osu!weekly #23

Hi everyone! Tasha here for another week of news for you all! No small talk this week, let's get right into it!

Bad news for those who may have been looking to join the Beatmap Nominators, as applications are closed for this month. For those who have been working hard to get into the team, your efforts have been noticed, so don't let applications being closed get you down!

The group stage for the Mania World Cup draws near! This saturday the seedings will be revealed on the wiki. Right after that on sunday we'll be having the live drawings for the group stage on the official world cup stream. Next week will be when everything gets started with the group stage, so get excited as I'm sure we'll see some very skilled players participating this year around!

The Australia & New Zealand Catch the Beat tournament is going into the third round this weekend! This tournament is in a 1v1 double elimination setting and is already down to some exceptionally good players. If you want to watch the matches, be sure to check out the schedule and tune in to their stream. For those who are interested in how the tournament has been going so far, you can check out the brackets to see how players have been advancing.

Are you from a German speaking country? Do you enjoy mapping standard? Well then the 1st ever German Mapping Contest might be just what you're looking for! Mappers are challenged to make a mapset with an "insane and "insane+" difficulty before the deadline of August 31st at 11:59PM UTC+2 for the song TOTTO - Wadatsumi. First place will be awarded with 2 months of supporter, while second and third will be awarded 1 month each. Be sure to read the thread and abide by all the rules before submitting. Happy mapping to all who participate!

This week on peppy's blog, there was a bit of insight into the database updates that have been happening behind the scenes in osu! that are being made to support multiple scores being saved per beatmap per user. This is good news for players climbing ranks, as it means your highest pp score will always be available and won't accidentally get overwritten by a higher map score that gives less pp. More details about what went into this were posted later in the week. Peppy also did a small Q&A answering a few questions that users had asked, such as open source osu! and plans for new fun mods.

Also on peppy's blog was a post by developer smoogipooo that goes into more detail about the transition to OpenGL. While OpenGL is working for 99% of users, there are some users who have OpenGL compatibility issues, so to address this, ANGLE was introduced allowing a DirectX render from OpenGL. This has already been implemented into the game, so if you're one of the users who experiences issues with OpenGL, search "compatibility mode" in configuration and check it to see if it helps!

hvick225, currently the player ranked first in both taiwan and the world, managed a very difficult Double time + Hidden score on the song HoneyWorks - Miraizu feat.Aida Miou(CV:Toyosaki Aki), netting him a very impressive 665 performance points for the feat. Definitely be sure to check out the recording on hvick's youtube channel as it is absolutely jaw dropping!

While worldwide #2 Rafis may not have managed an incredibly impressive score like hvick225 (though he did get a DT score on the same map as above), he has been earning a lot of interest from the community, enough interest that he has managed to get partnership with twitch.tv. Rafis' stream is quite impressive to watch considering his skill level, so I'd definitely recommend trying to catch him online!

That's all for this week everyone! As always you can send any news you'd like to be represented in the osu!weekly to news@ppy.sh and I will do my best to include that information. Have a good weekend everyone!

—Tasha