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
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.
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.