It's actually funny because you remind me a bit of myself in 2012 except that I mapped for myself and didn't make threads asking about what people think about the style I used in a certain map. But in the very beginning I thought that everything i placed makes sense with the song. My own creation seemed logical to me as I made it by playtesting it a lot and thought about the song when placing notes. Whenever I gave it to other people they went like "uhh this somehow works, but it's weird". After some time (more like after about 1.5 years of doing that) I started to mod others' maps because I hoped to find out why my own maps seem so dull and lame to me, the more I did that the more I became aware of the conceptual and rhythmical flaws in my earlier maps and started to dislike them for that reason even more, but I had a point to work from towards making something that other people can understand, predict and maybe also enjoy.
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Just like mainstream media, there are mainstream mapping techniques, people just started collecting them to have a compendium, most of them only work in certain contexts and are terrible in others. Believe it or not people copy other people's ideas because they like their ideas and incorporate them into their own work by mixing it with their interpretations.
If you have to explain why your map makes sense it probably doesn't, lol. If you map for yourself, that's fine! It only has to make sense to you yourself, you don't have to defend it to anyone, after all you made it for yourself!
If you map for other people you should aim to make something that follows a song and is predictable / understandable by other people as well and in order to do that you need to study what's predictable for people, which is easily done by looking at techniques, patterns and setups of maps you enjoy playing. If you aim to get a map ranked, you won't be doing it for yourself nor will you be the one who plays it the most, others will. Others will have opinions on your map, your style, your setup. If they don't understand what you were trying to express you probably failed to convey what you felt when placing objects.
As for your art argument it's just outright dumb to compare cubism with hyper-realism, each art style stands on its own and is defined by its own rules and regulations, while certain styles are popular, others are unique or in a niche because only a few people follow them. Timing is a technical part and therefore a bad argument for something subjective, it has to be correct otherwise the map will feel really retarded when playing it. The creative part of mapping is placing objects to the music and making them interact with each other in certain ways with certain motives. Basically most general Rules in the RC just define "a non-broken beatmap". Your map can still be boring af / rhythmically wrong, but not technically broken when following these regulations.
And yes each mapper and player probably defines for themselves what spacing styles, visual styles and song genres they like.
The only "unwritten" rule is make sense to other people probably. Flow is subjective, placement is subjective people just collect commonly used ideas because they seem to like collecting ideas which work well for them.
Xexxar's map used higher spacing what apparently most people deemed acceptable for the song (yes, this is subjective! People like being biased! You also are biased towards the style in that map, otherwise this thread wouldn't exist!) and someone came to the thread and explained their opinion, this happens and is encouraged in qualified maps. Since a discussion was going on while it was qualified, it was pulled out of qualification to continue discussing without having time pressure, that's mainly all there is to it. I personally didn't think it's overboard or anything, but didn't like it either and Xexxar decided to stop trying to get it requalified for now or something.
The making sense part is not written down because it's mostly something that people develop upon gaining more experience with the editor. This is what makes mapping fun, different people interpret the same song differently and both interpretations can work very well next to each other for many people!
If your interpretation of a song gets mainly people asking "what the fuck are you doing there? This is so unpredictable that it feels really random to me", then that means that
Idk if any of this contributes to your discussion, as I'm basically saying something similar to winber but with less provoking wording lol.
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Just like mainstream media, there are mainstream mapping techniques, people just started collecting them to have a compendium, most of them only work in certain contexts and are terrible in others. Believe it or not people copy other people's ideas because they like their ideas and incorporate them into their own work by mixing it with their interpretations.
If you have to explain why your map makes sense it probably doesn't, lol. If you map for yourself, that's fine! It only has to make sense to you yourself, you don't have to defend it to anyone, after all you made it for yourself!
If you map for other people you should aim to make something that follows a song and is predictable / understandable by other people as well and in order to do that you need to study what's predictable for people, which is easily done by looking at techniques, patterns and setups of maps you enjoy playing. If you aim to get a map ranked, you won't be doing it for yourself nor will you be the one who plays it the most, others will. Others will have opinions on your map, your style, your setup. If they don't understand what you were trying to express you probably failed to convey what you felt when placing objects.
As for your art argument it's just outright dumb to compare cubism with hyper-realism, each art style stands on its own and is defined by its own rules and regulations, while certain styles are popular, others are unique or in a niche because only a few people follow them. Timing is a technical part and therefore a bad argument for something subjective, it has to be correct otherwise the map will feel really retarded when playing it. The creative part of mapping is placing objects to the music and making them interact with each other in certain ways with certain motives. Basically most general Rules in the RC just define "a non-broken beatmap". Your map can still be boring af / rhythmically wrong, but not technically broken when following these regulations.
And yes each mapper and player probably defines for themselves what spacing styles, visual styles and song genres they like.
The only "unwritten" rule is make sense to other people probably. Flow is subjective, placement is subjective people just collect commonly used ideas because they seem to like collecting ideas which work well for them.
Xexxar's map used higher spacing what apparently most people deemed acceptable for the song (yes, this is subjective! People like being biased! You also are biased towards the style in that map, otherwise this thread wouldn't exist!) and someone came to the thread and explained their opinion, this happens and is encouraged in qualified maps. Since a discussion was going on while it was qualified, it was pulled out of qualification to continue discussing without having time pressure, that's mainly all there is to it. I personally didn't think it's overboard or anything, but didn't like it either and Xexxar decided to stop trying to get it requalified for now or something.
The making sense part is not written down because it's mostly something that people develop upon gaining more experience with the editor. This is what makes mapping fun, different people interpret the same song differently and both interpretations can work very well next to each other for many people!
If your interpretation of a song gets mainly people asking "what the fuck are you doing there? This is so unpredictable that it feels really random to me", then that means that
- they aren't skilled enough to comprehend the map
- your map is too complicated for your target audience
- your map lacks an understandable concept for anyone who can't read your mind
Idk if any of this contributes to your discussion, as I'm basically saying something similar to winber but with less provoking wording lol.