news
2 Oct 2022
osu!monthly, September 2022
osu!monthly, September 2022
Need a quick way to catch up with community happenings? We've got you covered with the third edition of osu!monthly!
We're still optimising the way osu!monthly is written, and we need your help to do it! For example, if you want to help us keep track of noteworthy or otherwise cool scores, please join the osu!dev Discord server or reach out to 0x84f#0001 on Discord — we'd love to have you! If you just want to engage with the team feel free to write on our discussion thread on the forum!
Without any further ado, let's jump straight into some osu! news!
Table of contents
What's new in osu!(lazer)
This month osu!(lazer) was graced with a brand new default skin called argon! While it is currently in its early stages and not optimised fully for framerates or readability, it aims to set a high standard for the future of osu! skinning with endless new possibilities that osu!(lazer) provides! You can find the skin and try it out for yourself with the 2022.923.0 update — it should be the first skin in the dropdown menu.
There have also been a bunch of quality-of-life updates, and so much of them that a list needed to be compiled:
- Various new sound effects have been added
- Maps now actually update where otherwise they wouldn't in specific scenarios
- Toast notifications have been introduced and the notification design was updated
- osu!(lazer)'s internal clock system has been reworked, which means universal offset works for more beat-synced components in the game, alongside other things
- You can now nudge skin components within the skin editor using arrow keys
- Storyboard performance has been improved by up to 10%
...and much more!
The editor also received some quality-of-life updates and bug fixes, such as adding the ability to split sliders after last month's introduction of slider merging. Next to that, you can now delete specific difficulties from the editor, the editor timeline now shows slider velocity properly during placement and slider control points can now be grid-snapped.
As for the gameplay, the singleplayer leaderboards are now added as well! Currently looking (and functioning) identically to the multiplayer leaderboards, the current implementation is a basic one, meant as a placeholder. Among other things, touch support has been added for osu!catch, a clicks-per-second counter was added as an optional skin element within the skin editor, automatic beatmap intro skipping in multiplayer has been added as a toggle, and judgement colours have been added in the hit distribution graph on the results screen!
Do you think that osu!(lazer)'s UI is slightly too big or too small for you? Do you want the game in a different position than the center, or in a non-native size? Well fear not, peppy has devised a solution for you!
By opening up the settings and heading into Graphics > UI scaling, you can change the scale of the UI to fit your needs! Furthermore, if you want your game in a non-native size or off centre, you can do that too under Graphics > Screen scaling! Check out the example video below:
Of course, we were not able to cover everything from the patch notes, so if you are interested in all previous and future patch notes, you can find them here, or if you'd rather watch a video digest of them check out the playlist embedded above!
Community recap
The voting for osu!'s 15th Anniversary Art Contest has concluded! Congratulations to Dreamxiety on first place with a whopping 7912 votes. illuminae2005 was right under them with 7248 votes and third place was taken by urgutz with 6671 votes. Even though only the top 3 entries get a profile badge made from their artwork, you will be able to see a wide range of top-voted entries officially added into osu! as part of the main menu seasonal backgrounds!
If you are interested in checking out all of the entries, you can do so here! If you are interested in downloading the finalist entries, you can do that here.
The community has been graced with the third batch of Hush-Hush medals for this year, along with 3 new beatmap pack medals! The most dedicated of medal hunters have already found the means to obtain them within just 5 days of their release, with the Lightless medal causing the biggest of headaches and taking 4 days of non-stop searching to solve!
Word on the street is that there will be more Hush-Hush medals coming soon, so if you feel like joining the hunt when they come out, go check out the Medal Hunters Discord server. Of course, if you feel like solving any of the Hush-Hush medals on your own — not just these new ones — they're all waiting for you.
If you don't already know by now, Corsace Open is one of two yearly tournaments hosted by VINXIS and is widely considered to be one of the best osu! tournaments of the year, constantly raising the bar for high-end tournaments with formatting changes, custom high-quality maps and commissioned songs made specifically for Corsace! Speaking of commissioned songs, you can check all of the Corsace Open 2022 originals out via their official playlist:
Congratulations to the top 3 teams! If you are wanting to catch up with Corsace or just watch a match you missed, you can do so on the Corsace YouTube channel. VODS are already available to watch for the entirety of this year's rendition.
Lastly, if you want to support the further development of Corsace you can find the donation details on their info page, all funds gathered go to the prize pool for next year and commissions of even more custom songs.
Another edition went by, but not without experiencing another year of the frantic keysmashing competition in the osu!mania World Cup (or MWC for short)! There's been some big overhauls on a few teams' rosters, but that has not stopped anyone from trying their best on one of the hardest editions we've ever seen.
We want to congratulate anyone who participated in the tournament. Most importantly, congratulations to South Korea for achieving what very few can, but don't be mistaken — this was no easy feat. Their last match against Brazil is one to fondly remember! And even with Brazil's technical issues, they had a hard time accomplishing such a goal. Special congratulations goes to the United States, as many feared that their roster revamp would be disadvantageous, but they ended up securing the 3rd spot.
There have been so many highlights, break points, and tiebreakers in this year's MWC that it would be impossible to fully recap it all in one post. For anyone who missed the Grand Finals match, we'd suggest watching it to experience it yourself. No words can convey the excitement generated from the event! Without spoiling anything, it can be said that getting a point difference of 3 is surely something to be amazed by. (And you can click the link if you want to get spoiled.)
But there was one last surprise: the custom tiebreaker. Players got to experience the skill peak of the tournament, expressed on a beatmap charted by -mint-, guden, MyZterioN-, and Toaph Daddy. And if that was not enough, the organisers also managed to add ああああ (which in the western alphabet means AAAA) as an official Featured Artist! Let's also not forget about poca_p0ca and their amazing GFX proficiency.
With all this said, let us thank all organisers and staff members for hyping up the community once more. Their work was essential in giving the players and viewers the best of tournament experiences for yet another year.
Notable osu! plays of the month
Section written by 0x84f
This month Aricin made a return and set some amazing scores, one of which we would love to showcase being his FC on Night of Knights.
As the first person to pass the ~750 combo threshold, he truly showcased his amazing ability at not only speed, but his godlike finger control as well.
A couple of other interesting plays would be chocomint's first HD FC on Arkadia and WhiteCat's HR score on Revolutionary Etude. WhiteCat's score in particular really showcases how far ahead of the pack he is when it comes to aim.
Notable mania plays of the month
Section written by kadoen
CrewK does it again. A year ago, just after it was loved, he achieved the first FC and 99% accuracy on polyriddim [brrrrrrrrrrrrrr], the original difficulty of the SV insanity that HowToPlayLN manufactured. Now he returns, motivated by the 1100 USD (!) bounty, with a monumental first FC/99%/#1 on the brrrrrrrrrrrrrr vip difficulty, consisting of entirely new patterns and SVs, increasing the difficulty of the already extremely hard original chart to a whole new level.
Most of this map has to be completely memorised — patterns, weird rhythms, everything — making this play an astounding SV achievement by one of the (if not the) best SV players in the game. Even if you don't play or follow mania, I strongly recommend you to go watch it. I guarantee you'll be impressed.
Notable taiko plays of the month
Section written by ianpep
Not everyone has heard of shinchikuhome's dominance, but those who know him already know what's coming up.
A mere 4 hours after being ranked, the infamous taiko pro shinchikuhome took the #1 spot with an astounding DT FC on KawaiiBass' beatmap of Yomi Yori, earning themselves 1102 pp, which is well deserved for a play of this caliber. This FC comes in at a blisteringly fast 330 BPM, filled with long stamina-draining streams alongside difficult colour and rhythm changes. Not to mention the insane accuracy as well, only hitting 20 100's throughout this 5-minute behemoth. This test of stamina and accuracy is certainly one to see!
Some other notable scores this month include loneyze's beatmap of Noah - Reflection, being the only HDDT FC on the map and bringing them 980 pp, alongside Ney's HDHRFL SS on Mike Morasky - Faster Than A Speeding Bullet taking an already tricky map to the next level, and earning himself #1 on the map.
Notable catch plays of the month
Section written by Patatitta
Camme79 has shown his DT proficiency with an FC on Senketsu no Chikai, a super tough 2011 map, which combines an uncomfortably high AR with incredibly spaced old-school patterns that prove a serious challenge even to the game's best players.
However, this certainly hasn't been the only impressive play this month, as we've seen ttobas set a new NM pp record on the recently ranked Ravensblood - Storms of Ages, a map with the highest star rating in osu!catch.
Did you know?
LilyPichu, a now prominent content creator loaned her voice to several skin creators back in the early 2010's. For example, you can check out the Nexus Slate & Nexus Ivory pair of skins which include her voice in places such as the map start countdown and applause at the end of a map.
See if you can find more skins that include her voice and let us know in the comments!
Monthly community quiz
We decided to make a small change to how the quiz works as we prepare to start writing harder questions. Starting from this month, there will be a time limit of 1 month (since the release of the news post) to answer the question, and if the question is not answered by the time next month's osu!monthly is released, the reward will not be claimable anymore.
We will also be posting the answers of last month's quiz as we feel it only makes sense regardless of whether a correct answer was provided or not.
Now that that's out of the way, the question we have prepared for you is:
Who rewrote the medal system in 2016?
The first person to provide the correct answer will receive 1 month of osu!supporter!
Things to look out for in October
- The osu! University announced an osu! improvement month event that stretches over the whole month of October. Interviews, tournaments, coaching, and giveaways are planned, and it would definitely be a mistake not to take advantage of this opportunity to socialise with the community, or to follow the events of your favorite game!
- After several weeks of hard work by creators and the voting phase coming and going, we should soon be able to see the results of the triangles Beatmapping Contest. Who was able to combine the best storyboard, hitsounds, and mapping around the triangles theme? We can't wait to see!
- The voting stage for the Chromatic Alteration skinning contest has concluded! With 23 entries and only 3 votes per player, hard decisions had to be made when it came to figuring out which entries deserve votes the most, and we are all eagerly awaiting to see the final results!
End word
Thank you for tuning into osu!monthly — we eagerly await your comments, criticisms and feedback! We are proud to be serving the community in this way and hopefully you'll join us again in the next edition.
—0x84f, Pisapou, RandomeLoL
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