Songs of the Week and Weekly Update 1/21/2022
Welcome to this Friday’s Song Release and Weekly Update!
Development
R3 version 1.4.2 has been released. You can find the download and changelog here. As always, please let us know of any bugs you find or feature requests you may have by commenting within #feature-discussion on our FFR Discord server, or by posting within our Bug Reports and Suggestions forum. You can also find stickied threads for the ease of posting any suggestions and bugs there.
Events and Difficulty Consultants
Please welcome justin_ator, Skayles, and _Zenith_ to the event team! Zenith has also returned as a difficulty consultant!
Batches
When it comes to song submission and judgment, there are currently some changes in progress to the previous system in favor of a new system. You can find more information about that in this post.
Moderation
Congratulations to Deamerai and Rapta for being upgraded to Global Moderators! The moderation team will be looking to do a full rules revamp sometime in the near future and will be hoping to implement it in places much more visible than just in the forums.
That’s all for the weekly update. Below are the Songs of the Week.
The 3 veteran files we have for you today are:
Moneko
Musician: Geoxor
Step Artist: Rapta
Song Length: 1:31
Difficulty: 13
Own Little World
Musician: Celldweller
Step Artist: trumaestro
Song Length: 3:32
Difficulty: 67
FACTORY_RESET
Musician: KURORAK
Step Artist: hi19hi19
Song Length: 1:30
Difficulty: 96
And for Non-Veteran players, these songs have went public:
Good Computers
Musician: Geoxor
Step Artist: Rapta
Song Length: 1:16
Difficulty: 11
Fur Elise Jam
Musician: The Piano Guys
Step Artist: WirryWoo
Song Length: 2:05
Difficulty: 65
hurricanic
Musician: DETRO
Step Artist: jh05013
Song Length: 2:36
Difficulty: 91
Enjoy!
-DossarLX ODI, the Game Management Team, and the Community Managers
Songs of the Week and Weekly Update 1/14/2022
Welcome to this Friday’s Song Release and Weekly Update! There have been a good chunk of changes over the last week or two, so here’s what’s been going on:
Development
R3 version 1.4.2 is on its way so keep an eye out. As in the past, there will be a changelog accompanying its release.
Season 2 started on January 1st! If you participated in season 1 (completely filled out your top 50) you should see a participation badge within the token section of your profile. There will be more badges released in the near future and there are new features being worked on to expand on your seasonal stats.
Event Team
No official events are currently active, but there’s an interesting unofficial event going on that has a cash prize for the first person that AAAs Death Piano! You can find the event thread here.
Difficulty Consultants
A couple files had their difficulty changed in the last week:
Change Yourself [Heavy] 80 -> 85
Black Chocolates 95 -> 94
If you come across any files that you feel could have their difficulty adjusted, please let us know by starting a discussion within #difficulty-discussion on the FFR Discord server, or by creating a thread within our Contested Chart Difficulties sub-forum. You can keep up with any official changes and proposed changes through our FFR Contested Difficulties spreadsheet. (You can also find this spreadsheet link pinned within #difficulty-discussion on the Discord server.)
Judges
Easy and Hard Batches for Official Tournament 15 are now open! Get your tournament-worthy files in by the end of May!
Please welcome Matthia as a judge consultant! He’ll be helping with reviewing files in our 100+ difficulty batches.
Thanks to Velocity, batch submissions now display an NPS graph! Older files missed in batches prior to the July/August 2021 batch have been updated or assigned to judges. Judges have also begun reviewing files from the October/November 2021 batch. To stay updated on batch progress, you can check out the Weekly Batch Updates thread. You can also find batch updates within #batch on the FFR Discord server.
Moderation
Our global mods have gone through and cleaned up the forum stickies a bit. This mainly involved removing any outdated/old stickies. The next step will be updating any existing stickies if needed.
General
We’ve created a new Community Manager usergroup to help centralize and convey information from every department. Each week you will see updates (if any) from each department along with the songs of the week provided by these users. On top of that, our Community Managers will be here to help guide users in the right direction with any questions or concerns they may have. Our two Community Managers are Sky Kitten and XJ-9, so please give them a warm welcome to this new department!
FFR has a new Twitch, Facebook, and Twitter! We’ll have users dedicated to each social media page to keep people consistently updated through those avenues. Spread the word!
Last but not least, please welcome our newest staff members!
M0nkeyz – Difficulty Consultant
SubaruPoptart – Difficulty Consultant
Zlyice – Difficulty Consultant
On to the Songs of the Week!
The 3 veteran files we have for you today are:
Good Computers
Musician: Geoxor
Step Artist: Rapta
Song Length: 1:16
Difficulty: 11
Fur Elise Jam
Musician: The Piano Guys
Step Artist: WirryWoo
Song Length: 2:05
Difficulty: 65
hurricanic
Musician: DETRO
Step Artist: jh05013
Song Length: 2:36
Difficulty: 91
And for Non-Veteran players, these songs have went public:
sans.
Musician: Toby Fox
Step Artist: Snupeh
Song Length: 0:50
Difficulty: 13
Blend W
Musician: MowtenDoo
Step Artist: Psychotik
Song Length: 1:31
Difficulty: 64
cafe terrace at dusk
Musician: bold expectations
Step Artist: bmah
Song Length: 2:03
Difficulty: 95
Enjoy!
-DossarLX ODI, the Game Management Team, and the Community Managers
Songs of the Week 1/7/2022
Happy New Year and welcome to the first song release of 2022! Many things happened over the course of this week to check out:
-The Event Token Batch has been extended until the End of February/Beginning of March to allow for more time in submissions.
-Files that had been stuck in batch for Conditional Queue reasons, Pending Fixes, or just forgotten about, have been pushed along in the batch process. We’ll hopefully see releases or resubmissions from them over the next few weeks.
-Added new Token Graphics to tokens that were missing them, and replaced tokens that were using the same graphic, go check out shiny new tokens on your profile!
-Revamped how Difficulty Discussion and Consulting is handled, so the system for selecting difficulty for files will be much more streamlined.
psychoangel691 has stepped down from Game Management staff, and for the time being gold stinger has jumped onto Game Management staff. We will be making some changes to the Song Release schedule. Starting with this release, there will be weekly releases on Fridays with 3 new Veteran files:
sans.
Musician: Toby Fox
Step Artist: Snupeh
Song Length: 0:50
Difficulty: 13
Blend W
Musician: MowtenDoo
Step Artist: Psychotik
Song Length: 1:31
Difficulty: 64
cafe terrace at dusk
Musician: bold expectations
Step Artist: bmah
Song Length: 2:03
Difficulty: 95
And for Non-Veteran players, these songs have went public:
Requiem
Musician: Helblinde
Step Artist: Skayles
Song Length: 2:01
Difficulty: 9
Manhattan Lover
Musician: takdrive
Step Artist: bmah
Song Length: 1:59
Difficulty: 69
Character Select – Super Mario Bros. 2 Extended (2021)
Musician: Shnabubula
Step Artist: MarioNintendo
Song Length: 1:51
Difficulty: 74
Black Chocolates
Musician: DJ SHARPNEL
Step Artist: Wiosna
Song Length: 4:00
Difficulty: 94
Enjoy!
-DossarLX ODI and the Game Management Team
Songs of the Week 12/31/2021
Oops, I dropped the ball a little on this week’s vet releases with the holiday and all. We’re getting back into our regular routine though. Jan/Feb batch is now open and keep in mind most files from here on out will be getting looked at for tournament viability, so if you have any you think are OT worthy I’d send em this batch.
This week’s Veteran releases:
Requiem
Musician: Helblinde
Step Artist: Skayles
Song Length: 2:01
Difficulty: 9
Manhattan Lover
Musician: takdrive
Step Artist: bmah
Song Length: 1:59
Difficulty: 69
Character Select – Super Mario Bros. 2 Extended (2021)
Musician: Shnabubula
Step Artist: MarioNintendo
Song Length: 1:51
Difficulty: 74
Black Chocolates
Musician: DJ SHARPNEL
Step Artist: Wiosna
Song Length: 4:00
Difficulty: 95
These songs went public:
Form, Part 1
Musician: Slippy
Step Artist: Rapta
Song Length: 0:51
Difficulty: 2
Charlie Brown Medley
Musician: The Piano Guys
Step Artist: WirryWoo
Song Length: 1:41
Difficulty: 48
Bad Apple!!
Musician: RichaadEB ft. Cristina Vee
Step Artist: Psychotik
Song Length: 3:03
Difficulty: 62
Lakes of Flame
Musician: Blue Stahli
Step Artist: trumaestro
Song Length: 2:48
Difficulty: 78
Enjoy!
R^3 v1.4.1 – Release
With 238 changed files, 18586 additions and 13860 deletions, what was supposed to be a small incremental update turned into the largest engine update instead.
This release comes a new Settings Window, new Replay History Window, several new Gameplay quality of life additions, a large multiplayer backend update and more.
As always the download links for the release can be found in the left sidebar with the blue Download button or by clicking here, if you run into any issues, be sure to drop an issue over at our issue tracker.
Menu Additions
Custom Menu Background – Velocity (@Psycast)
Why settle with just a gradient color background when you can place anything you want instead.
You can now set any .png or .jpg image as your menu background by naming it (bg_menu.png / bg_menu.jpg) and placing it within the games main folder.
Genre Flags – Velocity (@Psycast)
Genre flags are a representation of your performance within a genre or difficulty range. This was actually a feature round within the R^2 engine that lasted for a small while that highlighted when all songs within that category were AAA’d or FC’d. This has been expanded to show your current best flag for the category as a small colored dot next to the category matching the flags normal color.
Menu Navigation – Velocity (@Psycast)
The top navigation bar in the menu has been changed to make the filter button highlight when a filter is active, and to add a button to get to the Replay History window.
Allow previewing locked songs – Andrew WCY (@G-flat)
Locked songs were locked and didn’t have the option, they do now though.
Settings – Velocity (@Psycast)
The entire settings menu has received a new coat of paint and slightly more organized. Along with the redesign, it also adds some long requested features that didn’t really fit within the old settings window.
General Tab
This now contains the most basic and the most commonly changed settings during gameplay:
- Scroll Speed
- Receptor Spacing
- Note Scale
- Game Volume
- Menu Volume
- Global Offset
- Judge Offset
- Autofail
- Scroll Direction
- Mirror toggle
- Song Rate
- Isolation
Input Tab
Now displays inputs in a hopefully more obvious way, and includes a simple input tester to see if you have any issues with key rollover / ghosting.
Noteskin Tab
Noteskins recieved a small addition this time around as well, and it now supports loading noteskins directly from an external .txt file found within the noteskins folder.
In addition to this, note colors have been moved into this tab and now provides active representation of the note swap choices that are currently set.
Game Modifiers
No new additions this time for new game mods, but that have a new home here.
Game UI Visuals
This contains most of the visual toggles for the game, for both gameplay components and song selection components.
Game Colors
Used for setting the color for gameplay components such as Judge Accuracy text, Combo text, and the games background colors during menus.
Miscellaneous
For the settings that just don’t fit anywhere else. This contains your more advanced options such as engine playlist, framerate, vsync, and others.
This also news a new option to allow the game to remember it’s last window position and size, along with settings the values directly. So you don’t need to do it manually each time.
Replay History – Velocity (@Psycast)
The menu formally known as the F2 menu has also received the same new design as the settings window, but a little more then that.
Personal Online Replays
Since the removal of flash for the web, viewing saved replays hasn’t been the easiest thing around, and this is the first step at addressing that.
While the replay menu had the ability to play temporary replays created during a session or even external replays saved using the “Auto-Save Replays Locally” option, it wasn’t able to load online replays directly and you would have to resort to using the import code function which was rather obtuse.
The Online tab found within the replays menu will load your personal saved replays without any hassle. While that doesn’t allow you to view replays of a user, or load a direct replay from another user either, this sets up the ground work for that and will be expanded on in the future.
Gameplay Additions – Velocity (@Psycast)
Custom Gameplay Background – Velocity (@Psycast)
When black just isn’t enough. For those who after all these years have having background on songs disabled, but have grown tired of the just a solid back background, then this might be for you.
You can now set any .png or .jpg image as your gameplay background by naming it (bg_game.png / bg_game.jpg) and placing it within the games main folder. In addition to this, if you don’t fancy using a custom image and still want to change the background color, a new option found in the “Game Colors” section has been added to change the stage color.
Accuracy / Error Bar – Velocity (@Psycast)
Inspired by other games that have something like this. It displays accuracy during gameplay, uses the colors set in the judge colors, and it’s “on” by default. I have nothing else to add.
Song Progress Remaining Time – Velocity (@Psycast)
A simple timer that counts down to the end of the song, can be used along side the progress bar, and defaults to “off”.
Remove Receptor Judgement Animation- Velocity (@Psycast)
This is a feature that found it’s initial inception within the AF2021, and was brought over to the official engine. This disables the animation that plays when a note is hit, so no more distraction flash if you so choose.
Restore Aachen Light as Judge Font – Zageron (@Zageron)
It used to be the judge font but was changed out when the engine became open source. This was supposed to be a temporary change but I really do release engines slow so this took awhile. If you liked the newer one, then an option to change the font will be added in a future release.
Add Column Filter To Results Screen – Sploder12 (@Sploder12)
This allows you to change the accuracy graph on the results screen to different display settings for all columns, LDUR, or by hand.
Now you can really nail down which hand is to blame for you mediocre scores.
Multiplayer
Add MP Ready button – Sploder12 (@Sploder12)
Why be surprised when gameplay starts in multiplayer when you can ready up when you’re ready instead.
General Fixes – Sploder12 (@Sploder12), Zageron (@Zageron), Velocity (@Psycast)
While Oppiie was busy typing up a storm, some old and new issues started to become apparent that have been lurking around for many years, neglected due to the unwillingness to touch multiplayer code unless absolutely required. Taking advantage of all the working put in class typing the majority of the MP code, several game breaking dues were address after many years.
While it’s still not entirely stable, as one notable bug with the multiplayer room being stuck in a gameplay state still needs to be addressed, this should hopefully feel a little better.
Core & Multiplayer Code Typing – Oppiie (@mat100payette)
There’s a lot of work in this area, but sadly not much to show directly.
The multiplayer code found within the engine has remained relatively untouched for many years due to both the complexity of getting all the pieces to work together, and remaining as backwards compatible with previous engine versions as much as possible. Due to this, it has remained in a rather broken state that worked, but not that well. With this massive amount of work primarily completed by Oppiie, one of the largest steps into making a stable multiplayer experience has taken place with more work to be done in the future.
Another year has come and gone, and another engine update finally released, and here I thought the AF2021 engine would be the biggest engine release I would do for a long time.
I was going to go into more of the smaller changes and fixes, but the post is getting rather long.
- Velocity and the FFR Development Contributors.
Countdown to Christmas – 1
Christmas eve already and we’re down to our last day of this event. Don’t forget about the FFRmas Spon-cons. Today I’ve also re-started the veteran releases so that songs of the week will be back for everyone next week.
Fake Promise
Musician: DJ SHARPNEL
Step Artist: Wiosna
Song Length: 4:20
Difficulty: 90
This week’s Veteran releases
Form, Part 1
Musician: Slippy
Step Artist: Rapta
Song Length: 0:51
Difficulty: 2
Charlie Brown Medley
Musician: The Piano Guys
Step Artist: WirryWoo
Song Length: 1:41
Difficulty: 48
Bad Apple!!
Musician: RichaadEB ft. Cristina Vee
Step Artist: Psychotik
Song Length: 3:03
Difficulty: 62
Lakes of Flame
Musician: Blue Stahli
Step Artist: trumaestro
Song Length: 2:48
Difficulty: 78
Enjoy!
Countdown to Christmas – 2
Holy cow this month has gone super fast, can’t believe we’re coming to the end of this event already. I hope everyone’s been enjoying all the new releases and FFRmas Spon-cons!
Step It [Light]
Musician: Shirobon
Step Artist: jh05013
Song Length: 2:08
Difficulty: 21
Enjoy!
Countdown to Christmas – 3
Full Blown Meltdown
Musician: PUP
Step Artist: storn42
Song Length: 2:21
Difficulty: 63
Enjoy!
Countdown to Christmas – 4
Awake
Musician: Aaron Zimmer
Step Artist: Rapta
Song Length: 1:37
Difficulty: 5
Enjoy!
