Guten Tag,
As part of the Ranking Criteria's reconstruction, the United Beat-Knights of Ranking Criteria have been discussing subsections (such as timing, metadata, skinning, etc.) with the experts of each field. I'm here to announce what kind of rules and guidelines we agreed upon for the Skinning subsection in this draft. Notice this is not the final result, as we need the feedback of the community first before getting it officially bumped into the wiki!
Before posting, please think through if what you want to add belongs in any game-mode specific drafts of the Ranking Criteria or should be part of another subsection of the general Ranking Criteria. Thanks!
The proposal starts with the glossary.
Skinning
Rules
All rules are exactly that: RULES. They are NOT guidelines and may NOT be broken under ANY circumstance.
Guidelines may be violated under exceptional circumstances. These exceptional circumstances must be warranted by an exhaustive explanation as of why the guideline has been violated and why not violating it will interfere with the overall quality of the creation.
Make sure to read the entire draft! It will be up to discussion for two weeks and close on the 18th of June!
As part of the Ranking Criteria's reconstruction, the United Beat-Knights of Ranking Criteria have been discussing subsections (such as timing, metadata, skinning, etc.) with the experts of each field. I'm here to announce what kind of rules and guidelines we agreed upon for the Skinning subsection in this draft. Notice this is not the final result, as we need the feedback of the community first before getting it officially bumped into the wiki!
Frequently Asked Questions
(read this in all cases before posting)- Is it necessary to read the entire draft before commenting or asking questions?
-> Yes, else you may complain about/mention things that are not related to this draft or are actually already present here. - Is this the entire new Ranking Criteria? I feel like this is missing a lot of things...
-> This is not the entire Ranking Criteria. This draft aims to be the rules and guidelines that end up under the Skinning header.
The proposal starts with the glossary.
Glossary
Common terms
Skinning
- Gameplay elements:Skinning elements which the user interacts with on the playfield or receives feedback from during gameplay, as such elements that show up in breaks are excluded. Gameplay relevant elements are declared as such in the table listing.
- Hitburst: Element that appears after hitting an object, informing the player of how accurately timed their hit is in relation to the song (300/100/50).
- Complete set: Complete sets of elements as listed in the overview. A set is complete when all required elements in it are skinned. If an optional element is included, all required elements need to be present, but not other optional elements of the set.
- User-specific: A user’s personal skin which they set in their options menu.
- Beatmap-specific: Consists of skin elements located in the beatmap folder.
Skinning
Rules
All rules are exactly that: RULES. They are NOT guidelines and may NOT be broken under ANY circumstance.
- If you are using any elements created by another community member, ask permission beforehand. Respecting the work of others is paramount and most people will be delighted to have their work featured in your projects! Thus, if you do not know who made the elements you plan on using, you should not use them.
- Gameplay elements must be visible. You cannot make any element that will impair the playability of the map invisible as it will make the map unintuitive or even impossible to play (cursormiddle.png is an exception as it affects the behaviour of cursor trail). Elements that are not relevant for gameplay may only be transparent if there is a valid reason for this and the action itself does not impair the usage of interface elements negatively.
- Skinned elements must be cropped cleanly so they do not have pixelated artifacts around them or half-cropped shadows.
- Do not make any gameplay elements larger than their recommended skin dimensions. Elements like this may affect gameplay performance, and thus having them in a different size should be avoided. Elements that are not tagged as gameplay-relevant may use a different dimension and if no recommended size is given; this variable is left up to the skinner.
- When skinning gameplay elements, complete sets of elements need to be skinned in order to avoid conflicts between user-specific and beatmap-specific skins. A reference for this can be found here. When skinning an element that is marked as optional, you need to include all the required elements of the respective set, but you are free to skip other optional elements unless they are grouped with the element you are skinning.
Guidelines may be violated under exceptional circumstances. These exceptional circumstances must be warranted by an exhaustive explanation as of why the guideline has been violated and why not violating it will interfere with the overall quality of the creation.
- Skinned elements should not exceed dimensions to the point where they overlap other skin elements which they would not normally overlap in the default skin. This applies only to the visible parts of an image, which could distort the gameplay experience by visually obstructing normally visible elements.
- 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!
Make sure to read the entire draft! It will be up to discussion for two weeks and close on the 18th of June!