Pushed out some recent changes to sliders today. These change the way sliders are drawn for better consistency and readability.

1. The start and end circles are no longer included in the slider body. This means that after you hit them, they will explode away and you will only see the slider body remaining.

Reasoning: A lot of people already skin slider circles out. By drawing circles on the body texture as well, this introduced scenarios where skinning would result in unwanted side-effects. It also made little sense from a visual perspective to have hitcircles remain when they weren’t actually hittable.

2. Slider bodies now fade out gradually when playing with hidden mod. This allows for better readability (ability to see notes underneath the sliders) while also feeling more in-line with what hidden mod actually stands for.

Reasoning: Up until now, it didn’t make sense to have the slider bodies remain completely visible. With the change above, having the bodies remain visible looked especially out of place. We tested various ways of approaching this, and this was the best we came up with.

I know there will be some of you out there jumping up-and-down complaining that this makes HD harder, but please, try playing with it for a few days before you make a judgement. Many of those testing have said it actually increases readability when playing hD. The body is still visible almost until the end of the active time, so it is in fact quite playable!

These changes will be left on Cutting Edge stream to simmer for a while. We won’t be pushing them out to stable until OWC is over, so rest-assured it will not affect the imminent competitive scene.