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After almost two months of development, Beats 1.4b is finally released! There has been MANY improvements and changes, based on your feedback, and plenty of new features to check out as well!

This is a repost from the PennApps Mobile 2011 website prior to the start of the hackathon. Background: Due to my success success with Beats during the very first PennApps 2010, I was interviewed and asked to give advice to new hackers/participants in the upcoming PennApps Mobile 2011 hackathon. ====== Interview by Justin Meltzer from the Interactive Media Group. I took some time to interview Philip Peng, a junior studying Computer Engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. As the lead developer of a mobile game called Beats developed on the Android platform, he and his team transformed a concept hastily …

[KGVID]http://keripo.com/static/gaming/fw/videos/%5bFW-NA%5d%20Keeping%20It%20Classy%20-%20Forsaken%20World%20CB2%20PvP/FW%20CB2%20PvP%20-%20Keeping%20It%20Classy.mp4[/KGVID] (Direct download) Forsaken World North America (Closed Beta 2) PvP/Guild Wars – Keeping It Classy. 2010-12-06 RageQuit vs “Wicked” (fake war they declared on us), 2011-01-02 RageQuit vs Wicked, and 2011-01-03 RageQuit vs Classic. Captured by Moonlite, lvl 40 marksman (loli). Background music is “As The Rush Comes (Armin Van Buuren’s Universal Religion Mix)”, remixed by Armin Van Buuren, original by Motorcycle RageQuit Inc: http://rqclan.com Forsaken World Forums: http://fw-forum.perfectworld.com/showthread.php?t=74791

Just another update in case you were curious. Winter break! That means free time to work on Beats. I’ve responded to the flood of emails that you’ve all been sending me as well the handful of questions posted on the forums. Beats 1.4b progress is nicely coming along, but expect it to be a big one since much of the internal code structure is being revamped (that mess that we cranked out during those 48hrs of PennApps is finally being cleaned up). At the least, the next version should run a lot smoother, be less buggy, and a with a …

(Direct download) Forsaken World North America (Closed Beta 2) PvP/Guild Wars – Rake of Fury. 2010-11-26 RageQuit vs XIII, 2010-11-26 RageQuit vs Primal Instincts, and 2010-11-27 RageQuit vs Primal Instincts. Captured by Moonlite, lvl 3x marksman (loli). Background music is taken from Armin van Buuren’s A State of Trance Episode #483 The focus of this video is the marksmen’s AoE skill “Rake of Fury”. As pointed out in the end of the video, AoEs played a large part in mass PvP. If you’re a marksmen, I advise you to go down the fire tree for Rake of Fury which has …

(Direct download) Forsaken World North America (Closed Beta 1) 2010-11-12 PvP – The Zerg Effect. RageQuit and Condottieri from Godlike Alliance vs Immortals, PIGuild, Aurora, and a few others. Captured by Moonlite, lvl 30 marksman (loli). Background music is Black Lagoon’s TV OP “Red fraction” by MELL, followed by “Falling Down (The Prodigy Version)” by Oasis. First half was recorded at “half-size” but second part I remembered to switch my FRAPS settings back to “full size”. The focus of this video was really the zerg effect, in which case our opponents strongly outnumbered us in all instances but we still …

(Direct download) Forsaken World North America (Closed Beta 1) 2010-11-12 Testing Open PvP. Captured by Noblesse, lvl 30 human lightning mage. Background music is “Hands / GARNiDELiA*” by toku, vocals by MARiA, from the music circle Headphone-Tokyo. Not really 720p quality capture since I didn’t have my external hard drive ready so I only FRAPS’d at half size. FW-NA CB1 just raised the lvl cap to 30 so it was a first-time open PvP experience for many of us. Still getting use to the targetting system as well as the non-rotating mini-map (I wish they used dots like PW instead …

The new website and forums are now finally up! Aside from a bunch more info copy-pasting, you’ll be noticing some graphical improvements over the next few days as we have a small but talented graphics/web team helping out here on UPenn’s campus. Beats 1.4b’s progress is progressing smoothly as you can see via the latest Changelog and the To-Do List. As of the moment, on-the-go song installation is pretty much ready to go, a few nice graphical upgrades have been made, and the scoring system has (started to) become stabilized in preparation for Scoreloop integration (e.g. future scoreboards, achievements, etc.). …

An update based on some user suggestions. And before you ask, no .dwi support isn’t here yet, but its being worked on and definitely will appear soon. And no reverse play, leaders board, or any of those other major things on my To-Do list. Good news though is I figured out what was causing all those crashes with certain .sm files and have put up a preliminary warning about them. When .dwi support is added, the .sm parser will also be rewritten, so hopefully Beats will be able to support 90%+ of those StepMania/Dance With Intensity stepfiles out there! I’ve …

A quick update with a few changes that’ll hopefully fix a lot of crashes and make your gameplay experience a lot better ; 3 Going through the crash reports, I quickly realized that there were a lot of bugs that involved simple fixes, or, in the case of .sm file parsing, simple error catches. I admit, the current .sm compatibility of Beats isn’t so great. After all, I wrote the parser (alongside the rest of the alpha build of the app) in under 48hrs (sleep, or rather lack thereof, included), so things are very, VERY buggy. I will be completely …