It’s About That Time Again. New Server on it’s Way.
Most of you remember last year when we set out and secured financing for a rather large server to ease the growing pains around here at FFR. Well, that time is upon us again. I have found myself working longer and longer days just to keep our beast of a server load balanced. We have now ordered another, more powerful server that will be used exclusively for the database side of FFR. This baby will have 4 cores of the latest Opteron AM2 socket CPUs, another raid array built with 15k rpm drives and 16GB of ram all in a nice 1U rack again.
The new 1U rack last spring allowed us to double our traffic. We are hoping for similiar results again with this machine. This means more features for the site like 100% realtime siggy’s, more reliable server, faster retrieval of records and most importantly it allows us to work on the site and games more and watch the server less.
We are also going to be switching over from our 800×600 site size to a more comfortable 1024×768 size. This will allow us to put more information above the fold on the page so that you don’t have to scroll around as much. It also allows for an additional ad on the right side. (believe me, we need it).
Everyone can go check out any of the mirrors in order to see the beta site: http://www.xqsite.com After a few more tweaks, we hope to bring that layout over to the main site today.
Comments? Help us out here, we do this for you guys.
Cheers,
Synthlight + OMG Server Load
Song of the Week: Torinouta (Noise Rave Remix)
This week’s Song of the Week is a DJ Sharpnel (Warning: Not Safe For Work material) remix of the song “Torinouta“. It has many 32nd and 64th mini-bursts, as well as sections full of 8th jumps and mini-16th trills. The steps are by Dore, and the song can be found in Dance, in the lower-left corner as always.
Also, the flashflashrevolution.com domain should be working again now (if you’re still on xqsite), although it might be a little longer before all the ISP’s direct to it again.
Happy FFR’ing,
FFRSiggy aka FFR Banner and Editor
Some of you may have already noticed.
For those that have not, we have created an early beta of a Signature Editor or Banner Editor. This allows you to create a customized banner for you to paste into your forum signatures, post to your blogs or myspace / facebook profiles.
We are working on adding to the available banner themes and increasing the amount of layouts available. Also we hope to add more variables to the displays to make it snazzier.
Take a look, let us know what you think and do give us suggestions regarding site banners or site buttons in the forum.
The Games We Played, Part 5
It’s been one hell of a week, not just for me, but for all of FFR. I’ve spent probably 10 hours just getting these files ready for FFR, but I got it all done, and you all have 5 new simfiles to play.
Tonight, we put TGWP part 5 in the game. The last part of the song. I was wrong when I said that part 3 was the longest part. Part 5 is just a few seconds longer. The other parts have been really nice and emotional, and this one is even more so. The ending blows me away…it’s almost too epic. You guys probably know what to expect, with the other simfiles.
The whole song is just over 17 minutes long, and has 2000 (Yes, two thousand) manually found bpm changes. What is manually found? I found all of the bpm changes using nothing but my ears. It took me two months from start to finish to make this file. Over 40 hours in the editor in stepmania, which is unheard of… Making a file like this, synced so nicely was so hard to do. I almost thought I would go insane when I was at the end. The last 40 seconds of the song was VERY hard to hear and sync, but as you can all see, I did it.
Why would I make such a file? I wanted to make a simfile that matched what I felt towards the girl I love. To do that, I would have to make the perfect simfile. With The Games We Played, I think I did so. There is no other simfile that is like this. She gave me the will to start and finish this simfile. It was an intense two months, but I finished it and the results are outstanding! She is the one person that gave me the ability to do this. Sadly, right now we’re having a little trouble with our relationship. I don’t know what will happen right now, if she’ll leave or if she’ll stay. All I can do now is hope for the best.
And with that, I give you all The Games We Played Part 5. The last part of the song.
Enjoy!
EDIT:
Well, tonight I found out the truth. Me and her were on a “break” from each other as of two weeks ago. I found out tonight that it wasn’t just a break, it was a complete break up. This sucks…really bad. I put so much time into perfecting TGWP because of her, and she’s probably gone. It almost makes me feel like I wasted my time.
But…I know I didn’t completely waste my time. I know that even if it was or wasn’t made for her, it’s still one of the best simfiles ever made if not the best. I accomplished one of my ultimate goals in this game: to make one of the best simfiles ever.
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I also wanted to thank all of you guys for your amazing feedback regarding not just this song, but for all of the recent SotW’s AND for Shash’s fixing of many other songs. Originally, we planned to release only Part 1 of TGWP with MAYBE adding another part or 2 a few weeks or months down the road… but the response we saw from everyone made us realize that we needed to add in the entire song. And look where that has led us.
Thanks again guys,
The Games We Played, Part 4
A little bit late, but better now than never. Last night, we released the 4th installment of TGWP by Torley Wong, aka aspergian. As with the others, it is stepped by Rebirth0.
As with the others, you can find it in the upper half of page 1 of the Arcade genre, although it should be noted that they WILL be moving to page 2 in the near future.
I’ll be back in a short few hours with the final segment of The Games We Played.
Ta ta for now,
Song of the Week Continues: TGWP Part 3
Continuing with our broken-up release of The Games We Played, Part 3 of it has been released tonight. It’s the longest of all five sections, at nearly four minutes in length. Hope you enjoy part 3 of this colorful series!
Happy FFR’ing,
Song of the Week .. Again: The Games We Played, Part 2
I thought it best that we make this news item its own post so everyone sees it clearly. Especially since its not just a matter of it being the usual 1 Song of the Week.
Thus far we have The Games We Played Part 1 and The Games We Played Part 2. – JasonKey
PART 2 NOW AVAILABLE IN ARCADE AS WELL. Expect parts 3, 4, and 5 later this week. We felt that since all 5 parts were 1 song, they should all be released as part of the same Song of the Week. So enjoy this week…
Cheers,
Tass & 5x the fun.
Song of the Week: The Games We Played, Part 1
Today’s Song of the Week is made by aspergian and was stepped by Rebirth0. The Games We Played is a piano remix of many different songs from various video games like The Legend of Zelda, Super Mario Bros, Kingdom Hearts, Metal Gear Solid, Tetris, and many more. The song is 17 minutes long so that it has to be cut and released in different parts. The part we get this week is the first 3 minutes 22 seconds.
We said that we would have a song with BPM changes for this week, and this song has PLENTY of them. It has 200 – 300, give or take.
Enough talk about the simfile, let’s talk about the artist. The artist of this song goes by “Torley Wong” and has made music (mainly techno), for many years. Sadly, in May of 2004 he was struck by hyperacusis, and lost the ability to hear. He no longer makes music, but has uploaded all 230 of his songs so we can listen to them: http://www.archive.org/details/Torley_Wong_-_The_Final_Selection. We currently only have permission for TGWP, but we are working towards getting access to his entire library.
You can find TGWP1 in the Arcade section. It is currently on page 1, upper middle, although it will be moving to page 2 in around 1 month to continue the pattern of increasing difficulty within the genre. We hope you all enjoy this EXTREMELY colorful file. To discuss the file, go here. To brag about your scores on the file, go here.
Cheers,
Tass, Shash, and all things fuzzy.
BPM Changes Around the Corner?
Thanks to Kit- for her conversion coding and Shashakiro for all his testing and persistance, we now have support for BPM changes in FFR. Keep in mind that BPM does not change the scrollrate but is more of a CMOD type of conversion.
Our original converter has lacked this feature for quite some time but now you can expect to see BPM changing songs in the near future.
We also are supporting a full range of noteskins now and Shashakiro has been busy reconverting old songs to fix their noteskins and any other issues they may have.
On a seperate note, we took last night to rewrite nearly the entire script that writes scores to the FFR database. Hopefully this will bring load down a bit. If you notice any problems, let us know.
If you are new and you see the t-vb.php error and or the “not available” song list, just sign out and sign back in. It is a side effect of our changes and will be dealt with this weekend.
Cheers,
Synthlight + sleepless nights on the server
