just the client, so if you are looking to do this, be very patient and offer your help on server-side changes too. Also keep in mind that we probably won't add game modes which are already technically covered by other modes (ie. we don't need a DDR mode because osu!mania 4k with a skin already plays the same).

Will a part of the client code be censored? As in, connection to bancho and anti-cheat measures?

Yes, some code will be abstracted out of the open source implementation in order to continue to provide a fun and clean online gaming experience. It will be done in a way that will still allow debugging to be done with a client and server, but not the live server.

Will bancho be open source?

No, but bancho will not exist going forward as we are replacing it piece by piece with a better solution. The better solution is open source.

Will I be able to connect to the live osu! servers with a modified client?

No.

Do you personally condone of private servers?

No. If you have an issue with the official server let us know before taking matters in to your own hands.

Do you personally condone osu! clones?

Let me clarify that it depends on what you mean by a clone. If you're going to use the osu! code and make a new game called "gosu!" then no. This will infringe our trademark and also be an ass move.

If you want to make a music game with similar gameplay rules to osu!, then by all means go ahead! I "borrowed" the rules for each game mode from already existing games and to be honest I don't believe there should ever be copyright/patent placed on any kind of basic gameplay elements. Fuck that noise.

In short, if you want to make your own game, make your own game from scratch. I guarantee it will be a more satisfying experience for everybody!

When will it be ready?

A lot of people have requested higher resolution copies of my photography over the months since I started publishing it to instagram. I've finally compiled all the uploads so far as a wallpaper pack.

Resolutions I'm supporting this time around are:

Desktop 1920x1200 (16:10)

Desktop WQHD 2560x1600 (16:10)

Mobile 640x1136 (9:16)

I understand some of you may use different aspect ratios, but these should adapt quite well. For people running 16:9 on PC, set to "Fit" for the best result.

As an experiment, I'm hosting this on GitHub. If you're a savvy user, feel free to clone (and star) the repository and pull new updates via git. If not, you can download the release from here.

As for the lack of dev posts for me, there's a few reasons.

I've been busy.

The meeting notes and osu!weekly posts are taking a lot of my content away from me (this isn't a bad thing either).

I've been busy.

Enjoy :). Tweet me a photo of your setup if you end up using one of these!

Hi again! Ephemeral here, back again with more delicious development developments this month following from our promise in March to make these meetings a more regular thing. There's some exciting stuff on the horizon, and our summary for this month will only cover a little bit of what's actually going on behind the scenes.

This time, our conversation was held in voice over text - this meant that a lot more got discussed. That being said, there is a lot more to go through this time around, so let's get stuck into it:

Modding v2 development is progressing at a reasonable pace. The goals set from the last meeting were not fully met due to other distractions on the development end of things, but a lot of work has been made and the first usable prototypes of the system have entered internal testing. The system hinges on a lot of internal web changes which need to happen first, but they are getting done at a pretty quick rate, so the future looks promising. Don't believe me? Here's a screenshot of the current internal testing build. Yes, this all works.

The push to move the client to open-source proceeds at a great pace. Affectionately dubbed "LAZER" by the devs working on it, this new development branch aims to bridge the gap between the current client and the refactored codebase that will ultimately support both osu!next and a "legacy" compatibility layer for the old client design. This will ultimately enable external developers to start contributing to the development of the client, and paves the way well towards full osu!next implementation.

Due to the large number of changes slated for osu!next, a "seasons" based ranking system is being considered. While this is a fairly big thing to mention off hand, it is very much in the early consideration stage of things for now. Don't hinge too much on it. (peppynote: this basically means everyone agreed it would be cool, not that we are actively working on it.)

More artists need to be sought out to produce osu! exclusive tracks that are available for all beatmappers to use. There's also a composition/remix contest in the works that should be going live within the next month. If you know of any artists who would be interested in making music for osu!, please let us know in the comment section below!

Achievements are receiving a massive overhaul and many new ones are slated for release within the next month, with the artwork of over 40 new medallions already complete. These new achievements will be released in "packs", hopefully each week. Each pack will probably contain 4 progression achievements (attain x performance rank, score, etc), 2 high-level achievements (attain x score on difficult map with/without mods), 2 mid-level achievements (attain x score on moderate map with/without mods). We will also no longer be enforcing a "no-discussion" rule on hush-hush achievements, but will continue to release such achievements. You guys need to work together to figure out what you need to do to attain them.

CtB's editor mode is not sufficient for serious mapping as it currently stands, and changes are slated for the future to fix this. This has been a known issue for a long while now, particularly regarding slider creation. While it isn't a priority in the current development environment, it is a noted issue and will be addressed at some point in the near future. aka: Soon(tm). (peppynote: it's not a hard thing to fix, but we're also redesigning the editor from ground up. might as well make that happen first rather than redoing everything twice.)

Concerns were raised about the general state of the mapping meta and strong encouragement from the community for mappers to map high-reward pp rather than fun-to-play maps. Efforts will be made to promote alternative mapping styles by showcasing unique and enjoyable beatmaps in osu!news features, hopefully encouraging more people to experiment with styles that are not made solely to produce high pp or star rating scores.

A recent overhaul to the GMT's leadership fronted by shARPII is proving quite fruitful. Moderators will be scheduled to cover specific timezones and forums, leading to greater overall availability and a better, more consistent coverage of chat and forum channels across the day. Additionally, osu!news features with some prominent moderators are being considered in an effort to help the community better know who is handling chat, and to dispel some common misconceptions about these people or what moderators do in general.

A new video series on the History of osu! is slated to hit the osu!academy within the month, followed by fortnightly video releases of assorted content thereafter. The osu!academy (and YouTube presence in general) has proven very popular and there has been a wide demand for more of this content, especially considering the absence of updates made to the channel in previous months. ztrot will be adjusting his focus to align more on producing content for the osu!academy, which should hopefully yield more cool stuff for everyone to enjoy.

Improvements in support staff internal policies is significantly cutting down the average wait on ticket response times. We hope to improve this further in the coming months further by introducing a new means of handling ban appeals and restrictions in general which will massively free up the support team to handle issues at a far greater pace than before.

On the community front, more effort is going to be made to bolster the comparatively small sizes of the non-standard gamemode teams - particularly osu!mania. The team formerly known as the "Ranking Criteria Council" has also been put to work facilitating discussion in the Ranking Criteria subforum as per their new role. They've still not decided on a name for themselves, so I've decided to officially dub them the Criteria Friends until they manage to think of one. We also hope to hold up the great work of various members of the community who write guides detailing the sometimes complex ways that osu! operates as a whole by making their work far more visible than before, possibly featuring them in a new portal on the wiki, as well as some way of giving them proper attribution and credit for their work. As you can tell, it's been a pretty hectic month, and they're only going to get more packed as we start moving towards osu!next in the coming months. If there was ever a time to get excited about the future of osu!, now is probably it.