A framer refers to a pair of notes on the same column that are a small amount of frames apart.
Frame Conversions[]
The reason why framers exist stems from FFR originally being made from Flash. Since the game originally ran in Flash at 30FPS, the notes were also placed at integer frames, i.e., integer multiples of 1/30 seconds. This process is called a frame conversion, and results in two notes being farther or closer than they should be, or even converging to a jump.
The average frame gap between consecutive notes can be calculated by dividing 450 by the BPM. At the following BPMs, the average frame gap for 16th notes is an integer, leading to a perfect frame conversion:
- 112.5 (4 frames)
- 150 (3 frames)
- 225 (2 frames)
- 450 (1 frame)
In R^3 Engine version 1.4.1 or newer, charts released after August 3rd, 2021 are converted to milliseconds instead of frames, resulting in much more accurate note timings.
Framers[]
TODO: rework this section
While frame conversion impacts all kinds of patterns, it especially changes the difficulty of minijacks (or bursts that involve minijacks) since the players have to hit them faster or slower. Such minijacks are called framers. They are also called with the number of frames between the two notes, e.g., a framer with 3 frames apart is called a 3-framer.
A couple of files with "framers" are Mourning the Lost and Integraation. Most files at the higher-end have their framers fixed, such as grind2 and Kirlian Shores, but there are still a lot of files out there which still have "framers". In official tournaments, these framers are fixed before it is released in the tournament to ensure that the difficulty isn't artificially inflated.
0-Framers[]
0-Framers are framers with the gap of 0 frames. That is, two notes on the same column have exactly the same timing. Not only they are almost impossible to hit perfectly without resorting to a specific setup, they also appear as a single note, making it unacceptable for a chart to contain 0-framers.
Currently the only available charts with 0-framers are Party 4u "holy nite mix" and Vertex Beta vrofl, both of which have difficulty 0.