Welcome to the second edition of the monthly highlights and Map of the Month. Just like last month, we're listing the most important community events and updates.
Map of the Month: PolyphonicBranch feat. Ritsuka - Dearest by Love
This is the first ever approval map with no osu!standard difficulties, containing only a marathon Taiko difficulty. Standards are slowly evolving, and we're seeing more maps catered to specific audiences and modes - who knows, perhaps we'll even see a Catch the Beat or osu!mania marathon soon!
Special thanks to theowest, who helped upgrade the formatting from last month as well as wrote the first draft of a few of these entries.
• We now have CtB-specific BATs!
As CtB-only mapsets are now rankable, two new BATs have been promoted specifically for CtB in order to kickstart new CtB maps being ranked. Please welcome eldnl and Deif to the team!
• The mapping technique forum has been resurrected!
The mapping technique forum was implemented a few years ago to judge the public's opinion on current mapping techniques in the game, asking how fun they feel to play. Over the last two years, the forum has decayed into inactivity, but has now been boosted back into activity! Feel free to stop by at any time and put your opinion on today’s trends in mapping techniques.
• Beatmap pages now have Disqus comments!
Beatmaps have had comments for a very long time as nicovideo-style comments, but they can become very cluttered, as well as impossible to view without watching the map's replay. With the addition of Disqus comments on beatmap pages, users can now make comments that are much easier to see and respond to, as well as upvote good comments and downvote the bad! Note that this comments section is still in its infancy, and may be subject to changes over the coming weeks.
• osu!mania charts have begun!
Formerly impossible to have charts on due to every difficulty having the same max score, woc2006 has tweaked mania scoring for charts and made charts possible for the game mode! Do your best at the new selection of handpicked, quality maps (and let's also have a shoutout for the CAT, whose workload has increased 33%!)
• Over 100,000 beatmaps have been submitted!
Since the BSS went live in October of 2007, beatmap submissions have been exponentially growing, to the point where we've breached 100,000 unique beatmaps uploaded - nearly 47,000 of which were submitted in the past year! Congratulations to Antoneko for achieving the milestone map.
• Most of osu!'s text strings are now translatable!
A couple weeks ago, peppy wrote a utility to extract strings from the game data and convert them to localizable entries on the localization google doc. As a result, the amount of translatable strings for the game has increased by over 40%! The options screen, main menu, multiplayer lobby and match setup screen are now 100% translatable, with more to come - if you know a non-English language and want to help move osu! forward, this is your chance to do so!
As CtB-only mapsets are now rankable, two new BATs have been promoted specifically for CtB in order to kickstart new CtB maps being ranked. Please welcome eldnl and Deif to the team!
• The mapping technique forum has been resurrected!
The mapping technique forum was implemented a few years ago to judge the public's opinion on current mapping techniques in the game, asking how fun they feel to play. Over the last two years, the forum has decayed into inactivity, but has now been boosted back into activity! Feel free to stop by at any time and put your opinion on today’s trends in mapping techniques.
• Beatmap pages now have Disqus comments!
Beatmaps have had comments for a very long time as nicovideo-style comments, but they can become very cluttered, as well as impossible to view without watching the map's replay. With the addition of Disqus comments on beatmap pages, users can now make comments that are much easier to see and respond to, as well as upvote good comments and downvote the bad! Note that this comments section is still in its infancy, and may be subject to changes over the coming weeks.
• osu!mania charts have begun!
Formerly impossible to have charts on due to every difficulty having the same max score, woc2006 has tweaked mania scoring for charts and made charts possible for the game mode! Do your best at the new selection of handpicked, quality maps (and let's also have a shoutout for the CAT, whose workload has increased 33%!)
• Over 100,000 beatmaps have been submitted!
Since the BSS went live in October of 2007, beatmap submissions have been exponentially growing, to the point where we've breached 100,000 unique beatmaps uploaded - nearly 47,000 of which were submitted in the past year! Congratulations to Antoneko for achieving the milestone map.
• Most of osu!'s text strings are now translatable!
A couple weeks ago, peppy wrote a utility to extract strings from the game data and convert them to localizable entries on the localization google doc. As a result, the amount of translatable strings for the game has increased by over 40%! The options screen, main menu, multiplayer lobby and match setup screen are now 100% translatable, with more to come - if you know a non-English language and want to help move osu! forward, this is your chance to do so!
Map of the Month: PolyphonicBranch feat. Ritsuka - Dearest by Love
This is the first ever approval map with no osu!standard difficulties, containing only a marathon Taiko difficulty. Standards are slowly evolving, and we're seeing more maps catered to specific audiences and modes - who knows, perhaps we'll even see a Catch the Beat or osu!mania marathon soon!
Special thanks to theowest, who helped upgrade the formatting from last month as well as wrote the first draft of a few of these entries.
