History of osu! 2012

March

A new feature was tested out which added an integrated IRC web chat to the osu! website.¹

April

peppy hosted an art contest for achievement graphics, in which users were required to design icons for various given standalone and beatmap pack titles. The users whose graphics were picked by peppy received 3 months of osu!supporter as a reward.²

Exemplary icons submitted for the contest

May

A live stream listing was added to the osu! website displaying users who were streaming osu! on Twitch at the respective moment.³

August

osu! received an update featuring a SS grade version of the Sudden Death mod and game mode filters for the user list, among other things.⁴

From 11 June to 1 July, participants in the osu! 2012 T-shirt Design Contest were required to create artworks for t-shirts sold in the osu!store. Following the contest, a public voting was organised to determine the winning submissions. Ballance won the 1st place with 324 votes. Prizes for the finalists included a t-shirt with the user's submission printed on it, a 20$ gift to freely spend on any available merchandise and varying amounts of osu!supporter.⁵⁶

1st place entry by Ballance

September

osu! and its community celebrated osu!'s 5th birthday on September 17, 2012. During this time, all players were granted osu!supporter tags for 24 hours, beginning at 2012-09-16 (18:00 UTC), which was osu!'s original release time in 2007. peppy had intended to distribute an early version of osu! in some form or another for the celebration, so players were able to experience osu! from an earlier time, where the roots of the program were. However, because of differing .dll file versions, peppy was unable to get it working. He published it eventually a few months later in April 2013.⁷

October

osu!mania logo

On October 8, the Vertical Scrolling Rhythm Game (VSRG) osu!mania implemented by woc2006 was released to the public.⁸ The community voiced mixed opinions on the new game mode. Some players gave praise over the effort done while others criticised the score judgement for being too strict in comparison to O2JAM, a rhythm game with similar gameplay mechanics. For some players the update felt too rushed, as ranking, submitting osu!mania beatmaps, difficulty modification and gameplay were not polished enough or completed. A few players had issues updating their osu! client due to the enormous size of the update (around 20 MB). Most of these issues had been resolved in November with a lot of feedback from the community. Nevertheless, many users wanted to try out the new game mode.

For players who entered the multiplayer lobby before updating to the b20121008 build, there was a bug causing a comical appearance of osu!mania named as "3" without the game mode icon. Players were not able to play in the room without applying the update.

In addition to the new game mode, the following had been implemented in the update:

• Per-object hitsounds were added in the editor, thanks to mm201.
• Players became able to recover from failing in multiplayer by reaching full HP (this was not the case if the Sudden Death or Perfect mod was enabled).
• Scrolling support was added to the in-game online ranking list.
• Improvements for the skin selection to make the preview play more realistically.

Kurai helped in setting up the new osu!store to offer the designs submitted in the t-shirt design contest on high-quality t-shirts, with the eventual goal of expanding the product range to other items such as stickers.⁹

The osu! update on October 29 included a change for the main menu, allowing players with osu!supporter to customise the background image. Gameplay was not affected in any way by this pure visual alteration. osu!mania received its own ranking system which was highly anticipated by the community. To ensure no cheated scores made it into the ranking, there was a testing phase until November in which the leaderboard was reset several times.¹⁰¹¹

Furthermore, when watching replays (or while spectating) in the osu! game mode, users became able to see what buttons the player pressed on the button status overlay. This overlay could also be activated while in singleplayer via the Always show key overlay setting in the Options menu. It was placed at the top of the screen initially but later moved to the right of the screen to not obstruct the HP bar and potentially impact the player's focus.

Lastly, a few long-term performance issues were resolved that had caused occasional game-freezes.

November

The osu!mania ranking system had been finalised and all scores were reset one last time on November 13.¹²

In the update on November 22, localisations provided by voluntary contributors in the osu! localisation project v2 were added to osu!, making the game available in several languages. On top of this, a Quick Join button was added to the multiplayer lobby, enabling players to randomly join a room.¹³

Google Translate was added to the osu! website on November 8 as an optional feature, where users became able to choose a language and the website would be automatically translated.¹⁴

A new section was added to the screenshot page displaying a selection of popular images that were uploaded when pressing Shift+ F12 in-game.¹⁵

December

Art by RBRat3

On December 21, osu! had received new features and changes, with the most notable ones being:

1. widescreen support
2. a loading screen when entering a beatmap
3. the Fun Spoiler settings were replaced with the new Visual Settings menu, which was placed at the bottom of the screen
4. No Video mod was moved to the visual settings menu.

The widescreen support, despite being functional, caused some images and videos to look weird (the head of a character not being visible as well as missing or partly hidden text) because the top and bottom were cropped. Storyboards did not support widescreen at the time, instead, letterboxes or black bars would appear on the sides which caused them to look cramped. This created an issue for Catch the Beat¹⁶ as the fruit would go over the black bars that were supposed to be in the boundary when using widescreen. Some storyboards also did not function properly (some images did not stay in the playing area, but instead, extended out to the black bars).¹⁷

After passing a beatmap once, users also became able to dim the background to 100% via the new visual settings menu.¹⁸

On December 25, a new version of Bancho was released which reduced the amount of network traffic when connecting to the server. Being a special occasion, osu!direct was available for everyone for the day.¹⁹

References