hey how's it goin

during the rc overhaul back in 20whateverteen rc guidelines were revamped to function more or less as rules except for pretty clearly laid out circumstances. however, there are a bunch of guidelines atm that do not get this treatment, instead being pretty frequently ignored. this is posing a lot of trouble for enforcement of the more mandated guidelines, in particular the lowdiff guidelines, as people try to claim things are "just a guideline" so they can ignore it as they please. so uh let's do some cleanup of the guidelines to:

1. get rid of/repurpose obsolete ones
2. clarify exemption cases like we've been doing for newer guidelines

this thread is for general guidelines

general guidelines:
"Letterboxing and countdown options should be consistent between difficulties of a beatmapset."
needs reasoning behind it or needs to be removed.

"Slider tick rate should not be modified through the .osu file. Most custom values result in unsnapped slider ticks, however tick rates 0.5, 1.333, and 1.5 have practical use and can be applied only when they fit a song more appropriately than standard tick rates."
the edge case is currently not being enforced properly. maps such as https://osu.ppy.sh/s/878508 are using tick rate .5 for literally no musical reason. so either this needs to be reworded or qat need to start actually enforcing it.

"Maps should not surpass a score of 2.147 billion with any mod combination or game mode conversion. Scores are not calculated properly past this value. If the score limit is not reasonably achievable however (e.g. a HDHRDTFL SS play on a six star beatmap), it may be ranked."
seems there's a lot of confusion behind this one (scorev2 or some shit?), might need its own thread for proper cleanup

audio:
"Avoid using storyboarded hit sounds. If a player misses the hit object that the storyboarded hit sound lands on, then the hit sound will be played (which doesn't make much sense when this is a rhythm game utilizing audio feedback). Also, storyboarded hit sounds at places where there are no objects can confuse the player into thinking there was some unseen hit object, which does not make sense either."
seems to be a duplicate of the storyboard guideline "Refrain from usage of storyboard sound samples in ways that are easily confused with hit sounds during gameplay. This goes against the concept of audible feedback, as the sound samples will play independently of any input from the player." should be reworked in some way or removed.

skinning:
"Skinned elements should be kept in .png format if they utilize transparency. If they do not use any transparency, they can use whichever format uses the least space and is supported for skinning in osu!"
uh i thiiink it should be clarified why a file w/ transparency wouldn't be in a png file, or should be repurposed to rules, no?

storyboard:
"Widescreen support should be turned on if the beatmapset contains a widescreen storyboard. Alternatively, if the storyboard is designed for 4:3 resolutions, widescreen support should be turned off. This setting will not affect anything within the beatmap without a storyboard being present."
any reason why this is a guideline and not a rule?

uh i think that's everything .-.

Mode-specific guidelines included? Cuz we hve stuff like "use a spinner in every map" and "don't overlap hpbar" etc... still, which are easily brushed aside.

Original proposition I had was 3 levels of rules. One for absolute rules that cannot be broken (offscreen slider for example), one for rules that can only be broken under certain circumstances (most of the guidelines we have nowadays). Basically it lies on the mapper to argue that breaking the guideline is okay. and actual guidelines (try and use a spinner on every difficulty if it fits) which basically lies on the modder to argue that breaking the guideline is not okay.

We never implemented this though because I think the original plan was for these guidelines to eventually migrate into the wiki as like "how to map" features, but that project never got off the ground lol.

edit: i was too slow to type so i didn't see and this post does not consider monstrata's reply

___________________________________________________________________________________

General guidelines

"Letterboxing and countdown options should be consistent between difficulties of a beatmapset."

seperate into
in SB section as a rule:
Letterboxing settings must be consistent between difficulties which contain storyboarding in a beatmapset.

this wording would make it so that when you have a set, and one diff has collab names sbed, that diff can have widescreen support ticked, but it wouldn't be required on difficulties which don't have sb. because it wouldn't make a difference on the non-sbed diffs. but makes it a rule for when multiple diffs have sb.

in general section as a guideline:
Countdown options should be consistent between difficulties if used and has effect in the map.

^ will need some wording adjustment, needs to be clear it only applies if the intro time is long enough for countdown to even appear.

these should really be mostly self-explanatory and adding more reasoning to them in the rc itself would just be bloat.


think qat need to just enforce slider tick rate better, imo tick rate guideline is fine as is.


Audio
i agree with just removing the audio section guideline about sbed hitsounds, there's already a related rule about it in the audio section too just above it so like lol... the storyboard section guideline covers it in guideline form well enough, as this adresses the edge cases where it's more relevant.


Skinning
I don't see the issue here, if it has transparency, the guideline says to use png. If it doesn't then you can break the guideline and use another format like jpg.


Storyboard
pretty sure this was added because newer modders kept pointing out it being ticked/unticked even though without a storyboard it made literally no difference. I think it'd be fine to keep it as a guideline as there is some gray area of what constitutes designed for 4:3/designed for 16:9, like someone can make a 4:3 sb but the way it's made also works with widescreen support on. Keeping it as a guideline better leaves that kind of thing up to creator's discretion rather than trying to enforce it as a rule.



this is all just my 2c

@noffy letterboxing proposal sounds rly nice

for the skinning, the guideline is saying "if transparent then use png", it's not talking about nontransparent objects. unless there's a reason to not use png for transparents i think it should just be a rule, no? am i missing something?

oh, hmm, need to think about that a bit more
but the 1 case thing is
lighting.png is an additive element and can actually be a .jpg but would still appear transparent in gameplay. forcing all "transparent" elements to png can be confusing in this one case.

("what is additive color?" as a very simplified explanation let's say black functions as the alpha. degrees of darkness = degrees of transparency. it's a bit more complex but yea)

few comments (also you should probably link the two threads to one another for navigation purposes)

UndeadCapulet wrote:

general guidelines:
"Letterboxing and countdown options should be consistent between difficulties of a beatmapset."
needs reasoning behind it or needs to be removed.

Probably uses the reasoning of "Difficulties within the same set are expected to offer a consistent experience, so having different settings across the board is not allowed without apparent reason." Pretty sure people consider gds to be enough reason to allow this, but looking at recent maps I can't find any breaking this guideline, so who knows. Also changing this to only require consistency over the same mode would make sense, since modes aren't exactly consistent with each other to begin with and are often played by completely different people.

UndeadCapulet wrote:

audio:
"Avoid using storyboarded hit sounds. If a player misses the hit object that the storyboarded hit sound lands on, then the hit sound will be played (which doesn't make much sense when this is a rhythm game utilizing audio feedback). Also, storyboarded hit sounds at places where there are no objects can confuse the player into thinking there was some unseen hit object, which does not make sense either."
seems to be a duplicate of the storyboard guideline "Refrain from usage of storyboard sound samples in ways that are easily confused with hit sounds during gameplay. This goes against the concept of audible feedback, as the sound samples will play independently of any input from the player." should be reworked in some way or removed.

This was a result of the ubkrc groups working independently, where both the people responsible for audio and the people responsible for storyboarding believed they should address this. Why both were included I don't know, probably an oversight.

UndeadCapulet wrote:

storyboard:
"Widescreen support should be turned on if the beatmapset contains a widescreen storyboard. Alternatively, if the storyboard is designed for 4:3 resolutions, widescreen support should be turned off. This setting will not affect anything within the beatmap without a storyboard being present."
any reason why this is a guideline and not a rule?

If you have a storyboard designed for 4:3 where none of the particles go outside the 4:3 area, and the background of the beatmap is used as a sprite, it wouldn't make a difference if you had widescreen enabled or disabled since the edges of the screen would be black regardless. A large portion of the guideline is also easily avoided and/or already covered by the optimization guidelines. The only thing it actually brings to the table is that visible objects shouldn't unexpectedly disappear or be cut off when leaving the 4:3 area if widescreen is enabled, but defining what is unexpected to the point where it is consistently enforceable isn't very realistic, hence the compromise to let the sber/mapper/modder reason this themselves if necessary.

Noffy wrote:

seperate into
in SB section as a rule:
Letterboxing settings must be consistent between difficulties which contain storyboarding in a beatmapset.

this wording would make it so that when you have a set, and one diff has collab names sbed, that diff can have widescreen support ticked, but it wouldn't be required on difficulties which don't have sb. because it wouldn't make a difference on the non-sbed diffs. but makes it a rule for when multiple diffs have sb.

Letterboxing is not the same thing as widescreen support; letterboxing creates horizontal black bars on the top and bottom of the screen during breaks, whereas widescreen support only does anything if a storyboard is present, and creates vertical black bars to the left and right of the screen if disabled (and you have a widescreen resolution). That aside, I'd agree that consistent widescreen support over difficulties with the same base storyboard makes sense as a rule, if that's what you meant, but that doesn't affect the letterboxing guideline as far as I can see.

Naxess wrote:

Letterboxing is not the same thing as widescreen support; letterboxing creates horizontal black bars on the top and bottom of the screen during breaks, whereas widescreen support only does anything if a storyboard is present, and creates vertical black bars to the left and right of the screen if disabled (and you have a widescreen resolution). That aside, I'd agree that consistent widescreen support over difficulties with the same base storyboard makes sense as a rule, if that's what you meant, but that doesn't affect the letterboxing guideline as far as I can see.

The bars added if the sb is 4:3 but your resolution is widescreen IS ALSO called letterboxing just it's not.. the "Letterbox during breaks" option. The widescreen support and letterboxing options are also both present on the same screen. The current RC does not actually make clear which option this is referring to. The current guideline only mentions "letterboxing" which could refer to one, or the other, or both.

both that and the countdown guideline have the same issue where the options don't do anything if the maps don't have something to apply, so having it worded as is is misleading "make them consistent even though it does nothing, cause there's a guideline to have them consistent."


Proposal v2:

sb rule:
The widescreen support setting must be consistent between difficulties which contain storyboarding in a beatmapset.

general rule:
The letterbox during breaks setting must be consistent between difficulties of the same mode if they contain break periods. If there are no breaks, this setting does not do anything and thus does not matter.

general guideline:
The countdown setting should be consistent between difficulties of the same mode. If the difficulties do not have a long enough intro period for the countdown to occur, this setting does not matter and does not need to be consistent.

Well, widescreen support affects the bars that appear on the sides, not top and bottom, meaning it's technically not "letterboxing" (the term itself refers to the shape of a letter box, which is horizontal). Your new proposal seems much better though, since it separates letterboxing from storyboarding and connects it with breaks instead, which is what actually affects it. Not sure why the countdown in specific is a guideline, but would otherwise support those changes.

[quote="UndeadCapulet"]"Slider tick rate should not be modified through the .osu file..."
--> "fit better than standard tick rates" changes to "when they do not cause slider ticks to be unsnapped." since that's how it's treated

"Maps should not surpass a score of 2.147 billion..."
--> deleted because they convert to scorev2 now

skinning:
"Skinned elements should be kept in .png..."
--> i dont know the lighting file exception mentioned earlier in the thread, but if it's legit, this should be kept as is

storyboard:
"Widescreen support..."
--> "Keeping it as a guideline better leaves that kind of thing up to creator's discretion rather than trying to enforce it as a rule."

unmentioned things were changed as described in first post https://github.com/ppy/osu-wiki/pull/2156

merged