History of osu! 2022

January

More artists joined the Featured Artist program in the new year, namely NIWASHI, DGK, Haywyre, satella, Vansire, Boom Kitty, Annabel, and Maduk.

On 9 January, an osu! community meeting was held by the osu! team, discussing HP mechanics and general questions with community members.¹ In particular, many osu!mania players voiced that they desired osu!(lazer)'s HP drain to be less harsh, since osu!mania in osu!(stable) had no passive drain contrary to osu!(lazer) at the time. peppy mentioned that he would like to standardise HP drain across all 4 game modes to simplify gameplay for newcomers on lazer. 2 weeks later, on 22 January, there was another meeting with the osu! team detailing the continued development and answering various questions from the community.²

The editor in osu!(lazer) got a new feature which allows mappers to rotate selections via a button.³ Meanwhile, a new database system called Realm was implemented in the client, providing better efficiency and reliability. A progress bar was added at the start of the game while migration was going on, as it could take a while if there were large amounts of beatmaps and other data.⁴

On the website, users now became able to pin any of their scores and reorder them on their profile.⁵⁶

February

bill wurtz, Atavistia, HEAD PHONES PRESIDENT, MisoilePunch, Good Kid, Riya, Rabbit House, and MisomyL became Featured Artists.

In January, the osu! team opened a survey for osu!taiko and osu!mania to determine what the community expects of the performance points and the star rating system. The survey results, viewable here for osu!taiko and here for osu!mania,⁷ prompted the formation of a panel for osu!mania and osu!taiko in the Performance Points Committee later that year.

The third osu! community meeting of the year on 6 February was held concerning various community questions.⁸ On 20 February, another community meeting was held regarding mod multipliers and score, due to osu!(lazer) allowing variable rate adjustments for some mods. For example, Double Time can be adjusted to give 1.01x speed, instead of only 1.5x like in stable. This would give players an unfair advantage on leaderboards, as players still received the fixed 1.12x score multiplier. As a consequence, mod multipliers were temporarily disabled. The osu! team wants to work on a more robust solution in the future.⁹

osu!(lazer) received the Aim Assist mod as a new feature which draws hit objects to the cursor, essentially requiring less cursor movement from the player.¹⁰ The mod was renamed to Magnetised one month after the initial implementation.¹¹ Furthermore, the Alternate mod was also added, requiring the player to alternate between two keys when hitting circles.¹² The osu!mania game mode in osu!(lazer) got a new Hold Off mod where hold notes get converted to two regular notes.¹³

Following the first iteration in May last year, there was another skinning contest, this time with Tides of Winter as the theme. The contest concluded with thetasigma, BPChingu, and Redo_ getting third, second, and first place respectively.¹⁴

March

This month, Yunosuke, City Girl, EmoCosine, Raimukun, USAO, Plum, luvlxckdown, Never Say Die Records, and my sound life joined osu! as Featured Artists.

On 6 March, there was another osu! community meeting to determine how leaderboards and displaying scores should be handled. The solution implemented was displaying stable scores in lazer with Classic mod applied. Yet unresolved was the possibility of displaying lazer scores in stable, as the new lazer mods would decidedly not be implemented in stable and therefore displaying such scores in stable would only be possible with certain constraints. To integrate the community into this process, there was a survey about scoreboards in lazer. While preserving history was and still is a priority, the question of splitting or merging old and new leaderboards was left to the community to decide.¹⁵ Another community meeting on 20 March was held to give an insight in ongoing development.¹⁶

BTMC interviewed peppy about plans for osu!(lazer). Most of the questions were submitted by the community, with a few personal questions mixed in between.¹⁷ One major topic was the state of the ranking system, but there were also more general questions regarding the osu! ecosystem and its future.

The two mods Adaptive Speed and Strict Tracking were implemented in osu!(lazer). Adaptive Speed changes the track rate depending on if the hit was early or late.¹⁸ When the Strict Tracking mod is enabled, the cursor must stay in the slider ball at all times to prevent a combo break.¹⁹

April

9 new artists took part in the Featured Artist program: A.SAKA, Stonebank, Archspire, in love with a ghost, Mage, Aethral, Nile, MUZZ, and Mitsuki / RINYA. Additionally, the Monstercat label joined osu! as well, bringing many new artists to the community.²⁰

The survey that started in March about lazer scoreboards was now done and discussed in an osu! community meeting. The results showed that users voted for scores showing on beatmap leaderboards, performance points being awarded, and lazer's performance as the top priorities.²¹²²

After 5 years, Reddit hosted April Fools event r/place for the second time. Running from 1 April to 4 April, users could place colourful pixels anywhere on a canvas. The osu! community was successful in drawing and maintaining several artworks, as the illustrations were always in danger of being drawn over by other users. Among these artworks were the osu! logo containing the 4 game modes as well as a portrait of peppy.²³

Pixel artworks of the osu! logo on the left and peppy on the right

May

This month, Ardolf, Allegaeon, Tenchio, Neko Hacker, JOYLESS, 69 de 74, Origami Angel, and Rameses B joined osu! as Featured Artists.

In the A Place To Belong fanart contest, artists were prompted to draw osu! mascots going on adventures they had never been to. Dreamxiety won the contest with 3,713 votes.²⁴

From 20 May to 22 May, users could listen to various speeches in the osu! Talk Event: Overcoming Obstacles. As the title suggests, the talks were about addressing challenges with mindset in improvement, competition, and the like. Many topics in this event were about how to apply ideas from osu! to real life.

osu!(lazer) got big updates this month, with one being a new chat design²⁵ and the other being an entire overhaul of the mod select screen.²⁶

June

osu! welcomed Ponchi, Hino Isuka, SAMString, Kanpyohgo, :Poin7less, Tokyo Machine, Beach Bunny, NILFRUITS, and Toromaru as Featured Artists.

osu!(lazer) also received the Repel mod, which works in complete opposite to Magnetised. Enabling it would repel hit objects from the cursor, making it more difficult to navigate the cursor to the hit objects.²⁷

Several voluntary contributors were awarded with a Community Contributor badge for their astounding help in shaping the community to what it is today.²⁸

July

9 more artists joined the Featured Artist program, namely Rootkit, Grant, aran, Liar-soft, Blind Guardian, Exyl, NOISZ, Pegboard Nerds, and ZxNX.

osu!weekly was a newsletter for providing informative articles about all kinds of events in the community.²⁹ A team of voluntary contributors worked together to publish the osu!monthly, rekindling osu!weekly after 5 years in a monthly format, while also becoming the namesake of the first and second editions of osu!monthly last published 4 years prior on the osu! forums. These showcased development updates from osu!(lazer), community events, scores by top players among other things, as well as offering a community quiz, awarding the quickest user to answer with osu!supporter.³⁰

From 8 July to 10 July, 16 players were invited to compete in The Roundtable. Organised and hosted by BTMC in Los Angeles, the event was commented on by various content creators. The winner of this tournament was Utami, with mrekk taking the second place.³¹

The Single Tap mod was implemented for the osu! game mode in osu!(lazer), challenging players to tap with just one key.³²

August

This month, osu! was able to get a hold of Hamu, Darkney, Waterflame, Mitsukiyo, Koven, Abuse, DJ Genki / Gram, Aiyru, and -45 to become Featured Artists.

At 2022's cavoe's osu! event (COE), one of the largest osu! conventions, peppy hosted a technical presentation together with ThePoon on what the infrastructure of osu! looks like behind the scenes. They went over topics such as server cost, database storage, and how containerisation software like Docker and Kubernetes are used to implement infrastructure as code.³³

osu!(lazer) received an additional feature, making it possible to create mod presets from the mod select screen that save mod combinations and their settings.³⁴

September

Nashimoto Ui, Nitro Fun, Rezonate, AAAA, Andy Gillion, Vorso, Alestorm, Ritorikal, and Feint joined osu! as Featured Artists.

Since its 15 years of existence, osu! had grown a lively community with many voluntary contributors. In the wake of this event, an anniversary art contest was organised by the osu! team. The challenge was to create drawings of osu!'s mascots in historic moments. The first, second, and third place went to Dreamxiety, illuminae2005, and urgutz respectively. Among the results, peppy also shared some of his personal favourites.³⁵

Following the contest, there was a celebration event on the osu! Discord Server, where the osu! team played games together with community members and talked about random topics.³⁶

A new design proposed by flyte was implemented in the form of the "argon" skin to replace the old "triangles" skin from 2017.³⁷ The visual appearance of each game mode received a major overhaul, improving clarity and readability.

osu!'s star rating and performance point systems were revamped this month. Among a general balancing pass and other changes, playing on a touchscreen would now affect star rating.³⁸ The star rating and performance point systems in osu!taiko received a rework as well, with multiple new types of skill being taken into account in the calculation.³⁹

Several Hush-Hush medals, along with 3 new beatmap pack medals were added.⁴⁰

Medals released in September

October

This month, Mono., Tokyo.MeltiMelt, Ata, Hybrid Minds, GLORYHAMMER, Au5, Fractal, Kikuo, Hinkik, and Zenpaku were announced to be the new Featured Artists.

The triangles beatmapping and storyboarding contest concluded this month, with team Crazy Thursday consisting of yf_bmp, TtmnZk, Yugu, Chaoslitz and Yumeno Himiko taking the first place. Their beatmap will be included in every installation of osu!(lazer) as the contest's grand price.⁴¹

Among other changes, osu!mania now uses accuracy instead of score when calculating performance points, due to changes to the star rating and performance point systems.⁴²

osu! passed 4,294,967,296 scores, meaning that the old database system has reached its limit. Every score is saved with a unique 32-bit unsigned integer which means that the database can not store more than 2^32 scores. The expanded database infrastructure was already planned months prior to this and migrated to with a few weeks to spare.⁴³⁴⁴⁴⁵ The last score submitted on the old system was *namirin - Kanzen Shouri*Esper Girl played by ElDanetex.

Creative people proved their talent in the Chromatic Alteration skinning contest. The challenge of this contest had an interesting twist because the types of colours had to be from one of three specified colour spectra corresponding to vision deficiencies protanopia, deuteranopia, and tritanopia. Winners of this contest taking the first, second, and third place were thetasigma, Corne2Plum3, and koomo respectively.⁴⁶

osu!(lazer) received the Freeze Frame mod which would only show one whole combo at a time, requiring more reading ability from the player.⁴⁷

An update to the osu! website enabled display of the highest rank a player has ever achieved when hovering over a player's rank on their profile.⁴⁸

For this year's Halloween, there was a fanart contest once again where artists were encouraged to draw the osu! mascots in spooky costumes. Dreamxiety won the first place in the contest with 3,749 votes.⁴⁹ One entry was revoked because it was deemed too fear-inducing and the author was awarded with a custom badge instead.⁵⁰⁵¹⁵²

November

osu! welcomed 8 new Featured Artists, namely happy30, Massive New Krew, HoneyComeBear, Ensou, Crywolf, E0ri4, Innocent Key, and Noisestorm.

3 Hush-Hush, 3 beatmap pack, and 3 new skill medals were added.⁵³

Medals released in November

December

This month, LilyPichu, Ekcle, LandRoot, Satyr, tsunamix, nyankobrq, and Mili became Featured Artists.

A collaboration with makeship this year created 3 different osu! plush figure designs, pippi herself, the osu! cookie and Taikonator 3000, available in a limited-time offer.⁵⁴

Makeship collaboration

Another built-in skin was added to osu!(lazer) called "argon pro", a variant of the "argon" skin aimed to contain more minimalistic gameplay elements, starting with a new set of hitsounds for the osu! game mode.⁵⁵ Skins with fewer visual distractions are often preferred by top players.

In the last art contest of the year, New Beginnings, the participants needed to draw the osu! mascots welcoming 2023 on New Year's Eve. The winner of this contest was Dreamxiety with 2,203 votes.⁵⁶

References