osu! lazer feedback thread (editor edition)

[Okorin]

We collected those @ COE in person. I got a bunch of mappers together to do the osu!(lazer) trial run priority quest on my setup.

since i'm still there i'm unable to include videos or the likes for everyting. Instead I tried to describe the steps to repro what we were running into. If stuff is unclear, i'll add images etc after i return home from COE!

@pishifat wrote a similar "to-do" list of feedback in December last year in #31263

Hitsounds:

• cant access custom samplesets
  • when exporting to stable, green lines are generated with Normal Sampleset (most maps I have use soft sampleset as a base). doing this is fine. if you continue to change the map in stable, the green line being Normal sampleset will mess with how hitsounding works if most of your objects have soft sampleset in a section for example
  • Exporting to osz (so, also uploading from lazer) messes with the sampleset selection that was placed down (in ways i dont understand, it doesn't seem to change how the diff sounds overall but it does changes to it by replacing sampleset auto with sampleset:soft for example
• seek next sample is good feature, but side effect is u cant sleect like 5 sliderheads and apply the same hitsound to them, u have to scroll thru each separately. Selecting multiple sliders, going to one sliderhead and changing the addition should apply it to all sliderheads in the selection I think. Currently, it adds the sample to all sliderheads, sliderbodies and slidertails
• seeking next sample while you have a selection of playfield objects makes the behaviour a bit unclear. You have one hitsound dialog open in that case, but you have other objects selected. Should it apply the hitsound to all objects selected? Right now it only applies it to whatever sample point you are on.
• addition banks are only accessible when you have a hitsound on it. if you remove the hitsound the data about what addition you had is lost and reset to auto (so add whistle -> set addition to drum, remove whistle, add whistle again => it's back to "auto")
• sampleset switching not intuitive (expect to doubleclick sliderend and have sliderend selected for hitsounds, double click sliderhead to have selected for hitsounds, doubleclick sliderbody to have that selected for hitsounds)
• volume control (i.e. fadeouts) for sliderbody hitsounds and spinners would be cool
• Olibomby mentioned a hitsound design tab, like in a music editing program to arrange samples and (maybe) even merge them or whatever

Exporting:

• collaborating with people who use stable is a pain (have to expert to osz, open the archive, dig the .osu out), because if you mount the map to edit externally, the lazer .osu format will remain unreadable for stable (people claimed the .osu files I sent them were "corrupted")

timing tab:

• cannot select multiple lines or copy paste them. You can clone a single line and that's it
• clicking something will make it seek to that time if you want to use the clone button this behaviour is kinda annoying, I think if this behaviour would be moved to doubleclick it would be more intuitive
• scrolling through the timeline on the timing tab only works if you have the cursor in that area of the screen, otherwise it will scroll the timing points part of the screen. I think it would be more intuitive if you had to click into the timeline in order for it to scroll there and otherwise scroll the top timeline of the song where ure at
• besides the small timeline, you have no overview of effects, so if you want to do kiai flashes, good luck figuring out where they are. The top timeline could be used to more directly illustrate the effects (i.e. color the flashes the same purple on the top timeline if you are on the timing tab. that way you know what's going on with kiai flashes
• what the community calls "smooth timing" is harder to make
  • normally you do this by placing red lines, changing their bpm and then lining up the timeline ticks. In stable, the position of white/red/blue ticks is dependent on the current timing line and will display into the future. People use this in order to align timing lines to snap on the red / white lines of the previous timing line (for bpm finding reasons). The timeline in lazer displays the timing as dictated by all timing lines with "smooth looking" transitions between them, but you may accidentally be off by a lot because the visual isn't the same and there's no easy way to doublecheck your timing lines are aligned properly
• if you change a timing point you expect the current timing point you're at in the top timeline to change, not the selected one; once you notice your error (it changed selected instead of current) undo is also impossible. this makes it REALLY easy to mess up the timing of your map while you think you're fixing it

Compose tab

• changing sv is a bit difficult because you need to draw a slider, change its SV, resnap it and if you then decide to delete the slider you need to do all this again (it does not remember that you wanted to change the section from 1.5x to 1.3x, etc.)
• breaks are overeagerly inserted after about 4/1 approximately. if you add objects after a break it keeps re-inserting it even if you went out of your way to delete it previously
• crtl-shift-r (new shortcut being CRTL+R) messes with everyone's decade long muscle memory at the start
• decreasing UI size to get more editor space is WACK (IMO it should look identically to test mode in all cases so that you have a very concrete idea of how your map works)
• crtl+arrow keys cant get rid of decimal points (like if you place a slider at x:123.45 the .45 can't be removed without using a separate tool? (i found out the move tool exists today and why i would want to use it), technically this is a non-issue but it causes minor misalignments involving flipping and it feels like you don't have actual control about your objects
• slider control points are VERY fat and thus make drawing sliders with lots of close red anchors very difficult (wiggle sliders are the most common usecase for this)

MISC

• button resnap all notes would be helpful (had to resnap everything in a gd once cuz i had to copy their timing)
• cannot lock notes against changes. when hitsounding this is VERY useful to have the existing objects in a read-only state
• When you change SV of a slider, replacing the 0.1x to 10x SV slider with one of the bpm adjustment buttons from the timing screen would be way more epic. Current slider-bar has like 0.1 to 10x, but most things above 3x wont be used often in standard so you have very little control over the values that would be interesting because they're between 0.3x to 3x for the vast majority of maps. Changing the slider to account for that would be possible, but I think a button to just have relative SV (like add or subtract 0.05x/ 0.1x / 0.2x / 0.4x / 0.8x or so) would be epic
• current distance snap display (current: 1.1x on the right side) is VERY confusing, because it goes not by selected object but current timeline position. Distance snap is not shown for selected objects (only absolute pixels) (people who use distance snap alot were very lost)
  • current: should show distance to previous AND next; and change based on selection?
• custom snap divisors (1/5, 1/9) get reported as unsnapped :( on verify tab

Suggestions

• instead of mentioning Toggles Q~P (and you having to guess which is which), add a menu at the top that's like Help or something and does similar things to discord's CTRL+/ where it displays all current editor shotcuts and what they do so u can reference them?

[tadatomix]

Question about hitsounding, do you mean making like something like this closed PR #31291 or more like the entire timeline refactor as it was shown here #31266?

[Okorin]

Is this about

Olibomby mentioned a hitsound design tab, like in a music editing program to arrange samples and (maybe) even merge them or whatever

If so, i think having a hitsound layering part like FL studio ( so #31266 )-ish would have been the idea there

[tadatomix]

Yes it is. I also hope that this will be PRed one day, since it seems like there was some work in porting that already (see #31266 (reply in thread)). Thank you for the answer

[velamyGH]

slider control points are VERY fat and thus make drawing sliders with lots of close red anchors very difficult (wiggle sliders are the most common usecase for this)

+1, i use a lot of "slider wiggle rhythm" especially in lowdiffs and seeing the sliderpoints a bit smaller to manage this would be super nice. i know theyre against having everything be a toggle / setting but maybe being able to adjust the anchor size from the view panel seems like a good idea if possible

[crestalgia]

please add global resnap on lazer theres a lot of cases of adopting timings changes and you have to either do it on stable (and deal with the nightmare of unsnapped green lines) or object by object in lazer which is a huge pain

also can consider choosing what beatsnap devisor to consider when resnapping (when maps contain both 1/3 and 1/4 you kinda have to pick one and resnap the other by hand which is also a pain so something that lets you pick and choose what devisor to consider when resnapping would be real nice

[bluebear94]

When editing a mania map with the scrolling direction set to down, the behavior of the scroll wheel is opposite to what I expect (I expect scrolling up while the cursor is in the playfield to reveal higher sections of the map, but the editor always reveals earlier sections. A workaround is to set the scrolling direction to up, but I’m used to playing downscroll so I’d like to have the behavior fixed or at least an option added for this.