Someone has bumped up t/64761/start=0 . For the special aspect of o!m, I decided to separately open a thread to discuss something completely different.

My opinion is that we should leave mappers their ability (Or say free___ though if I do that this post is not possible to be posted here) to choose whether to use hitsound or just slient it away.

While in osu!, ctb and taiko, sometimes we seriously need hit confirmation(Especially for the last one, as many hits are not really on heavy ,or even light beats), things are different in osu!mania.
You may have noticed that osu!mania is a mode which is focused on music playing BUT NOT MUSIC ACCOMPANYIMENT, which means every hit is representing a feature in the music. This is slightly different from the concept of standard osu , where you hear sliders/spinners sound when doing them. (Not saying the point in the slider that makes combo, when you are doing sliders and spinners without music sounding in many situations these elements itself sound.)

A great deal of o!m maps are going to have completely customized hitsound. They already throw away these default hitsounds, instead, they use hundreds or even thousands of different instrumental sounds to FORM the music. If you missed a note, it represents nothing like in standard osu where you still hear the complete song but without a clap. You just won’t HEAR THAT SOUND. This is actually the situation of hitsound used in o!m. The first ranked song by DJPOP is a good example, where many drum hits are separated from the original song and in preview you just can’t hear them(Oh yeah this is another problem but it's out of this thread's scope.)

This kind of map(I’m going to call that key-sounded maps later) is always greatly appreciated, but because you’ll have to de-compose the song in order to do that, this is not suitable, or to say, possible, to every song, especially for these anime Ops(Actually for nearly every vocal songs, unless you get an off-vocal non-less version, and even that you can’t get really good quality map.) and is costly. So many mappers considered made an imitation: You hit the song as if you play the song in key-sounded maps. And this is where no-key-sounded maps come into place.

Though a lot of maps are key-sounded, most of o!m maps are still no-key-sounded. The technique is used all over the formerly BMS community. These songs follow simple rules: When there is a sound, there is a note. BUT NOT VICE VERSA! For you are “playing” the song, everything you pressed should represent one thing in the song. If a clap is not belonging to the song, no mappers would consider introducing them into gameplay by all reasons even for confirmation.(You are not going to confirm that: the sound is always there whether you imagine you play it or you just missed it)

And now we come through the rule of hitsound.

All map need a hitsound.

This is where things go messy.

Because of the aforementioned rule, many mappers are forced to use hitsound, be it loud or almost silent. As mentioned earlier, if the sound doesn't represent a note in the music, the note should be removed from the first place. Sadly, in most cases, there isn't a way to add default hitsounds into the map because of the lack of a drum bit in the music and the mental urge to NOT add extra sounds into the music.

By omitting hitsound, the mappers have already considered the map not to be suitable to make a key-sounded version or is too hard to do so. In any aspect they already decided not to feature key-pressing sounds. So why do we have to put a rule to enforce them to do so? If they do think it is necessary to put a default hitsound there, they may remix the song(Any addition to the song is kind of remixing.) or to go through the mapping process from the beginning to make a key-sounded map.

From another side, (default) hitsound feature also has something not suitable for osu!mania, especially when you hit 3 or more blocks at the same time. You may hear an extremely loud sound several times louder than the original one making you impossible to hear the background(Although the volume of the original hitsound is optimized.) One of the best examples are converted map of Banned Forever [Nogard] http://osu.ppy.sh/s/16349 , the song with cover of a red fox.
So you have seen the reason of silent hitsounds in osu!mania, why not make an exception to osu!mania for this rule? What do you think?

xxbidiao wrote:

(default) hitsound feature also has something not suitable for osu!mania, especially when you hit 3 or more blocks at the same time. You may hear an extremely loud sound several times louder than the original one making you impossible to hear the background(Although the volume of the original hitsound is optimized.)

Agreed.

How about proposing per-key hitsounds?

HakuNoKaemi wrote:

How about proposing per-key hitsounds?

It's already usable in key-sounded maps. (Editor support this)

Silent hitsounds. I can only agree.

HakuNoKaemi wrote:

How about proposing per-key hitsounds?

This is fine if we create our own music and add hitsound to finish our song just like in key-sounded bms/IIDX. But most songs in osu we cannot find a midi, and it's extremely difficult to decompose it down to every instrument. Also we don't have vocal in midi. One thing we can do is "add hitsounds" to the original song, most time it works with adjusted volume. However, even this can be time consuming because we need to export proper per-key instrument key-sounds using midi software, and most mappers don't want to spend that time. And we have lots of maps without hitsound in other mania games.

I wholeheartedly agree with silent hitsounds being allowed. It makes sense to me - you can't always do these fancy per-note hitsounds for any song, and if you're required to either do that or to use a normal hitsound set, then it may discourage a lot of people from mapping. With only a handful of mania maps and mappers, and a ranked map count that is laughably minuscule, this is probably the last thing that we want to do.

Why is this in Ranking Criteria? Can't you just add blank wav's to your skin? It's a pretty simple thing to do, here have a .zip that you can copy and paste into your skin. http://puu.sh/2Ai3c Simple solution and doesn't need any discussion or finalization, if you want your hits to be silent it's this easy. I for one like always having hitsounds because I'm used to it from years of osu! (And I'm sure there are others too). So having this forced or making the developers waste time on a silly toggle seems trivial when you can just add these to your skin.

And if you want to play the maps with custom hitsounds just keep the toggle on in-game under the funspoiler.

Because we don't mind o!m maps with no hitsounds. MMzz. And we would like to see them ranked. That is why it's on Ranking Criteria.

You cannot force people to have maps with and without hitsounds, it breaks the consistency of the core gameplay. But you can provide this easy solution to players who prefer having no hitsounds. There is no way for us to allow people to play maps without hitsounds, with hitsounds. That just takes more time out of developer's hands to create more trivial toggles.

MMzz wrote:

Why is this in Ranking Criteria? Can't you just add blank wav's to your skin? It's a pretty simple thing to do, here have a .zip that you can copy and paste into your skin. http://puu.sh/2Ai3c Simple solution and doesn't need any discussion or finalization, if you want your hits to be silent it's this easy. I for one like always having hitsounds because I'm used to it from years of osu! (And I'm sure there are others too). So having this forced or making the developers waste time on a silly toggle seems trivial when you can just add these to your skin.

And if you want to play the maps with custom hitsounds just keep the toggle on in-game under the funspoiler.

MMzz, that's way more effort-involving than just going to Options, going to Audio, and turning Effects all the way down. No menu sounds, sure, but then you don't have to worry about custom map skins. And not having menu sounds isn't really a big deal.

MMzz wrote:

You cannot force people to have maps with and without hitsounds, it breaks the consistency of the core gameplay. But you can provide this easy solution to players who prefer having no hitsounds. There is no way for us to allow people to play maps without hitsounds, with hitsounds. That just takes more time out of developer's hands to create more trivial toggles.

Were not trying to force anyone to do anything, aside from change a rule which many mania players agree should be changed.

The suggestion is to modify the ranking criteria so someone has the option to leave their map without hitsounds if they desire. I personally prefer all-or-nothing for hitsounds. Either you have complete custom hitsounds like DJPop's map, or you have silent sounds.

As it was stated above: osu!mania and standard osu are vastly different games in quite a number of ways. There is no reason to force a rule which was created because of how standard osu works onto osu!mania.

There are a few reasons I prefer the option of no hitsounds. The first is that I love music, and I prefer to hear the original music as the composer/producer/artist created it, not with sounds added over top of it. The second reason I prefer the option of no hitsounds is slightly more practical: It takes a lot of work to hitsound something, even without custom hitsounds. Removing this requirement lowers the amount of time and effort someone must put in to get a map that might be considered for ranking and it does so without negatively impacting the patterns or other technical aspects of the map. The third reason ties in with the fact that standard Osu and Osu!Mania are different: like xxbidiao said in the original post, because osu!mania maps generally do not overmap, and focus heavily on patterns which can be directly linked to sounds in the song, there is no real need to use sounds to "hit-confirm".

MMzz wrote:

You cannot force people to have maps with and without hitsounds, it breaks the consistency of the core gameplay

That means it's an option.
Having no hitsounds doesn't actually break the gameplay.
Why? Because the song is your hitsounds.
Having making custom hitsounds like in DJPop's smoooch is almost near impossible to do with other maps that aren't built to be played on mania.
*sigh*

My opinion on the matter is, if the mapper wants silent hitsounds to be the default way to play the map then they should use silent .wavs and still "hitsound" the map so that if somebody wants hitsounds for whatever reason - "because I'm used to it from other modes" would likely be the most common one - they can just turn off custom skins after playing the map once and still have not-suicide-worthy hitsounds.

Keysounding a map takes a lot of effort and most importantly, the resources to do such. Maps taken from other mania style games like o2Jam, IIDX, DJMax, Pop'n Music and the like all generally have all their key sounds available and more or less just require the mapper to set them. However if you were to take ANY other song keysounding it is nigh impossible, and hitsounds themselves are wholly unimportant in mania from a gameplay standpoint. Entirely contrast to osu! Standard.

Enforcing the hitsound rule onto mania just leaves mappers who aren't doing an already previously keysounded map in a bind because they now have to worry about something like hitsounds to get ranked, when they just lower the actual quality of the map from a sound perspective (unless it's a proper keysounded map of course).

Really there should just be a tick box in the mania editor for "use silent hit sounds", but allowing mappers to just use blank hitsounds is good enough.

TouchFluffyTail wrote:

However if you were to take ANY other song keysounding it is nigh impossible, and hitsounds themselves are wholly unimportant in mania from a gameplay standpoint. Entirely contrast to osu! Standard.

*tests it*

...Even though I'm a complete osu!m newb, turning hitsounds off seems to actually make this way easier. >_>

Bobbias wrote:

There are a few reasons I prefer the option of no hitsounds. The first is that I love music, and I prefer to hear the original music as the composer/producer/artist created it, not with sounds added over top of it. The second reason I prefer the option of no hitsounds is slightly more practical: It takes a lot of work to hitsound something, even without custom hitsounds. Removing this requirement lowers the amount of time and effort someone must put in to get a map that might be considered for ranking and it does so without negatively impacting the patterns or other technical aspects of the map. The third reason ties in with the fact that standard Osu and Osu!Mania are different: like xxbidiao said in the original post, because osu!mania maps generally do not overmap, and focus heavily on patterns which can be directly linked to sounds in the song, there is no real need to use sounds to "hit-confirm".

This, pretty much.
I've played maps both with and without hitsounds, and there's not much difference IMO.
Maps with hitsounds didn't "support" the play experience as much as many would believe, and those without hitsounds didn't feel incomplete nor decrease the enjoyability in any way.
If the mapper can save time and effort by silencing hitsounds altogether, why not?

Standard and mania are different game modes. Treat them differently.

+Agreed

Louis wrote:

Standard and mania are different game modes.

THIS.

Players can always turn the effect volume down to 0 if they dont want to hear any hitsounds, but if the mapper uses silent hitsounds it means the player will HAVE to have them silent.

Sakura wrote:

Players can always turn the effect volume down to 0 if they dont want to hear any hitsounds, but if the mapper uses silent hitsounds it means the player will HAVE to have them silent.

I suppose this thread, as described in OP, discusses more about whether hitsounds are needed in osu!mania, rather than if we should let players have a choice.

The point here is, we shouldn't always give players a choice for something that isn't needed in the first place.

Consider adding a trigger in Options (low-end PC is gone and "Hit Lighting" looks so lonely!) for adding the vocals of Aha? to every song...You will probably yell "no" within a split second. You see that such an option is not needed, even silly. Though understandably it can sound very alien to a long standing osu!standard player / mapper / modder, real osu!mania players are here saying that for some songs that are infeasible to properly keysound, an extra layer of hitsounds can be unnecessary, even undesirable, albeit not as silly as the Aha? example.

Louis wrote:

Standard and mania are different game modes.

That being said, the Aha? thing might work well as the next April Fools joke.

I'm pretty sure it's much easier with hitsounds....

















In O2jam.

I read the thread and understood what it's about, but I missed the way how you're going to make it happen. For example setting the volume to 0% or using silent .wav files, I don't know.

Personally I don't care how well a map is hitsounded, as long as I have some way of using that same clap I have in my skin for every key.

I'm not familiar with the subject, but if you make map using silent .wav files and keep the volume high in editor, couldn't I just disable that map's hitsounds to use the claps I have in my skin?

BRBP wrote:

I read the thread and understood what it's about, but I missed the way how you're going to make it happen. For example setting the volume to 0% or using silent .wav files, I don't know.

Personally I don't care how well a map is hitsounded, as long as I have some way of using that same clap I have in my skin for every key.

I'm not familiar with the subject, but if you make map using silent .wav files and keep the volume high in editor, couldn't I just disable that map's hitsounds to use the claps I have in my skin?

I think you will find these hitsound back. Though this is not what mappers want - they decided to make the hitsound silent.(Yeah reasons formerly said.)
And you may NOT want to use your skinned hitsound when you face key-sounded maps!

@BRBP: If there's custom hitsounds via map folder (blank.wav) then those will override whatever you have in your skin, if there's a 5% volume hitsound (minimum as the editor doesnt allow lower) then whatever custom hitsounds you use will have that same volume.

I'd prefer to leave the option for the players rather than force them, so i'd rather this rule removal not pass for osu!mania.

But alas, seems like most of the community does want it removed.

BRBP wrote:

I read the thread and understood what it's about, but I missed the way how you're going to make it happen. For example setting the volume to 0% or using silent .wav files, I don't know.

Personally I don't care how well a map is hitsounded, as long as I have some way of using that same clap I have in my skin for every key.

I'm not familiar with the subject, but if you make map using silent .wav files and keep the volume high in editor, couldn't I just disable that map's hitsounds to use the claps I have in my skin?

If the map uses blank hitsound files then changing the funspoiler setting to ignore beatmap hitsounds will give you your hitsounds back fine. If they turn the hitsounds volume to 0% in the editor they wont, but this is why I say there should be a "silent hitsound" specific toggle in the editor, that the funspoiler would override for people who want basic hitsounds, despite what the mapper wants. This way it satisfies both parties, and alleviates some mapping stress on mappers. (which is the most important part)


Also a huge note that hasn't really been clarified; hitsounds are very different from keysounds. A keysounded map is a map that has it's 'hitsounds' set as per-key sounds that are a part of the music. Hitsounds are just the generic sounds that osu uses on key hits that are a carry over from the other modes of osu!. No other mania style game has these. If a map is not keysounded in those games then the hits are silent. and there are MANY non keysounded maps, most of which you can't even tell because as previously stated by Bobbias, the music itself is your hit confirm.

See DJPop's maps for keysounded maps; http://osu.ppy.sh/s/81109 http://osu.ppy.sh/s/63089

You are free to use silent hitsounds in your own skin, or turn the effect volume down to zero if you want your hits to be silent.
This is osu!mania, not your other respective games. Hitsounds are something all maps will have no matter how simple, this is simply how this game works.

"Mapper's being discouraged about hitsounding" is a huge assumption. Hitsounding is very simple and you are not required to have these super elaborate hitsounds in osu!mania. You can just use regular hitsounds with a clap/whistle to keep the rhythm and you are good to go. And silent hitsounds effecting someone's playing ability is completely personal, not a statistic.

A handful of people cannot speak for a whole community.