Experiment X
PLEASE Excuse the mess tonight. Finishing some upgrades and it may look EXTREMELY sloppy for the next 12-24 hours. The colors are whacked out and there is whitespace all over the place.
FEB 22 – *I will fix the right blocks cutting off portions of the FFR playfield tonight.*
Cheers,
Synthlight
DDR SuperNOVA
Thanks to nforcer and Neonatrias, FFR has some EXCLUSIVE DDR SuperNOVA pictures for you to see! Check them out in the forums, and let us know what you think! DDR SuperNOVA is the latest arcade mix in the DDR series, and it’s going to be a world wide release! The photos are from a location test in Naperville IL.
Cheers,
lightdarkness, nforcer, and Neonatrias
Synthlight on the Move
Hopefully this news story will answer questions for a wide range of people in the FFR community. I will cover the current status on things like R2, 3rd Style and FFR T-shirts. I will also try to cover some development ideas for the future of FFR and current happenings in my life.
Life:
Lets start first with why I have been so silent for the past couple months. As most of you know, I have been in business for myself for MANY years and occasionally I must work onsite along with clients. As an example, one of my most recent clients has been getting ready for a trade show and needed 200% of my effort in order to prepare certain Flash pieces. When I say 200%, I mean it. I spent 4-5 days at the client’s site with approximately 3 hours during that time in which I was out of the office. I slept a 1-2 hours each day in order to keep my sanity. Luckily though we finished getting ready for the trade show and everything went well.
3rd Style:
3rd Style development started back in the summer / early fall and has continued to move forward but unfortunately slowed to a crawl for the last 2 months. As I have started to work more normal hours this week, this pace has picked up. 3rd style is at the top of my priority list. Besides having a completely new interface, 3rd style will boast MANY new songs upon release and include many features that have been requested for a long LONG time like speed mods, skin changes and BPM change support. I will personally be working on my DWI converter so that it can handle BPM changes. I expect 3rd Style to be released sometime within the month of April. I will say April 31st but it may be sooner depending on my schedule.
This release will be the most radical change for FFR within the last 2 years. Chardish, LD and I (with the input of others) have worked to lay the foundation of the new interface. I admire Chardish for not getting fed up with me everytime I requested visual changes or sent him back to the drawing board. I think in the end we came out with a superb design that will ultimately be easier to navigate and read for both noobs and veterans alike.
R2B2:
Over the past 6-8 months, R2 has been rewritten from the ground up. This time I have not been putting the pressure on Soccr to get everything done ASAP and he assures me that this version is bug free and solid as a rock. The core engine is complete, quick as hell and solid as a rock. Tthe graphics remain similiar but we have switched from keyboard navigation to mouse navigation in order to stop the confusion of new users trying to run R2 and getting frustrated.
Most importantly we will include a new feature that I know everyone will like, the ability to upload your own .mp3 / stepfiles into your account. This will allow you to play your stepfiles from school/home/work/library or wherever you have internet access. After uploading, you will see the songs available in your category listing and will be able to play them as if they were local. The songs will keep a high-score for you just as normal songs are capable of. You will also be able to create a “friends list” and share your uploaded songs with your friends. I will have to limit the amount of server space used by each user account and or IP in order to keep costs down.
Again, I would like to say April 31st for the release date but this depends on quite a few factors. I will work with soccr to see what we can accomplish before April.
FFR Chat:
As most of you know. We have had a few problems with kids causing problems in the chat. I am in the process of rewriting functions for the chat that will prevent these problems and will be patching all known holes. This will come as a release in the next few weeks to a month.
FFR T-Shirts:
I am working this week with LD in order to figure out who has what and what orders I have missed. I will be delivering T-shirts to EVERYONE within the next 2 weeks. Even if you cancelled your order and received a refund, I will STILL be sending you a t-shirt or sticker. While my life is busy as hell, there is no excuse for my late response on all of this. Everyone will get what they ordered, nothing less. As a matter of fact, if you have not received your T-shirt, PM me “Synthlight” in the forums. We will get it taken care of.
Community:
Thanks to everyone who has been part of the FFR community. We now have over 2 million multi-user plays, 800,000+ members, Approximately 230,000-250,000 games played per day and continue to grow at an incredible pace of around 1,500 new members per day. Our site does approximately 1,000,000+ page views per day and shows no sign of slowing down. Oh yeah, it’s still free! It will be interesting to see if these stats change when 3rd Style and R2B2 are released.
I will be going over all staff and community suggestions from the forums while developing these next releases. I want to assure you that your threads are being heard.
Cheers,
Synthlight
Song of the YEAR!
Hey all you FFR’ers out there! I hope you had a great holiday season, and now that you’re all rested, it’s time to put your fingers to the test!
Tonight, we are not only releasing the last song of the ‘week’ for the 2005 year, but it’s also the LONGEST FFR song ever released! You will definatly need to work up some strength for this song, because it’s a MARATHON song. Thats right, over FIVE MINUTES of gameplay! You’ll certainly be able to rack up the points on this one!
Gamepro17616 has stepped for us “MAX Forever” by DM Ashura. It’s a remix of several DDR songs, and it’s quite an awesome addition to the many FFR songs we already have! I’m not going to tell you exactly where the song is, that’s a secret, but I can tell you that the year 2006 has something to do with it!
We hope you all enjoyed the many new songs and features FFR has added over the past year, and we hope to see you through the 2006 year!
Cheers,
lightdarkness
Happy Holidays from FFR!
Merry Christmas & Happy Holidays FFR’ers! This time of year is for drinking eggnog, lighting candles, opening presents, and listening to FFR Radio!
Right now, on FFR Radio, JurseyRider is spinning some Trans-Siberian Orchestra for us, and will be playing various Christmas and Holiday Music (Can I get some Adam Sandler up in here?) for the remainder of the evening. Jurs is now off the radio, but you can still listen to some FFR and DDR tunes on the radio!
Tune in to FFR Radio by clicking the links on the left, or by clicking here. She will be on for the next few hours, so be sure to tune in! We will also be chatting it up in the FFR Radio IRC channel, located in #ffrradio on the irc.othersideirc.net network, so stop by for some holiday chatter for all.
The entire staff of FFR hopes you all have a safe and happy holiday season. Here’s looking towards another great year of key-tappin at FFR.
Cheers,
FFR Staff
R.I.P. Captain Jack 1962-2005
Hello everyone. I wish I had better news for you today. Something trivial about an art update, or a song of the week, or a free copy of some video game.
Francisco Gutierrez, better known to us as “Captain Jack,” has passed away this morning at the age of 43.
In 2002 Captain Jack was diagnosed with a stroke. Though his lifestyle heightened the chances of another stroke, he continued to live life doing what he loved. He collapsed on Monday at a party in Spain, fell into a coma, and was pronounced dead today. He is survived by his ex-wife and son Francisco (21).
There’s no point in masking the fact that we’re connected to Captain Jack through his music on DDR. All of us have heard it; all of us have loved it. He’s become about as much of a part of DDR as DDR itself, and thus the entire music game community is affected by this tragic death.
In memory of his life and his wonderful contributions to both music and music games, we are putting Captain Jack’s self-titled theme song in the game for a short time. We know we don’t have the rights to it. We don’t care. Play, and do homage to this great man. God knows he deserves it.
Tak tak tak, never looking back
Come and fight for Captain Jack
Say it slow, but say it loud
Join the peace camp and you will be proud
Cheers,
Chardish
FFArt Week 5
You’ll have to forgive me for taking forever on this. This was one of those weeks/weekends where all of Chardish’s professors met in unholy congress and reached the sadistic consensus that Chardish should have to do an amount of homework that could be considered nothing less than a Herculean labor.
But the winners from last week’s contest were:
Beethoven Virus: Guillermo Maldonado
End Night: Tyler Mitchell
Bubble Bobble Hillbilly Rodeo: Tyler Mitchell
I’m working on reformatting the nature of this contest because I don’t think we’ll have enough backgrounds quickly enough. But I need to have a chat with Synth about that before I go forward with presenting my idea.
You guys have been patient though, so I’ll give you some cool songs this week.
Next week’s songs are:
Delirium
Get Down
dot death (stealth mix)
Go nuts!
Remember – rules are here. You have until next Tuesday to do this. Tuesday 25th October.
There, I updated it! Now back to listening to the IIDX12 soundtrack for me. 
(Omae wa nanimania?)
Cheers,
Chardish
FFR STUFF!! WHEE!!
Stuff Update:
For those of you who have not been following the forums, the FFR stuff (T-shirts and stickers) has arrived and we are now shipping the orders out. Please let us know when you receive your orders. After all orders have been shipped, we will put the remaining inventory up for sale.
Cheers,
Synthlight
FFArt – Week 4
Week 4 is now underway! For those of you who don’t know, FFArt is a way that those of you out there with artistic talent can contribute to 3rd Style and see your name in the game credits.
Click here for more info on the contest, with instructions on how you can enter for this week.
Let’s start with the winners from last week. Tough calls, all.
Lovely Lovely Lovely – Guillermo Maldonado
4F73R M3 – Gabriel Ongpauco
CIA Rave – Jared Setoh
In an attempt to avoid drama, please remember that when you submit an image, you can’t go back and revoke it. You said we could use it, so we’re using it. To use an example, whoever wrote the song “Danger Zone” can’t go back to the people who made the movie “Top Gun” and demand they remove it. It’s done.
Next week’s songs:
Beethoven Virus
End Night
Bubble Bobble Hillbilly Rodeo
Good luck on Week 4!
Cheers,
Chardish
