History of osu! 2012
September
osu!'s main menu at the time
osu! and its community celebrated osu!'s 5th birthday on the 2012-09-17. During this time, all players were granted osu!supporter status for 24 hours, beginning at 2012-09-16 (18:00 UTC), which was osu!'s original release time in 2007. peppy had intended to distribute an early version of osu! in some form or another for the celebration, so players could experience osu! from an earlier time, where the roots of the program were. However, because of differing .dll file versions, peppy was unable to get it working. He has said he will get it working someday.
Links:
October
osu!mania logo
Per-object hitsounds as seen on the left of the editor
On 2012-10-08, osu!mania was finally released to the public build (woc2006)! In addition to this:
- Per-object hitsounds were added in the editor. (mm201)
- Allow recovery from failing in multiplayer by reaching full HP. (Exception if Sudden Death or Perfect mod was enabled)
- Scrolling support to in-game online ranking list.
- Fixes on skin selector to make it play more realistically.
The main event of this update was osu!mania. Many player flood in osu! just to try and play the osu!mania mode. Some gave praise over the effort done while some question the score judgement being too strict and very off, in comparison to O2JAM. Issues were to be expected, as some players were unable to update their osu! client due to the enormous size of the update (~20MB would be a good guess). Some felt to complained that the update was too rushed, as ranking, submitting osu!mania beatmaps, difficulty modification and even gameplay was not completely polished or completed. Some issues were later resolved somewhere at November with enough feedback from general public opinion while some were still in process.
Trivia: For players who entered Multi's lobby before updating to the b20121008 build, they may see a comical appearance of osu!mania named as "3" without the game mode icon (as seen below). You can't enter the room nevertheless without applying the update, let alone playing it.
Entering Multi without the b20121008 build broke osu!mania
Links:
Background change as shown by peppy
On 2012-10-29, the background in the main menu could be changed if the user had osu!supporter status. In addition to this:
- osu!mania ranking was in beta testing stage. Score were to be reset after a week.
- Button status overlay.
- Performance improvement.
A few notable changes to fix the previous update (osu!mania) and to give what the players really wanted, osu!mania ranking. As the osu!mania ranking system isn't completely tested for various aspects yet, the ranking would be reset each week or earlier to ensure no hacked scores were to be uploaded. The test lasted quite a while until the 2012-11-13 update (20121113b).
For supporters, they were given the luxury to set their image as osu! background rather than the usual background colour. Practically speaking, this does not affect anyone and it was more to a gimmick if anything. However, the background change requires you to be online to actually work, as osu! needs to verify your osu!supporter tag in order to work. Gameplay was not affected in any way.
Button status overlay was considered a nice addition. Now, you can actually see how you/they handle your/their hit either by using the keyboard/mouse or repeatedly using that one button. By default, this would only work in osu! during a replay or spectating a play. You can manually make it to appear during gameplay at the Options under Input Tab - General as "Always show key overlay". It was placed at the top of the screen initially but later switched to the right of the screen because it was obstructing the HP bar and player's concentration.
Links:
November
On 2012-11-13, osu!mania ranking was now implemented with pp ranking. To ensure that all of the scores weren't faked or cheated, the scores were reset one last time.
Links:
On 2012-11-22:
- Updated localisation. More languages were added.
- Right-clicking non-current beatmap can allow the display beatmap option at song select without prior opening it with left-click.
- DirectX improvement.
- (Multi) "Quick Join" button added.
- Fun Spoiler Settings was available during replay/spectating a player.
Localisation from osu! localisation project v2 has been added. You can find the localisation at the Options page in Graphics tab under "Languages".
A "Quick Join" button was added to Multi's lobby where you randomly join a room based on the beatmap you have when pressed. Since you were randomly "forced" to enter a random room, it would not be surprising when the beatmap in question was in the difficulty setting you do not want (Insane difficulty usually or difficulty you can't handle well). Unless you find searching a room manually yourself was troublesome, you can use it as an option instead.
Links:
December
Art by RBRat3
On 2012-12-21, osu! was given quite a major update. The most notable changes were:
- Widescreen support
- Loading screen at the beginning of beatmaps
- More smoother song selection
- Fun Spoiler Settings was changed to Visual Settings and placed at the bottom of the screen
- No Video mod was moved to Visual Settings
Technical issues and bugs were expected. The widescreen support, despite being functional, caused some images and videos to look weird (head of a character not visible, missing or partly hidden text) as the top and bottom were cropped. Storyboards currently don't support widescreen, instead, letterboxes or black bars appear on the sides which caused them to look cramped. This created an issue for Catch the Beat as the fruit would go over the black bars that were supposed to be in the boundary when using widescreen. Some storyboards also do not function properly (some images do not stay in the playing area, but instead, extend out to the black bars). These issues were currently known and were being fixed as solution to the issues were discussed and found.
Links:
On 2012-12-25, it was a Merry Christmas for the ones who celebrate it. A new version of bancho was released which "reduces the amount of traffic sent when connecting. This means you should experience 95% faster connection times". Being a special occasion, osu!direct was turned on for everyone for the day.
Links: