I used to play o2jam years ago and when I started playing osu!mania earlier this year(May), it took a lot of time for me to find the hitposition and offset that would work for me back then.

I played regularly until September and played LR2/BMS since then.
Setting-up LR2 is the only hard part but when it comes to timing, I just used the default and only took me less than 5 songs to adjust back to 'standard' timing I used to have when I played o2jam. After a few weeks, I tried playing on o2jam again and find my timing still consistent. Also tried playing stepmania(both 3.9 & 5.0) again using default timing offset and timing difficulty of 5 like I used to and I still have the right timing.
Playing the games I mentioned above also fixed my messed timing on Beatmania IIDX, DDR and ITG that I got when I played osu!mania regularly.
Getting used to the timing of the other VSRGs I'm playing except osu!mania complements my timing on each game.

Now I'm trying to get back on osu!mania because of the songs/maps I like but afraid it will mess up my timing on other rhythm games again. The hitposition I use when I played osu!mania from June-September does not work with my current timing anymore so I'm going to set it up again.

Q:
Why is the default timing (Offset and hitposition) of Osu!mania so different than the defaults of other VSRGs?
Does anybody know the equivalent timing setting (Hitposiion, Music offset, or combination of both?) to get the equivalent default timing of every popular other VSRGs to o!m?

As someone going through this exact predicament atm himself, is anyone able to give a technical answer?

Is it just >osu!mania coding?

Since I never played any other VSRG before I cant really tell. I believe its just different because it has its own design and its mostly designed for STD. Anything should be able to be achieved by skinning or hitpositioning but not sure what you really mean.

For me it is a bit weird because sometimes I have to change my hitpos to get more consistent but it just happens eventually. Also my PC is not the best one either so that doesnt help.

Maybe other veterans can help you here? I heard some people from stepmania plays with around -70 local offset and change the universal offset of each map when they feel its needed.

Unfortunately I can't answer this either, but I know of at least one thing that MIGHT have an impact on timing in osu!mania. I'm not sure how other games handle input, but I know that in stepmania, input is handled completely separately from the graphics, but in osu, input is processed once per frame. This means that input which happens after osu processes a frame's input code will be delayed until the next frame, and dropped frames cause even more delay. If you are playing with vsync, that means a delay of 16.6ms. If you are playing at 120 fps, it's 8.3ms, and at 240 it's 4.16ms, which is at least a bit more reasonable, but still not a good thing. However, Peppy has stated that he plans on decoupling input from graphics sometime in the future. I believe this is planned to be part of osu!next, but it might come at a later date than the official release.

Anyone used to stepmania style input handling will immediately notice this and wonder why they got a worse judgement when they shouldn't have. This can be very frustrating or confusing, but there's no way to solve that. The only thing you can do to mitigate it is to have a good enough computer to run osu at a very high framerate, and that still doesn't fix the actual issue, it just reduces the impact of it.

I can't speak for how o2jam's input code works, nor lr2, but this explains some difference from stepmania at least.

I know entozer stopped playing osu because he simply couldn't adjust to osu's timing.

o2jam is rendered at 800x600, the viewport (the part of screen where the notes are) is 80% of the screen height and the judgment line is at the bottom of it at 600*0.8 = 480 pixels.

no idea how that translates into the osumania hitposition but its a good place to start.

also keep in mind osumania notes are bigger than in o2jam that gives the impression the viewport is smaller and can affect how you read/where to focus your eyes.

coldloops wrote:

o2jam is rendered at 800x600, the viewport (the part of screen where the notes are) is 80% of the screen height and the judgment line is at the bottom of it at 600*0.8 = 480 pixels.

no idea how that translates into the osumania hitposition but its a good place to start.

also keep in mind osumania notes are bigger than in o2jam that gives the impression the viewport is smaller and can affect how you read/where to focus your eyes.

That's equal to an osu!mania hitposition of 384 if you consider that the bottom pixel line of the notes is what should touch the judgment line when it's time to press; if you consider that the center, or any other part of each note, should be what touches the judgment line in order to press, then the hitposition is a bit higher (depends on other skin settings and note images used).

The size of notes in mania are fully customizable, so it's possible to make a skin that looks the same as o2jam.

Full Tablet wrote:

if you consider that the bottom pixel line of the notes is what should touch the judgment line when it's time to press

yes good point, the bottom of the notes should touch the bottom of the judgment line.

Full Tablet wrote:

The size of notes in mania are fully customizable, so it's possible to make a skin that looks the same as o2jam.

yes you can play with the WidthForNoteHeightScale option, by the way note height in o2jam is 7 pixels at 800x600.

To add to this, I know how O2Jam calculates Judgements. O2jam actually does it "visually" rather than based on timing. If greater than 80% of the note graphic is within the red bar at the bottom of the lanes (assuming 1x speed multiplier) the note is judged as cool, if it's between 50% and 80%, it's good, if it's between 20% and 50% it's a bad, and anything else is a miss. Pretty sure the judgement bar is 16 pixels high.

Note that I said assuming 1x multiplier above. When you use a speed multiplier, the game compensates for the increased note speed by multiplying the size of the judgement bar area by the speed multiplier, ensuring that the actual amount of time that each judgement window covers is the same. However, O2Jam does NOT scale the size based on song BPM, which is why timing windows become smaller as the BPM increases (note speed increases but the judgement bar does not scale in size, therefore less time to hit each note).

This information comes from the O2Jam wiki and the open2jam reverse engineering documents (they also went through the trouble of finding out the actual scroll speeds for different BPMs at 1x, which allows you to calculate the actual timing window sizes from the rest of this information, but I'm too lazy to look that up).

I don't THINK O2Jam handles input the way SM does (completely decoupled from the framerate) but I would say anecdotally, O2Jam feels more responsive than osu does when both games are running well (and that IS provided O2 is running well. O2 is quite the old game now and does not play nice on modern OS's which can lead to performance much worse than you'd expect from something that was able to run at a stable 60fps on pretty much any computer back then (which I might remind you is a decade ago now)).