Here's a thing that's been on my mind as of late:

If you're going through a stream or a similar sequence but aren't pressing the keys with quite the right frequency, you might slowly drift off and start getting OKs.

As the approach rate and/or accuracy increase, it can get trickier to tell if you're hitting the circles a little early or a little late without looking at the hit error meter, which means taking your eyes off the circles¹.

Therefore I would like to propose the following: allow skins to supply separate animations for early/late hits (like early-hit50 or late-hit100) and have a setting for whether these should be used.

Here's a quick edit I made in an afternoon:
https://github.com/YAL-Forks/osu/tree/early-late

The code isn't the best and it's not using the actual "late" images despite me introducing time offset sign to JudgementPooling, but you can get an idea of how it'd feel:


Early hit vs late hit

Here's a test skin used for the above screenshot:
https://www.dropbox.com/scl/fi/qnwo0jvij8loymyhsfik6/WhiteCat-2.1-yal.osk?rlkey=mnv651a8g67f1snlh20b8i8ui&dl=0

¹ Placing one or more hit error meters amid the play field is an option, but a slightly weird one given that they draw over the circles.

Hey there, thank you for the feature request and the work you've drafted up on the lazer client to implement this. This has actually been requested before a while back, you can find it here, so this post will be locked to avoid duplicates. While you can shine some love on that side, it would also be a good avenue to explore the discussion on GitHub to see if your work can be possibly implemented in a future release. <3