V2 Beta Released!

TLDR

• See a demo here: https://youtu.be/tJeBpewe-PI

• This only affects note timing, not mapping style. That will be coming later.

Hi everyone. I'm excited to finally announce the first public release of V2. It still isn't complete, but I believe it's finally reached a point where I am comfortable releasing it to the public. It's available as it's own distinct toggle when selecting mapping options

So what changed?

Version 2 has a focus on stability. I (and other users) have noticed that Version 1 will often confuse itself. I've seen it get stuck in repeated patterns that it will stretch throughout the majority of the song (and sometimes past the end), and I've also seen it "lose it's mind" and place hundreds of notes extremely fast, irrespective of difficulty. Version 2 should be much less prone to doing either of those. In general, this leads to much more variety in note timing which has made the maps generally more fun to play.

Please be aware that this update does not change the mapping style. I've found that the mapping system often does better with better timings, but this is not a guarantee and it will still sometimes output impossible or questionable mapping. I plan on dropping the "Beta" label when the mapping system is also updated.

How do I use it?

Above is a screenshot of the new Version 2 mapping options UI.

When switching between Version 1 and Version 2, the body of the UI will change to show each models features. Notably, Version 2 no longer will take a list of difficulties. Instead, you can use a slider to set the approximate speed of the map. You can use the + and - buttons to add or remove dots from the slider, so you can still select up to 5 difficulties for each map. TopMapper will automatically decide which dot should correspond to which named difficulty in the game.

Of course, Version 1 is still completely available and I have no plans to remove it from the website. I fully expect that there will be scenarios in which Version 1 still performs better than Version 2, and I urge everyone to use the model they prefer.

You teased other features last post, where are they?

In the previous post I mentioned two features, osu! conversion and TapMapper. I also mentioned that these features would likely need a better timing model. While I haven't yet got around to testing TapMapper, I am happy to report that the v2 model works for osu! conversion and that is now live on the website. Simply select "Convert from osu!" on the homepage, upload an .osz file, and select the difficulty from the osu! map.

osu! conversion will disable difficulty control and force the use of the v2 model. This is because the timings are taken from the osu! map, so there is no difficulty to control. In addition, the v1 timing model struggles to decide where to place multiple notes and where to place a single note, causing it to generate broken maps when using the osu! map as reference.

Now what?

I'm excited to finally take a break from the note timings and start work on the mapping system. As I've mentioned before, I'll be adding 360 degree and distinct mapping styles. While waiting on my poor graphics card, I plan to work on implementing TapMapper and a remap feature that will take an existing Beat Saber map and update it with arcs/chains or optionally recreate the entire map (similar to convert from osu!)

Farther out ideas include AI generated lightshows (which I would love to do earlier, but feel much less important compared to actual map quality) and a Beat Saber mod that would allow for map generation directly within the game. Of course, these are just ideas and no work has begun on either of these yet.

Thank you everyone so much for supporting me. I didn't expect to get this much positive reception to TopMapper, all of you following the project and using the mapper are strong motivation to make this as good as I can.

Of course, if you have any suggestions are problems, leave a comment below or send me a DM.