I'm pretty much brand new to beatmapping, and I haven't been playing osu for too long, so if the type of functionality I'm about to describe already exists, please tell me so I can make use of it. Also sorry if this is a duplicate, I did searches for vague terms about sliders but found nothing. To me, none of this is absolutely necessary (you can make sliders just fine in the current editor) just something that would hopefully make things easier.

Issues:
- After semi-successfully beatmapping almost 3 difficulties for a song (said song will go up when I'm done with the 3rd difficulty), I find one thing still bugs me: slider creation.
- Sliders are a very important part to the flow and elegance of a beatmap, and the way it feels to edit them now is terrible imo. I'm slowly getting used to it, but I think it could still be better.
- Slider length is hard to nail down especially when you're going for a specific shape.
- Slider shape is sometimes hard to predict, and I haven't found a good way to add additional anchors in the middle of 2 anchors or at the end of a completed slider.
- Sliders are often made to be symmetrical or reflexive, but I haven't found a way to select 2 slider points to move in unison.
- I often see repeated slider shapes with only minor transforms applied across many different songs, but I haven't seen a way to actually save a slider shape to reuse later.

Proposed Resolution:
- Dedicated slider editor with the following features:
- Ability to layout a slider and save the shape as a path so you can import it into other beatmaps.
- Ability to save slider shape packs for reuse in other beatmaps
- Flexible editing with the ability to add anchors between placed anchors, and toggle placed anchors red/white
- Ability to select multiple anchors to move in unison or move mirrored across x/y axis.
- Independent in-editor BPM/slider velocity settings to test laid out sliders on various song settings.
- Ability to scale slider shapes.
- Ability to lock/unlock length at will while editing. Locking the length just means that the slider won't jump to the next beat if an anchor is dragged too far.
- Possibly give access to bezier curve anchors to customize position.
- Ability to open sliders made in compose editor into slider editor with mirrored slider settings from the beatmap.

Dae314 wrote:

- Slider length is hard to nail down especially when you're going for a specific shape.

Scaling tool?

Dae314 wrote:

- Slider shape is sometimes hard to predict, and I haven't found a good way to add additional anchors in the middle of 2 anchors or at the end of a completed slider.

Ctrl + Click?

Dae314 wrote:

- Sliders are often made to be symmetrical or reflexive, but I haven't found a way to select 2 slider points to move in unison.

Could be nice, but you can still use the grid to help you out.

Dae314 wrote:

- I often see repeated slider shapes with only minor transforms applied across many different songs, but I haven't seen a way to actually save a slider shape to reuse later.

I think this has been requested before.

Not a bad idea, but i don't see it being any better than the current system, in fact the current system seems awfully easy to make sliders with.

Dae314 wrote:

- Ability to lock/unlock length at will while editing. Locking the length just means that the slider won't jump to the next beat if an anchor is dragged too far.

This would actually be nice.

I think eventually we should be able to drag the cursor in the shape of the slider we want. That would be slider editing nirvana.

Dae314 wrote:

- Dedicated slider editor with the following features:

Why dedicated? That's just an extra screen adding an extra annoyance needing to go into/out of.

Dae314 wrote:

- Ability to layout a slider and save the shape as a path so you can import it into other beatmaps.
- Ability to save slider shape packs for reuse in other beatmaps

These two sound the same to me? The ability to import/export sliders for use in other maps. This has been discussed.

Dae314 wrote:

- Flexible editing with the ability to add anchors between placed anchors, and toggle placed anchors red/white

ctrl+click can do both of these.

Dae314 wrote:

- Ability to select multiple anchors to move in unison

I don't see this being useful at all. Moving multiple anchors has a non-obvious effect on shape and I don't see it helping with shaping.

Dae314 wrote:

or move mirrored across x/y axis.

A symmetry lock has been discussed. It would need three options: horizontal, vertical, and 180 rotational.

Dae314 wrote:

- Independent in-editor BPM/slider velocity settings to test laid out sliders on various song settings.

What does this even mean?

Dae314 wrote:

- Ability to scale slider shapes.

Edit / Scale By

Dae314 wrote:

- Ability to lock/unlock length at will while editing. Locking the length just means that the slider won't jump to the next beat if an anchor is dragged too far.

Length lock works for me, but there's some potential for troubles if the map's timing gets changed.

Dae314 wrote:

- Possibly give access to bezier curve anchors to customize position.

You already ... do? This is fundamental to making sliders.

Dae314 wrote:

- Ability to open sliders made in compose editor into slider editor with mirrored slider settings from the beatmap.

Already been through why a separate mode is a bad idea.

TheVileOne wrote:

I think eventually we should be able to drag the cursor in the shape of the slider we want. That would be slider editing nirvana.

We discussed this in another thread and concluded that the resulting shapes from such a tool would look like something you did in mspaint and could probably be replicated with catmulls.

challenge accepted



It would be nice to have a smoothing option for sliders. If you selected a range and all the slider points within that range will become equidistant.

A way to view exact distance between two slider points/ view angle/slope between slider points.

Point symmetry tool: Will divide the points of a slider in half and make the second half of points mirror the first half.

That's about all the things that i would find useful for slider creation at this time. I think that making sliders with the cursor would be a good tool for advanced users. The mapper can remove the extra move points to perfect the shape. It would be better than not having the tool. also catmull are really tedious to make with the current slider algorithm. What's wrong with catmulls?

The reason for my recommendation of a dedicated editor was because it was such a long feature list I thought that having a dedicated editor with a separate hotkey namespace would be useful. However since several of the features I listed were possible (THANK YOU!!!! OMG my life is so much better now) with the current editor, it wouldn't need to be dedicated, I agree. As a side note, I never intended the dedicated editor to replace the current compose editor, just extend it for when you need fine control over the sliders.

I separated saving single sliders and slider packs because I feel like having a dedicated way in game (like how osz files work) to auto-extract a bunch of sliders would be nice compared to just having sliders in a zip file. Plus, it would make sharing easier. Thinking about it now, if slider export/import were created, that would open up the possibility to have a slider toolbox in the editor so you could just drag out slider shapes. Anyway, since this has already been discussed, this feature request is depreciated.

Maybe it's just the way I design sliders, but I lay out the shape first, then go for length since length keeps snapping to beats. Most of the shapes I use are somewhat symmetrical, and it would be nice to be able to say move the 2 points immediately to the right and left of the top anchor in a circle down simultaneously if I needed to. Movement along various symmetry lines would go along with this idea of moving multiple anchors at once. Anyway, this feature request is also depreciated.

The independent in-editor settings are now a depreciated idea since I don't think there's enough features to justify a dedicated editor.

Maybe I mean the handles? When making curves in other programs, you're given access to 3 points per anchor usually. 1 point is pretty much for positioning, and the other 2 control the curve. I don't know the actual name for all of them. Is there an option to show these already? This is also unnecessary, so I'm just going to say this is depreciated.

This topic has run a bit off the original intention, sorry. It used to be a bottled feature request (as in a request for a feature that would implement a bunch of features), but now it's degraded into a multiple feature request.

In order to keep with the rules of this subforum, I would like to restrict this thread's discussion to just length lock. The OP will be edited, and hopefully the title can be changed as well.