hello osu! community and I'm here to tell you my suggestions for skinning osu!mania~

so... first things first. PLEASE ALLOW TRANSPARENCY FOR THE ELEMENTS (and yes, I mean ALL the elements). I mean, why make it a .png if you're not gonna use its awesome transparency capabilities? And... I swear that the osu!mania playfield would look so much cooler if this will be implemented. i was dumb, this is implemented at the very first day

Next one. The playfield background. There should be an element that will be stretched according to the screen height and the total size of the columns. Not just the plain black colored background.

Stage overlay. The osu!mania stage looks so redundant. We should be able to put an animate-able overlay image on top of it so we can make it look cooler. It also adds more variations to the skins we can produce. Now this should be anchored on top of the thingies you press (forgot what it's called) and stretched according to the total size of the columns.

Kiai support. Background and stage overlay must also follow the rhythm. Since the playfield looks currently dull, there should be 2 additional elements, background-kiai and overlay-kiai. These things pop up and replace the original ones whenever it's kiai time. They should also play with the beat by altering the images' brightness in every beat of the song.

Stage-right and stage-left. Yup. I want these things to be able to extend all the way to the top so that I could put fancy decorations on the sides of the playfield. meh this is useless as well

Optional osu!mania custom healthbar and healthbar colour. These would be optional. Since some skins have osu!standard healthbars that doesn't look good on osu!mania.

Star3. There could be these hundreds of stars bursting out from the stage center whenever kiai time starts.

Some other stuff~

Rearrangement of the element layers. Yep. This thing really needs to be fixed. A couple of things that I spotted: in multiplayer, scoring cannot be seen; in-game, healthbar gets printed on top of section-pass or section-fail. So, I propose that the layers get printed in this order:
storyboard < score panel < ranking tabs combo fire < star 3 < playfield background < healthbar < thingies you press < stage-right & left < stage overlay < lighting (on the column where you press a button) < guideline (the line where you're supposed to hit the notes) < notes < lighting (when you hit a note) < section-pass & fail.

I also might post images on how I want things to look like when these will be implemented. Tomorrow, maybe, when I'm back on my pc. no i won't

Support
Sounds really cool, opens up a lot of fun skinning possibilities~

you have a star bro ;D

First, mania already support transparency of all elements.
Some of the rest suggestions can reached by config file now.

+10 Support. My current skin and osu!mania clash a good bit. \:

Or (if anyone has them), can someone name out the elements that osu!mania specifically uses?

woc2006 wrote:

First, mania already support transparency of all elements.
Some of the rest suggestions can reached by config file now.

/o/
i guess this is added then?

please tell me those which are implemented already and I will remove them from the post ^_^

maybe some of this minght help

deadbeat wrote:

maybe some of this minght help

MLGnom is a boss x.x

MLGnom wrote:

So, time to make explanation of osu!mania skinning.

Let’s start with skin parts.

1. LightingN – Lighting that appear when you hit a note on judgment bar (named that correctly?). Can be animated, through it’s pretty fast animation.
   
2. LightingL - Same as above but it’s for “slider” notes.
   
3. mania-hit0, 50, 100, 200, 300, 300g – Hitbursts for osu!mania. You can animate them, but remember these are really fast, so you need to be cleaver to make them visible. Animation isn’t looped, that means it is long as many sprites you did.
   
4. mania-key1 /2/S – Skin for buttons. Be careful with using patterns on it. Because later in .ini files you might set length of buttons that can make patterns stretched. Special button is used in 7k/8k game mod.
   
5. mania-key1D/2D/SD – Skin for buttons while pressed. Same as above.
   
6. mania-note1/2/S – Skin for mania notes.
   
7. mania-note1H/2H/SH – Skin for end parts of “slider”.
   
8. mania-note1L/2L/SL – Skin for middle part of “slider”. This one can be animated.
   
9. mania-stage-hint – known as judgment bar. Place where you need to hit note correctly. If you have problems with correct position of it use judgment line that you can set in .ini files.
   
10. mania-stage-left/right – A left/right part of mania playfield. They aren’t restricted by size, so you can make neat sides by adding something more than border. If you will use it just for border, do a smaller part - rest will be repeated from upper part of screen to bottom.
    But if you are going to something larger, set height at 768px and width of your preference.
    
11. mania-stage-light – special light that appears on column stage when you hit a button. Game will always try to fit it into column width, making them wide will force game to resize it to size of column.
    Better make higher than wider.
    
12. selection-mod-key4/5/6/7/8 – mod icons for mania key mods.
13. special-mania - osu!mania icon in special mode select.

Now second part – ini files.
Every mania skin should contains 5 .ini files ! 4k, 5k, 6k, 7k and 8k. As you can guess these are general options for mania-key mods.

Let’s start explaining them!

1. ColumnWidth:50,25,30,25,30,25,30,25 – the widths of tracks. All numbers are separated by comma.
   Sizes goes from left to right. So if you changed special button position in 8k, you need to change it here too.
   WARNING! Use only 4 sizes for 4k, 5 for 5k, 6 for 6k, 7 for 7k, 8 for 8k. No more,no less than amount of tracks otherwise you will crash osu! when starting a map!
   
2. SpecialPositionLeft:0/1 – Special position button for 8k. If turned off (set to 0) button will appear on right side of stage.
   
3. ColumnStart: 230 – Position of osu!mania stage. You can set from 0 to 460. 0 - left side, 230 - center of screen, 460 - right side.
   
4. ColumnLine: 1,0,0,0,0,0,1,1 – Set a white line between tracks. 0 – off, 1- on. Amount should be same as amount of tracks otherwise it won’t work.
   
5. JudgementLine:0/1 – Show judgment line. It’s line where you need to hit notes.
   
6. Colour1: 80,0,0,200 – Set colour of track. Numbers are in format RGB A (red, green, blue,alpha – transparency ). You should set colours amount same as amount of tracks (Up to 8 for 8k).

Template : http://puu.sh/1eKoc

For more recent osu!mania template we need to wait, because things are constantly added/changed etc.

thanks a lot for that ^.^
I also found a few implemented features while skinning, and I'm about to update this thread in a while.

although I'll have to disagree with the column start. it only gets centered in certain screen sizes like 1024x768 or 800x600 but not in widescreens like mine, which is 1366x768. so technically, setting columnstart to 230 will not center the playfield, instead it will move the start of the playfield 230 units to the right.