Archive for the 'Flash Flash Revolution' Category
Reminders
Hello hello, Happy Friday! Just a few reminders for you:
Signups for the 13th Official Tournament will be closing this Sunday evening at 10:59pm server time (CDT). Don’t miss out! We’ll be doing live previews again this year starting Sunday the 28th at 8pm server time (CDT). Be sure to give the Official FFR Twitch a follow to get notified when we’re live!
Tomorrow evening (6/27) in the FFR Discord we will be doing a Q&A session with Synthlight starting at 8pm server time (CDT). Now’s the time to get those burning questions answered by Synthlight and other FFR staff members. Drop your question here in this form even if you can’t make it, we’ll be taking a recording of it.
See you guys then!
13th Official Tournament Reminder and QA Details.
Hello everyone! I hope your week is going well so far.
Official Tournament
Can you believe the 13th Official Tournament is just one week away?! if you haven’t signed up yet don’t worry, there’s still time! You can find all the info in the 13th Official Tournament Thread. We’ll be doing live previews again this year so be sure to follow the Official FFR Twitch to catch those.
Q&A
I also wanted to give you all a few more details on the upcoming Q&A session with Synthlight. We will be hosting this in a voice channel on the FFR Discord this Saturday, June 27th starting at 8pm server time (CDT). If you have any questions you’d like to ask Synthlight or the rest of FFR staff please use this form to pre-submit them. We will also take live questions time permitting, but the best bet is to submit it on the form there.
That’s all I have for now, happy key smashing!
SoTW and Batch
Hey everyone! With the official tournament a mere 3 weeks away we will be suspending songs of the week temporarily. Once the tournament starts there will be 8 brand new songs going in per week for the 8-week duration, that’s a lot of new songs! Holding off on songs of the week will also help us ensure that we have some extra on deck just in case we need to swap any planned files out or accommodate any tiebreakers. We actually have only a small queue of files right now, which is awesome considering how large it was last year.
Now on to the batch, so far we’ve left it consistently open but with the influx of work from special batches, we will also be temporarily closing the batch after the May/June concludes. Don’t worry, we’ll be back with it shortly after. I just want to ensure we get all caught up and can keep moving forward smoothly with all the content coming in.
I think that’s it for now, as always any questions or concerns don’t hesitate to reach out!
-psychoangel691
13th Official Tournament signups & Updates
Good morning everyone! I hope you all had a good weekend. I have a few things to talk about today, the 13th Official Tournament is near! But first, I need to address a small bump we ran into:
Due to some corruption in the database, we had to do a mandatory rollback to May 28th. If you’ve submitted any files or updates to your files in the submission area during this time, please re-submit them to ensure we’re not missing any. I know some of you have lost some scores as well if you have screenshots you can submit those directly to the unrecorded scores form and I will get them in for you asap. We’re really sorry for the inconvenience, but it’s good we caught this while we had backups and were able to address it quickly.
Now for what you’ve been waiting for, signups for the 13th Official Tournament are open! The signup period is a little longer this time around as the requirements for participation have changed some. We are requiring more games played over more songs in order to place people more accurately. Please be sure to check out the 13th Official Tournament Thread to get all the details about that and more for the tournament. Hype!
If you have any questions or concerns you can always reach me via DMs here on the site, or through the FFR discord. My tag there is Azlynn.
See you on the dashboard!
It’s About Time…
History is important and this is going to be a long front-page post. Sorry in advance. Legacy is important. It’s why above all else, the FFR staff has chosen to prioritize keeping songs, scores, replays, forum posts, profiles, and more. This community has been around since early 2002 and we have had some incredible journeys together. The ups and downs… The stories… The business aspect… Friendships… I have seen people get married, have kids, get FFR tattoos, and be inspired to become game developers. Just amazing. At the same though, this is why our FFR database has grown so large over the years. We are not just talking about a few records here, we are talking about hundreds of millions.. maybe billions of records. Almost 70GB worth if you just count the main database and this is just the “text” records. There are another 100GB of code and site files.
So whats up?
Over the past week and a half, I have been working behind the scenes to modernize the infrastructure, database, services running the game, and then move it into a more robust private cloud platform. It’s on that platform right now as we speak. You might also wonder if we are ever going to move the database off of the webserver and give it more than a few GB of RAM? DONE… I wrapped up modifying about a hundred scripts and moved it all over on Sunday night. As a result, you should already start seeing things like level rank generation getting faster, the site should be more responsive and generally more reliable. The exception would be me interrupting you with snapshots or testing deployments in the middle of the night. I have completely replicated FFR as a staging server(s) on my local home machine so that I can quickly deploy, debug, and push to production additional upgrades as we move forward.
The current developers have done an incredible job over the years but they need more support on the infrastructure side and while I do hold a full-time job, I am the most qualified to continue that tradition and essentially take care of that nest. So that’s what I am going to do. With that being said, over the next few days, I will be deploying a significant number of database upgrades, DB configuration optimization, and query optimization. The same will happen on the webserver side. I have a heaping handful of base services I want to make sure are completely up to date as we get closer to planned releases and additional *SECRET* plans. In all, this phase of upgrades means that you can continue to go about your daily FFR lives without interruption with the only thing you notice being is a more responsive site as time moves forward.
While life has taken me in all kinds of twists and turns over the years, I still pay monthly for the infrastructure and along with the admins, developers, and moderators, we keep the game 100% free and void of ads. Just the way it was originally envisioned. It’s best for me to be involved right now and I owe it to everyone to be so. As a community, as a site and as players, we still have some amazing things to accomplish.
So on the subject of history… How many of you have been around since we had a simfile database with tens of thousands of entries for the Stepmania community? FFR was THE source for simfiles for a number of years. I bet you didn’t know those files were held in a RAID array where BOTH drives went bad. Like that, pooooff, they all the files vanished. Tragedy. I kept the drives all these years as some sort of nostalgic piece of history in the corner of my closet. About 6 months ago, I was going through things and I decided it was worth a shot to have them sent off to a company specializing in physical data recovery. That company finally reached back out a few months ago to let me know what was going on…. Should I ruin the surprise? I think you know the answer.
One last thing I want to mention was that Google converted all of our free email accounts that they assigned us access to about 15 years ago into gsuite accounts and started to charge $5 or so a piece for the hundreds of user-based email accounts. Needless to say, that was no bueno. The bad news is that I have been having a hell of a time getting them to switch it back, the good news is that we can pay on a per-account basis if anyone out there needs permanent or even temporary access to this @flashflashrevolution.com email addresses. I/we will do what we can to get that back on track and I am still working with Google on this.
Enjoy the upgrades so far and please feel free to let me know what you would like to see changed on the site, game, server, or whatever. Stop by on the official FFR Discord to say hello to me and the rest of the devs, moderators, and players if you get the chance.
Feel free to reach out with questions, I’m an open book.
18 years and counting…
Cheers,
Synthlight
Songs of the week 05/27/2020
I know, I know I’m a day late. My bad guys, but here’s a bonus song to make it up to ya:
Labradorite
Musician: OSTER project feat. Yu Tokiwa
Step Artist: bmah
Song Length: 2:25
Sail On
Musician: Masterplan
Step Artist: storn42
Song Length: 2:58
Son Of Robot
Musician: Dance Gavin Dance.
Step Artist: Pizza69
Song Length: 3:52
Sarcophagus
Musician: Ninja 9000
Step Artist: M0nkeyz
Song Length: 2:48
Enjoy!
- psychoangel691 & The Game Management Team
Songs of the Week 05/19/2020
LIGHT OF HARMONY
Musician: NeLiME
Step Artist: gold stinger
Song Length: 2:00
Wine & Roses
Musician: L’Indécis
Step Artist: M0nkeyz
Song Length: 3:40
Handle Your Business
Musician: b.i.n.t.
Step Artist: ositzxz369
Song Length: 2:10
Enjoy!
- psychoangel691 & The Game Management Team
Songs of the Week 05/12/2020
Ohi, here’s some songs:
At The Speed Of Light
Musician: Dimrain47
Step Artist: snaphap
Song Length: 4:05
Dracula Man X2 Alpha Turbo
Musician: Jake Kaufman
Step Artist: Psychotik
Song Length: 3:10
Hopeful BlueSky
Musician: cosMo@Bousou-P
Step Artist: DarkZtar
Song Length: 4:49
Enjoy!
- psychoangel691 & The Game Management Team
Belated Mother’s Day Release
Oops, my bad guys. I meant to release this yesterday but I got really sidetracked so you get your mother’s day release one day late.
Unborn Baby
Artist: Venetian Snares and Speedranch
Step Artist: ositzxz369
Length: 0:42
Enjoy!
-psychoangel691
