secrets

Improved 3rd Strike hitboxes

I worked over the 3S hitbox script of c_cube, which had in turn been modified from the script mz made from LennethEX's custom MAME build. It's completely functional now. Get it from the SVN repo.

Here are the noticeable changes:

• Now showing pushboxes.
• Now showing throw and throwability boxes.
• Now showing the center axis of individual boxes.
• The usual hotkey functions are working.
• The usual customization settings are at the top.
• The vulnerability boxes that come out when the character is extending a limb during an attack are now the same blue as the regular vulnboxes, since the user has no reason to distinguish them. (Unless hitting them gives a counterhit bonus or something?) You can make the colors different if desired by editing the "ext. vulnerability" value.
• Removed all the debug stuff, such as infinite super and the membrowser drawn on screen.

It works great with mz's test build of FBA-rr 0.0.6. And, FBA comes with built-in background removal in Video > Graphics layers. By the way, you can put multiple versions of FBA in the same folder as long as the EXEs have different names. They'll use different INIs but share everything else.

ComboVid.com DAMAGE exhibition v.two

There were a lot of clips left over from v.one. They along with new content were assembled into v.two, edited by Keiko, and premiered at the Season's Beatings tourney in Colombus, Ohio.

Here are the usual overdetailed explanations of my (tool-assisted) contributions.

See also: http://combovid.com/?p=6171

Street Fighter III OSD

Added the trio of SF3 games to the OSD script. Usage with FBA-rr is recommended due to MAME's terrible CPS3 performance.

Besides the usual life, super, and stun values, you can see stun recovery rate (the gray number) and the taunt bonuses to damage, stun and defense. (These figures don't give quite the whole story on damage: character-specific, combo-count, and lifebar scaling get factored in as well at some point.) It's easy to get confused on how the bonuses are applied when the PA itself hits the opponent or when they wear off, but now you can see for yourself. There were no PAs in New Generation so not much I could work with there.

fighting-OSD.lua

This is an update for dizzy-meters.lua, which it replaces in the MAME-rr SVN repo. A full description of supported games and functions can be found on the new wiki page. That page still needs some screenshots.

Besides the name change, this one is easier to read and edit. The old file was one of the worst coded scripts I've ever written: I was experimenting with keeping the usage of if to an absolute minimum, which led to some strange arrays of functions. Plus it was too rigidly geared towards drawing specific elements, whereas the new script is more versatile. Part of the motivation behind this was just to replace that ugly thing.

I still haven't gotten around to adding some SF3 stuff.

I'd like it if people could verify the omissions; e.g., are there really no dizzies in kof2001 & kof2002? And aren't there escapable combos in the Marvel games?

October 2011

In September I mapped out the Genesis game Sub-Terrania, which took longer than expected thanks to difficult backgrounds and camera control. The rest of the month's research went toward overhauling the old dizzy meters script. I'm adding more games and functionality but it's not finished.

I plan on wrapping that up first. Then I'm thinking of either hitboxing a couple more games or making some long-needed improvements to TranScripter.

Sub-Terrania maps

I've finished up screenshot maps for the Genesis game Sub-Terrania:

view at encyclovore

I got into this from correspondence with the illustrious speedrunner Mike Uyama, who is practicing for a speedrun/speedrun marathon of this game along with Revenge of Shinobi.

Sub-Terrania, released in 1993 by Euro-American developer Zyrinx, is sort of a 2D flight sim in close quarters. It's divided into nine or ten missions with objectives ranging from rescuing miners to boss-killing to simply reaching an exit. If it sounds like 1994's much more famous Descent, there's one problem: Sub-Terrania is a miserable game, thanks to poor controls and generally hateful design. This kind of thing could work with a flight stick and throttle, or a mouse and keyboard, but fails pretty hard with the Megadrive's primitive gamepad.

Much of the player's effort is spent just worrying about fuel and fighting gravity, which is even worse while towing something and gets stronger on mission 7. The actual enemies are relatively impotent compared to the biggest threat: walls. While walls can easily bump the ship off course and damage the shields, just grazing at the wrong angle can unexpectedly trap and kill you. The game is just "so good". It also doesn't help that you can only see less than a screen's distance in front of you.

Sub-Terrania was about as much fun to map as it is to play. The camera is difficult to manipulate directly and is constantly trying to move, even if you place the ship in the middle of the camera's view. If the ship is placed in the edge of a wall the camera freaks out even more, and the ship quickly dies—even before the shield can be drained. I was planning on placing all enemies at their initial positions and orientations after the stage loads, but they don't all get drawn on the same frame, and apparently have some time to react to the player's position before they get drawn, so that idea didn't work out. I used this Lua script (local copy) to help control the camera but in the end it was only marginally useful.

Todo as of September 1

The only thing accomplished in August was adding hitboxes for Real Bout Special, RB2 and MotW, and getting throwboxes out for the Garou Densetsu and early King of Fighters series. It's not much compared to the prior body of work, but it proved to really taxing because of the need to dig every little thing out of the innards of the code using asm traces. (However, anyone considering getting into this kind of work shouldn't be too put off: hitbox systems are generally more sanely designed in later games.)

The scripts are now about as good as they can get, at least given the precarious state of MAME-rr and FBA-rr. With this done, I feel I can leave behind the hitboxes to work on other things. I'm leaving next month open-ended, but there's a Lua project with 3rd Strike and a cartography project I want to try.

KoF '94-'95 throwboxes

Though '96–2002 were already covered, the first two games don't write throws to RAM and needed breakpoints to bring them out. The throwability checks are also improved for the whole series. (disassembly / local copy) Nothing revolutionary here, but this is now done.

Some differences from the later games:

• Special and DM throws grab the opponent's axis, and the range of some of those depend on the opponent.
• Ground throwability boxes have no defined height.
• Air throwability height varies widely between characters. Width can change between grounded and air state.
• Air throws have no height: turning the character axis off and the box axis on can make them easier to see.

I've also brought the wiki page up to date and made all the scripts conform to my current, hopefully more readable than ever coding style. These things shouldn't make any difference to the user, but it closes up the last of my unfinished business with these scripts.

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Was "Super Arabian Burglary Backbreaker" coined by KoF? It sounds like a typical name for a pro wrestling move but I haven't seen it anywhere else.

Also, has anyone noticed SNK puts the surnames of the Chinese and Korean fighters first, but does the Japanese names Western style?

garou-hitboxes.lua

Finally, work is more or less complete on the Fatal Fury series hitboxes, now including RBS, RB2 and MotW. Due to the significant differences from the KoF series, the script has been split into a new file. Some of the relevant disassembly can be found here (local copy). As usual, this script works with both parents and clones.

evo 2k11 stuff

Another evo has gone by, with another round of Combovid-associated videos.

This year the big collaboration was ComboVid.com DAMAGE exhibition v.one, with editing by Snoooootch. The idea was big damage over style. Problem with that is, it tends to not be stylish... Anyway, I had a few clips in this, all scripted with macrolua.