A sample timing window for the Legacy, Velocity, and R^2 engines.
In FFR, the timing window is an interval of time, centered on a note, in which the player's input will successfully hit an arrow. However, as the timing window is meant to represent the synchronicity of the player to the rhythm, a timing scale is added around the note, expressed by a number of frames, to evaluate the accuracy of the player. Some timing windows are exclusive to their correspondant engine (such as the R^3 Engine).
Each frame is coupled with a diminishing score value. In the case of the FFR platform, they are represented by the following terms: Perfect, Good, Average, Miss and Boo. Optionally, a Marvelous can be added on certain engines.
For more on score values, see Scoring System.
History[]
Back in 2003, in the original version of FFR, there was only 1 frame to get a perfect. It was much harder to hit notes at all, and hitting any arrow when there wasn't a note there punished players with a miss.
In version 2, the timing window was changed to allow 7 frames to hit a note. Hitting a note in the earliest possible frame would result in an average. The next frame gave a good, the middle 3 frames each gave a perfect, the 6th frame gave a good, and the 7th frame gave a good but also a miss. This lasted for around 3 years before it was finally changed to just a good.
In the actual game engine, the timing window consists of 7 frames in which one can hit an arrow, and the earliest possible frame would result in an average. The next frame will result in a good, the middle 3 frames each give a perfect, and the last 2 frames both give a good.
Framers[]
- Main page : Framers
A 4th arrow and a 32nd arrow conflicting in today's timing window.
FFR's files, usually, are not well converted. This makes it near impossible for most players to play files (especially files at a very high difficulty) with an extremely good Amazing/Perfect ratio due to inconsistent frame differences. However, most of these bad frame conversions don't create that much of an issue aside from "Amazing" accuracy purposes, but those frame conversions which do create lots of problems for many players are called framers.
Framers are a commonly used term to describe how close an arrow was to another arrow during earlier times for the game, as knowing how many framers there were in a song was very helpful for hitting those certain arrows properly. However, since the game has been updated to take speed into account, the amount of framers that most players worry about are relatively low.
Avmiss[]
A 4th arrow and a 32nd arrow conflicting in what the timing window used to be.
Probably the most famous pieces of history of the timing window is known as avmiss. Simply put, if there were multiple arrows with overlapping timing windows, and an arrow is pressed, the game would always credit the player for hitting that latest possible arrow that it could. This made concurring arrows much more difficult to hit. If there were 2 arrows in the same direction only 4 frames apart, called 4-framers, then the second note would cover up one of the frames in which a player could normally get a perfect on the first note, making the arrow much more difficult to hit accurately. On 3-framers, there was only 1 frame to get a perfect on the first note and hitting it accurately was a huge challenge for most players. On 2-framers, the best a player could possibly get on the first note without missing would be a good, and there was again only 1 frame to do so. On 1-framers, the best a player could do without missing the first note would be to get an average, and these notes were especially challenging since there was only one frame to avoid missing at all. If a player hit a later note before an earlier note, the earlier note could still be hit, but even if a player did, the game would still give them a miss for it. Unfortunately, as a result, a song with zero-framers could not be completed without getting at least one miss for each zero-framer.