Perhaps this would only be possible with comparisons between a player's own local scores, but maybe the developers can find a way to integrate this idea into comparing to other player's scores too.
The way I envision this would work is very similar to how lap times for F1 Racing work, and more specifically the time differences between the drivers at any given time during the race. Another way to think of it is like the ghost player you can race against in Mario Kart, which drives your exact route from a previous race, which serves as a point of reference for you to see how you stack up against yourself.
For Osu the metrics tracked and compared could be the score, accuracy, combo, or number of misses of previous plays.
The way I see this looking in-game is as a numerical value somewhere in the HUD indicating just how much better or worse you're currently doing compared to how well you did in the previous play(s) at that exact point in the song. For example, you're 30 seconds into the song with 90% accuracy and in the previous play 30 seconds in you had 87% accuracy, so over on the side somewhere there is a "3%" shown in green font to indicate that your accuracy is 3% higher than your previous play at that point in the play.
If you were doing worse the font would be a darker colour like red, or whatever 'negative' colour would work without it becoming very hard to read on the background. Perhaps to fix the background problem you could have this information placed on a different coloured background so that no matter what dim level the player has set you can still read the information there.
I see the ability to do this as a great feature for players as there are many instances when I've played maps and performed better than ever on a particularly hard section and wondered just how much better I'd done. So with this feature, even if I couldn't really look to the side of the screen mid-game, I could watch the replay and see in real-time with clear data just how much better I'd done in the difficult section than before.
One thing I'm unsure of though that I wish I knew a good way of doing is just how you'd display the information for comparing multiple previous plays to the current one. Maybe the easiest and most viable way to do this would be to just have the default option be to compare your current play to your best play, or to a single play of the players choice.
Anyway that's it. I apologise that I haven't been as concise as I could be, I wanted to be as thorough and clear as possible in explaining this idea.
The way I envision this would work is very similar to how lap times for F1 Racing work, and more specifically the time differences between the drivers at any given time during the race. Another way to think of it is like the ghost player you can race against in Mario Kart, which drives your exact route from a previous race, which serves as a point of reference for you to see how you stack up against yourself.
For Osu the metrics tracked and compared could be the score, accuracy, combo, or number of misses of previous plays.
The way I see this looking in-game is as a numerical value somewhere in the HUD indicating just how much better or worse you're currently doing compared to how well you did in the previous play(s) at that exact point in the song. For example, you're 30 seconds into the song with 90% accuracy and in the previous play 30 seconds in you had 87% accuracy, so over on the side somewhere there is a "3%" shown in green font to indicate that your accuracy is 3% higher than your previous play at that point in the play.
If you were doing worse the font would be a darker colour like red, or whatever 'negative' colour would work without it becoming very hard to read on the background. Perhaps to fix the background problem you could have this information placed on a different coloured background so that no matter what dim level the player has set you can still read the information there.
I see the ability to do this as a great feature for players as there are many instances when I've played maps and performed better than ever on a particularly hard section and wondered just how much better I'd done. So with this feature, even if I couldn't really look to the side of the screen mid-game, I could watch the replay and see in real-time with clear data just how much better I'd done in the difficult section than before.
One thing I'm unsure of though that I wish I knew a good way of doing is just how you'd display the information for comparing multiple previous plays to the current one. Maybe the easiest and most viable way to do this would be to just have the default option be to compare your current play to your best play, or to a single play of the players choice.
Anyway that's it. I apologise that I haven't been as concise as I could be, I wanted to be as thorough and clear as possible in explaining this idea.