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Eluveitie - The Uprising

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Topic Starter
Honeybadger_old
This beatmap was submitted using in-game submission on den 24 april 2013 at 03:35:25

Artist: Eluveitie
Title: The Uprising
Tags: folk metal
BPM: 110
Filesize: 5199kb
Play Time: 03:36
Difficulties Available:
  1. Hard (4,76 stars, 596 notes)
  2. Insane (5 stars, 862 notes)
  3. Normal (1,91 stars, 235 notes)
Download: Eluveitie - The Uprising
Information: Scores/Beatmap Listing
---------------
My first map! Had a hard time making the easier difficulty, as I felt it didn't fit the song itself. Any help with that one would be much appreciated! Fairly happy with the other two, more so the Hard than Insane.
Thanks to BusterBlazeFox for all his help!
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Changelog:
13-04-10 - Modified timing a bit in insane. Also modified the flow a bit in the Hard difficulty. Not sure about 00:33:012 (1,2,3,1,2,3,4,5,6), any opinions?
13-04-11 - Modified spacing a bit in easy.
13-04-15 - Decided to move it to pending.
13-04-24 - Changed a section in insane.
BusterBeachside
OH MY GOD THIS TRACK IS AWESOME

Metal is awesome by itself, but FOLK metal!?!? It's just too cool.

This next comment is totally just my personal pet peeve, but why use the Soft sound set for such a heavy song? It's just begging for some whistles. x3 I personally don't think it fits at all. But then, plenty of ranked beatmaps are like that, so keep it however you want it. I just don't like ti much. :p Now for some REAL modding.

EASY:
Since this is an Easy diff. (Well, it's actually more of a normal TBH, maybe you should rename it?), I think you should lower the difficulty a bit. My suggestions:
HP Drain: 4
Circle Size: 3
Approach Rate: 3
Overall Difficulty: 2 (I stress this one, those spinners were a bit too hard for this level)
00:21:966 (5) - Having any note begin on anything but a white or red tick in an Easy diff. is generally bad idea. It's hard to read in general, even more so for a newer player. I know this makes the map seem boring to an experienced player, but not being intuitive in your maps just for the easier difficulties is both annoying to new players who can't clear the harder maps and also makes you look lazy. :? I know this is your first map, as you said, and most mappers find easier difficulties to be tough to map for. Just keep it in mind as I continue the mod and for any future maps! :D
00:25:785 (1) - You were pushing it with the two objects before this one, but I note this one since it's another Blue Ticker.
00:57:557 (5) - New combo?
01:00:285 (10) - Same as above? You had a bunch of 4 combos but then you suddenly have a 12 combo. Might as well keep it all the same. Longer combos actually do make the map harder by the way, since the ends of combos give a bigger Life boost than normal hits.
02:04:648 (7,8,9,10) - Another blue tick here and otherwise hard for a new player to read. Since you had a pretty steady beat going for a long time before this point, it makes it even more counter intuitive. Easy diffs. really are more about focusing on keeping the beat and keeping it simple. It's actually pretty simple making an Easy difficulty. :)
02:50:467 (1) - Hey hey, this is an Easy difficulty, no jumps! ;) Seriously, new players will NOT be able to do that.
02:54:830 (1) - Above. Any other jumps will have to be changed, too. They're no bueno for easy difficulties, sorry. :|

HARD:
Overall difficulty +1? Spinners seem too easy now. :D
You had WAY too many short sliders. It's really easy to spam repeat sliders. It's really tough to read and pretty strenuous on the players clicking fingers...
Try making more lines like this one: 02:37:648 (2,3,4,1,2,1,2,3,4,1,2). It had a pretty good mix of hit circles and sliders, and not too much unnecessary repeating.
I didn't see anything particularly unrankable about it otherwise, but all the mini repeat sliders just make it seem a bit lazy and not very original.

INSANE:
00:02:739 (1) - Note is partially off-screen. That's unrankable. :(
00:39:557 (1) - Haha, there were a couple of these, but sliders like this on Insane difficulties are fail-bait. Not sure if that was your goal, but yeah, it can be a bit jarring to suddenly have a big slider like this since they're so easy to do for any player skilled enough to pass this map to begin with (those streams, such fun). I don't know how good you are, but what I mean to say is that you don't get a lot of HP from slider ticks and Insane diffs. tend to have higher HP Drain Rates, so you could end up failing here even if you were doing it right. It's not a problem in its own right, I just wanted to let you know in case you weren't aware of this...
01:10:512 (1) - Move this note to 01:10:376 and add note at 1:10:648? This note is hard to read.
01:15:830 (2) - Distance spacing is hard to read. Once again, not sure how good you are at the game (I'm trying so hard not to treat you like a noob here, I swear xD), but experienced players tend to judge more on the distance spacing than the approach circles. Even if you were trying to make this one part a little bit harder, it's not really a logical place to put something like that in the song's flow, you know what I mean?
01:21:285 (8) - Once again, distance spacing. It's really tough to read this hit as anything other than part of the stream it appears to be connected to. If you want, you could just do a new combo on it to show the player that the timing on it is different.
01:23:876 (3) - The timing is tough to match with the lyrics singing to a different beat here.
01:25:648 (2) - More spacing
01:46:239 (1,2) - Notes are partially off-screen

There were a lot of spacing and timing issues in this one. Better that you make the notes REALLY far away (A jump, as they're known) then way too close to the last note when the timing isn't the same. The only time that's really OK is when you're stacking notes. Pretty much anything is fair game in stacks, it seems... Haha!

Love the background image, love the track! It needs some work, particularly on the spacing and weird timing, but I think it could be great with some cleaning up work! Also, might I suggest making the combo colors a little brighter? Having such a dark, forest-y feel to it just doesn't sit well with me for some reason. It's never bad to have some good contrast between the BG image and the combo colors. Most more experienced mappers just leave them as the default colors, actually. :D

Good luck!!
Topic Starter
Honeybadger_old
You have no idea how much I love you. <3 I'll get to work as soon as I'm done with my League of Legends game. I think it shows that the first note I ever placed with the editor was in that insane difficulty. When I started out I had no idea what spacing even was and how it related to the playability of the map. I thought I had found all of the spacing messes I made for myself, but thanks for catching the rest (hopefully)! I think that making tracks for levels easier than your own skill is something you learn after a while too, thanks a ton for all the input!

Folk metal is best metal in my ears.
BusterBeachside
No problem at all, let me know via PM when you get finished touching it up and I'll look it over for you again! :)
Topic Starter
Honeybadger_old

BusterBlazeFox wrote:

OH MY GOD THIS TRACK IS AWESOME

This next comment is totally just my personal pet peeve, but why use the Soft sound set for such a heavy song? It's just begging for some whistles. x3 I personally don't think it fits at all. But then, plenty of ranked beatmaps are like that, so keep it however you want it. I just don't like ti much. :p Now for some REAL modding.
My thought behind that was that I liked the subtle normal sound to let the song itself have more presence. It's my personal bias to love the song in its original glory that's behind it. After much deliberation I've switched it back to the normal sound set. It highlights the map rather than the song, which I suppose is the point. Besides, the map is supposed to compliment the song, so it works either way. I'm horrible with adding sounds though, as mentioned I love the song in its original state. Any advice on the matter would be lovely!
EASY:
Since this is an Easy diff. (Well, it's actually more of a normal TBH, maybe you should rename it?), I think you should lower the difficulty a bit. My suggestions:
HP Drain: 4
Circle Size: 3
Approach Rate: 3
Overall Difficulty: 2 (I stress this one, those spinners were a bit too hard for this level)
Agreed, those settings are much better. Had a bit of an issue pinpointing exactly how easy easy should be, but this seems just about right. Renamed the difficulty as well, you're right about that too. Folk Metal doesn't really make easy easy, if you catch my drift.
00:21:966 (5) - Having any note begin on anything but a white or red tick in an Easy diff. is generally bad idea. It's hard to read in general, even more so for a newer player. I know this makes the map seem boring to an experienced player, but not being intuitive in your maps just for the easier difficulties is both annoying to new players who can't clear the harder maps and also makes you look lazy. :? I know this is your first map, as you said, and most mappers find easier difficulties to be tough to map for. Just keep it in mind as I continue the mod and for any future maps! :D
Changed the slider to a circle on the ending point of the slider, the white tick. I got caught in matching the melody of the song and ignoring the difficulty, pushed it a bit far there. The song doesn't lend itself to lower difficulties, especially not if you love it like I do. I want to represent it perfectly, which is impossible without more difficulty.
00:25:785 (1) - You were pushing it with the two objects before this one, but I note this one since it's another Blue Ticker.
I'm having difficulties managing that part. Changed it to no longer fall on blue ticks, but it doesn't fit with the song properly.
00:57:557 (5) - New combo?
Fixed
01:00:285 (10) - Same as above? You had a bunch of 4 combos but then you suddenly have a 12 combo. Might as well keep it all the same. Longer combos actually do make the map harder by the way, since the ends of combos give a bigger Life boost than normal hits.
Fixed. Did not know about that combo thing, good to know. Was not intentional to have a 12 combo though, it slipped through the cracks.
02:04:648 (7,8,9,10) - Another blue tick here and otherwise hard for a new player to read. Since you had a pretty steady beat going for a long time before this point, it makes it even more counter intuitive. Easy diffs. really are more about focusing on keeping the beat and keeping it simple. It's actually pretty simple making an Easy difficulty. :)
Replaced blue tick slider with single white tick circle. Rearranged the pattern to be more intuitive and fluid. Once again focused more on the melody than the beat, which negatively impacted the difficulty.
02:50:467 (1) - Hey hey, this is an Easy difficulty, no jumps! ;) Seriously, new players will NOT be able to do that.
02:54:830 (1) - Above. Any other jumps will have to be changed, too. They're no bueno for easy difficulties, sorry. :|
Whoa. Not sure how that slipped past my playtesting. Fixed the jumps. They're ghosts of copied pasta, I believe.

HARD:
Overall difficulty +1? Spinners seem too easy now. :D
Done, good call.
You had WAY too many short sliders. It's really easy to spam repeat sliders. It's really tough to read and pretty strenuous on the players clicking fingers...
Try making more lines like this one: 02:37:648 (2,3,4,1,2,1,2,3,4,1,2). It had a pretty good mix of hit circles and sliders, and not too much unnecessary repeating.
I didn't see anything particularly unrankable about it otherwise, but all the mini repeat sliders just make it seem a bit lazy and not very original.
I'll need a bit of clarification on the repeat slider issue, not sure I'm understanding correctly. An example of an offending snippet would be lovely. The chorus is very heavy on the repeat sliders, should redo that.

INSANE:
00:02:739 (1) - Note is partially off-screen. That's unrankable. :(
.. Why'd I put it off-screen? Rookie mistake. Oh wait.. One of the first notes I placed. I'll let it slide. This time.
00:39:557 (1) - Haha, there were a couple of these, but sliders like this on Insane difficulties are fail-bait. Not sure if that was your goal, but yeah, it can be a bit jarring to suddenly have a big slider like this since they're so easy to do for any player skilled enough to pass this map to begin with (those streams, such fun). I don't know how good you are, but what I mean to say is that you don't get a lot of HP from slider ticks and Insane diffs. tend to have higher HP Drain Rates, so you could end up failing here even if you were doing it right. It's not a problem in its own right, I just wanted to let you know in case you weren't aware of this...
I've replaced all fail-bait (cursed fail-bait, didn't even realize I was doing it) with other things that fit. Hopefully I got every last one of those pesky little buggers.
01:10:512 (1) - Move this note to 01:10:376 and add note at 1:10:648? This note is hard to read.
Good call, fixed.
01:15:830 (2) - Distance spacing is hard to read. Once again, not sure how good you are at the game (I'm trying so hard not to treat you like a noob here, I swear xD), but experienced players tend to judge more on the distance spacing than the approach circles. Even if you were trying to make this one part a little bit harder, it's not really a logical place to put something like that in the song's flow, you know what I mean?
You're completely right. Makes no sense to space those two notes that close in that spot. Fixed.
01:21:285 (8) - Once again, distance spacing. It's really tough to read this hit as anything other than part of the stream it appears to be connected to. If you want, you could just do a new combo on it to show the player that the timing on it is different.
Readjusted the note to use proper spacing.
01:23:876 (3) - The timing is tough to match with the lyrics singing to a different beat here.
Redid that part to match the lyrics rather than the guitar, as the lyrics are more prominent and on a different beat. The result is an easier but well fitting bit, which is rather lovely if I may say so myself. Not too happy with the transition back into guitar focused mapping.
01:25:648 (2) - More spacing
Fixed. Changed the fail-bait into a steady beat of circles, easy but that's better than failbait. Fits decently to the tune.
01:46:239 (1,2) - Notes are partially off-screen
Fixed

There were a lot of spacing and timing issues in this one. Better that you make the notes REALLY far away (A jump, as they're known) then way too close to the last note when the timing isn't the same. The only time that's really OK is when you're stacking notes. Pretty much anything is fair game in stacks, it seems... Haha!

Also, might I suggest making the combo colors a little brighter? Having such a dark, forest-y feel to it just doesn't sit well with me for some reason.
Combo colours changed to a lighter green, teal, red and yellow. Not entirely sure about the red, might be too dark still. The green likewise, not sure. I'm not the best with colour.

Comments: Very thorough of you! Thank you for taking the time. Don't worry about treating me like a noob, I am one. I can play maps decently well (can play certain insane songs, nothing too extreme), but I've only just started mapping a day or two ago. I've played fun beatmaps before, but I've never really thought about the mechanics of what's fun behind it, which is what you're helping me with. Once again, thanks!
Verlaren
Nice song~
BusterBeachside
My comments in bold. :D

My thought behind that was that I liked the subtle normal sound to let the song itself have more presence. It's my personal bias to love the song in its original glory that's behind it. After much deliberation I've switched it back to the normal sound set. It highlights the map rather than the song, which I suppose is the point. Besides, the map is supposed to compliment the song, so it works either way. I'm horrible with adding sounds though, as mentioned I love the song in its original state. Any advice on the matter would be lovely!

When your mapping, sometimes sacrifices like that have to be made. :( Since it's a rhythm game, you have to provide some kind of feedback to let the player know how they're doing. Since you have to do that anyway, you might as well make it sound good! :D It's best if you look at it as adding some new awesome-ness to the song itself, know what I mean? For reference, I uploaded a .osu file of the Insane map with some hitsound mods I made (Just open your beatmap folder and drop it in, it should come up as the "Hitsound" difficulty in-game and shouldn't overwrite anything). People say I tend to overuse the whistle sound, haha. xD But in the end, just do whatever sounds best to you. It's not really a very big deal! :D
01:31:376 (1) - Note here that I switched to the soft sample set for emphasis. You can do this by highlighting the notes and then clicking on the sampleset button to the top-left of the window. A pretty recent feature that makes it so that you don't need a billion timing sections to change sounds! :D
Also, you forgot to apply the normal hitsound set to the other two difficulties. Changes in one diff. don't affect the others. :) It'll take ya ten seconds to change them, though, don't worry.


Agreed, those settings are much better. Had a bit of an issue pinpointing exactly how easy easy should be, but this seems just about right. Renamed the difficulty as well, you're right about that too. Folk Metal doesn't really make easy easy, if you catch my drift.

Yeah, it's tough to make an easy map for a heavy song like this. Totally doesn't fit...

Changed the slider to a circle on the ending point of the slider, the white tick. I got caught in matching the melody of the song and ignoring the difficulty, pushed it a bit far there. The song doesn't lend itself to lower difficulties, especially not if you love it like I do. I want to represent it perfectly, which is impossible without more difficulty.

I totally understand you, there. That's why most mappers start with the Insane difficulty, just so that they don't get bored of mapping it. xD Trying to make the easy difficulties sound good while keeping them simple is one of the common pitfalls for new mappers. Don't worry, it gets easier! :D Basically, you always want sliders to start and end on a white or red tick. You could have, say, a repeat point on a blue tick if you wanted, though. Considering the slider speed is always going to be slower, the player can usually keep up with it even if it's a strange beat. Take a look at the beats at around 02:13:246 to 02:31:596 in my map here: http://osu.ppy.sh/s/59221
Note that for the actual Easy difficulty, I kept it very simple around here, but these types of sliders would've been acceptable in this case.


I'm having difficulties managing that part. Changed it to no longer fall on blue ticks, but it doesn't fit with the song properly.

I know it doesn't sound good to us, but trust me: for a new player, it's all they can handle. I'm gonna be honest here. It's not any fun making Easy difficulties. They're something that needs to be there, though. Otherwise, new players could never get into the game! It's best to think about how you would want it if you were still new. I used to get really annoyed at notes that were really soon after spinners, for instance, because they were really hard to get to at first since, as a mouse player, it takes a second to find your cursor after a spin. In the same way, new players have a lot of trouble hitting complicated beats, even if they go with the song. osu! is a game of interpretation, so if they don't know how the song goes before playing the map, how are they supposed to know what beats to expect? :) And hey, just because someone isn't good at osu! doesn't mean they can't like Eluveitie, right? ;)

Replaced blue tick slider with single white tick circle. Rearranged the pattern to be more intuitive and fluid. Once again focused more on the melody than the beat, which negatively impacted the difficulty.

Yup, it's much better now. A new player would feel pretty accomplished hitting those notes at the end going into the Break Time. :D

Whoa. Not sure how that slipped past my playtesting. Fixed the jumps. They're ghosts of copied pasta, I believe.

"File > Open AiMod" is your friend. ;) If there are a lot of warnings when you tick the "Check distance snap" box, there are likely to be a few errors in the map. It's generally a good idea to never disable Distance Snap unless you're making a jump in a Hard or Insane level difficulty. But I can see how the copy-pasting can cause that. One trick for doing that is to flip the whole sequence after you copy/paste it. This makes it seem like a new section to the player (And not, well, a copy/paste of the last one), and it can also help you move all the notes around so that they don't conflict with your Distance Snapping. Just hit "Edit > Flip Horizontally/Flip Vertically" until they look good when you snap them up. Sometimes you don't even need to flip them around! Just make sure none of them are off-screen in the end. And that can be fixed by rearranging the object just before the copy/paste section. A bit to remember about that, but it comes naturally after a while.

I'll need a bit of clarification on the repeat slider issue, not sure I'm understanding correctly. An example of an offending snippet would be lovely. The chorus is very heavy on the repeat sliders, should redo that.

Play from here...:
00:43:921
To here...:
01:01:376
...a few times and tell me how your fingers feel afterward. Since all of the repeats aren't done the same way, they get to be really hard to read since there's hardly any time to see if there's a repeat arrow or not. As a result, the player doesn't really know when a slider is going to end, since they all kind of end differently. But yeah, it really is mostly the chorus part that's at fault here. I'll give you an example if you still don't understand later on. :)


.. Why'd I put it off-screen? Rookie mistake. Oh wait.. One of the first notes I placed. I'll let it slide. This time.

Ha! xD Just one of those things you have to look out for when mapping. :3 Close to the edge is okay, but sometimes I fail to see why the editor allows us to place notes so darn FAR...

I've replaced all fail-bait (cursed fail-bait, didn't even realize I was doing it) with other things that fit. Hopefully I got every last one of those pesky little buggers.

I didn't even realized I was making a play off of "Jail-bait" when I said that! xD That should TOTALLY be said in the osu! community, like, all the time. Haha! Actually, while I'm at it, long sliders are usually a good idea for those pesky easy difficulties. Helps waste away some draining time while helping new players work on their aim (Since they have to follow the ball over all of the slider ticks, you know).

Redid that part to match the lyrics rather than the guitar, as the lyrics are more prominent and on a different beat. The result is an easier but well fitting bit, which is rather lovely if I may say so myself. Not too happy with the transition back into guitar focused mapping.

I personally think it sounds great this way! The guitars are the more prominent part right after that, so it flows really nicely. I didn't even notice when I playtested it again.

Fixed. Changed the fail-bait into a steady beat of circles, easy but that's better than failbait. Fits decently to the tune.

Nicely done, sir. 8-) You could also change longer sliders into pairs of shorter sliders. Can't go wrong with more circles on an Insane, though. Heh!

Combo colours changed to a lighter green, teal, red and yellow. Not entirely sure about the red, might be too dark still. The green likewise, not sure. I'm not the best with colour.

Looking a lot better than it did, I like it. :) As long as it's not all dark it's fine. It makes the map easier to read since there's more contrast between the hit objects and the background image. On that note, there are a lot of combo changes in this map, so you don't really see any one color for long, anyway. Just like with the hit sounds, changing the colors on one map doesn't affect the other two, so you'll have to go back and change those manually as well. :)

Comments: Very thorough of you! Thank you for taking the time. Don't worry about treating me like a noob, I am one. I can play maps decently well (can play certain insane songs, nothing too extreme), but I've only just started mapping a day or two ago. I've played fun beatmaps before, but I've never really thought about the mechanics of what's fun behind it, which is what you're helping me with. Once again, thanks!

No problem, I'd hate to see such a sweet song go into the beatmap graveyard! :o



Files:
.osu file of the Insane diff. with a few quickly added hitsounds to give an example:
https://dl.dropbox.com/u/88667536/Eluveitie%20-%20The%20Uprising%20%28Dwargkiller%29%20%5BHitsound%5D.osu
(Just open your beatmap folder and drop it in, it should come up as the "Hitsound" difficulty in-game and shouldn't overwrite anything)
Topic Starter
Honeybadger_old
I should start a changelog. I've redone quite a bit in the hard difficulty to cut down on repeating sliders, rather happy with the result!
BusterBeachside
Never a bad idea to keep track of problem areas and such. I'll take a look at your changes when I have the time (Probably Thursday)! :D
Topic Starter
Honeybadger_old
I have a few areas that I don't like (I'm pretty sure the timing is off in one spot, keep hitting stuff early there). Haven't had time to get down and edit it yet though.
BusterBeachside
I'll take a look at your timing and beat snapping next, then. :3

EDIT: Shot you a kudosu star, hope to see this ranked soon, eh? ;)
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