I personally play Etterna on windowed mode and the proportions are really easy to read however trying to play on osu! mania is very jarring and uncomfortable to read.

If you could size and position the note field window (more specifically vertically) that would be really amazing even if only vertically as you can then just adjust the column size

If this is what community/forums/topics/261054?n=1 covers then sorry, but I think they are talking about standard.

If this is not possible then please add resizable windowed mode as the resolutions available are just there to support older hardware and not necessary perfect for gameplay as they generally just scale everything down and using custom resolution makes it terrible to play other modes because I use fullscreen for them meaning I would have to change it in the cfg file every time I want to play standard. If that is not possible please add an option to save a custom resolution in the resolution select menu so its a part of the drop down or where you can click a checkbox for it and it remembers what it was set to.

So to conclude basically add an option to render the notefield and associated elements (note images etc) in a custom resolution and to be able to place it anywhere on the screen.

Its is fully moveable and resizable horizontally, and i believe you can technically move it up (probably not down) via skinning. I suppose this would be nice, I wonder if lazer already has something similar yet or not?

I mean to mimic a different resolution essentially rather then the whole note field being stretched across the screen vertically. Which will make reading the notes either very fast or slow and clumped where if you vertically compress it a little you can keep a higher scroll speed which makes the notes spaced cleaner without having that stretched across your whole monitor which obviously scales everything including all the proportions and scroll rate making it look very extreme.

It's also hard to have your eyes cover the whole screen and having what are normal spacings on a lower rez scaled and stretched to fit the whole screen again just makes it very disorienting and you can't really get an in between because the fullscreen is amplifying whatever settings you use so stuff will either be very fast and spread out or slow and clumped together etc

Of course this is all personal preference and a lot of people might read better that way but I know a lot of players in many different vsrgs play widowed so they can have control over this and since osu! doesn't have a resizable windowed mode and the resolutions available might not fit everyone's needs as they generally just scale everything down and that's not saying the downsides of playing windowed with the latency and having the menus squished.

So because of that I think this would be a great feature to have in the game though I understand with lazer in the works and how this is probably niche its not really likely to get added but it just really deters me from spending the majority of my time in osu! mania atm because its simply very uncomfortable for me to play.

Lo and behold I have finally found this thread after playing osu mania for a week.

I agree to what op has said a few months ago, and Ill actually try to explain this uncomfortable scenario in the best way that I can

I was a high level O2jam player back in the day Lv80+ circa '06-'10 capable of clearing all the official hard charts Lv 30+ and my skills were definitely above average in the game out of enjoyment, I played the game again this April and I can still clear the hard songs. So no issue there.

However when I tried osu mania and then tried out the high level songs, It felt really uncomfortable and different, to the fact that I developed thumb strain after 1 week and felt fatigued compared to playing O2jam for years on end; and when I played the O2 client after 1 week my skills actually declined due to the differences in reading the notes for both games.


So I screenshoted both games to try and compare the timing windows and notes for each and there was really a difference when playing high leveled songs:


So on the left is a dense set of notes from O2 while on the right is a set of notes from osu; both songs have high bpm, my osu scroll speed is at 27/28


So what O2 players usually do while reading insane songs is that the notes are read on this red line right here in order to anticipate the falling of the dense notes and therefore have the reaction time and rhythm, as well as anticipate the falling of the next set of dense notes since they are all falling at a fast pace of 150-200bpm, which makes the player have ample time to combo the song as well as have the accuracy and have a comfortable time playing dense chordcharts and high level beatmaps. Really enjoyable, really comfortable, and you can play high level songs for hours on end with no strain. This is the infamous HUK mash notechart from the famous O2jam Identity series.



Meanwhile on osu mania, the playing area is a little compressed, but now wider, so the player has to read the notes on this red line right here thereby failing to anticipate the falling of the dense notes as well as failing to anticipate the falling of the next set of dense notes and now relying on the uncomfortable reaction time each time a dense set of notes lands in order to sight read the notes properly and get the proper accuracy. This only makes you mash stair notes and get finger strain because you can no longer read the dense notecharts properly as well as the next set of falling dense notecharts



So to compare the two:

I play on 4:3, 16:10; or 5:4 (1280 x 1024) since these resolutions are the best playing field for VSRG's and they make the reading comfortable especially on high level songs.

So now if there was a skin option or a gameplay area option to elongate the play area taller


Or expand the play area in order to accommodate reading a set of dense chordcharts; as well as making the play area less wide



And now thereby making a similar comfortable sight reading skill in O2 (as most 7k players have played O2jam in the past) which I believe is still the best format for 7k VSRG'S after all these years. Nothing can compare.


So all in all, I have found no skin to this day that can replicate this or make the gameplay area taller/change note density spacing/columnlength setting until now. This is the closest I can get to mimic the sight reading skill I have gained in O2; maybe it will be implemented in lazer, but who knows. Its just a setting away. I do not know what settings tournament players use when playing the game as they are very good or maybe they might have just adapted to the reading requirement in osu mania after all these years of playing.


This only applies to high level songs by the way and not really applicable to less dense notecharts since they are almost always readable at any type of play area without any strain even if you are playing osu mania for hours on end; though it is still somewhat less enjoyable.

But if this option is delivered, the comfortability in playing dense/hard notecharts will greatly increase and not turn off players in the long run because as you progress further into the game you will more or less run into these difficult beatmaps and you will now have an enjoyable time playing it rather than loathing the game because of these bad settings that is implemented by default. This also applies to other game modes 4k/5k/6k as well.