secrets

Hitbox wiki update

http://code.google.com/p/mame-rr/wiki/Hitboxes

• Added a demo pic to the Common box types section.
• Added a MAME-rr vs. FBA-rr discussion.
• Now that the background removal codes have been added to the mamecheat pack by Pugsy, the instructions have been simplified.
• The links to MAWS have been replaced by those to Progetto EMMA, which is like MAWS but in Italian, and overseen by people who keep their webspace intact.
• Finally added a proper section for the CPS3 script.
  • The discussion on breakpoints has been moved there since it's the only script that uses them now. Hopefully SH-2 games will get Lua BPs and it can be removed entirely.
  • Needs screenshots for NG and 2I. And then there's the Jojo games...

Hitbox script updates

http://code.google.com/p/mame-rr/source/detail?r=161

It's been so long I almost forgot what I set out to do:

• Get garou-hitboxes.lua to use FBA-rr 0.0.7's new emu.registerexec and emu.registerwrite Lua functions for breakpoints. I also used bps to remove the dodgy pseudo-disassembly for vulnerability checks and to avoid messing with the memory banking to get box data. This meant I had to go back through that maze.
• Re-fix the other scripts to draw breakpoint-triggered boxes on the correct frames. It's important not to set FBA's audio to mute or the frame sync will be off.

WarZard/Red Earth hitboxes

Added Warzard, or Red Earth as it was called in its limited distribution outside Japan, to the CPS3 script. The object handling and hitbox system has almost nothing in common with the Street Fighter III series, and I had to work from scratch to get it out.

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.

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?

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.

---

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?

Marvel hitboxes updated

The Marvel script has been brought up to the same level of rigor as the other CPS-2 games.

In particular, if you put in the breakpoints provided, throwboxes will appear on the correct frames, and pushboxes don't flicker or fail to disappear on inactive frames. It also compensates for laggy stages (Onslaught, Apocalypse, Manhattan, and MSH Blackheart) and replaces hacky validity checks with the real deal. Since everything was basically working before, there's not much new to show, but it's a better tool now.

Only problem I noticed is in COTA, some chars show the throwbox for any normal attack, even if no directions are held or if it's a non-throw button. I guess the range is checked before the inputs in that game.

If you don't want to deal with BPs or want throwboxes to appear all the time like they used to, increase the fill and outline values of the "potential throw" boxtype at the top of the script. One of the changes to all the scripts has been to make it more clear what the user is and isn't supposed to edit. Another has been to make hotkey confirmations appear on the game screen instead of the Lua console.

Also, the index page on the MAME-rr wiki has been updated to reflect the recent upgrades. Some of the SF2 and CPS-2 screenshots have been improved.

And in related news, I got tired of waiting for Pugsy to update the mamecheat pack and reassembled all the BG removal codes, this time in a spreadsheet form.

CPS2 throwboxes

The CPS2 hitbox script can now show throwboxes for all its supported games with the help of breakpoints. Throwability boxes have also been added, which as usual are enabled with hotkey 5.

The third user-relevant change is that the validity checks that determine when to not draw the boxes have been made more accurate for all the box types. So for example, the blue boxes in vsav will disappear exactly when the opponent can no longer be juggled, and white boxes won't reappear until exactly the frame when the opponent can be thrown again.

This was achieved by studying trace after trace of asm dumps, sometimes using breakpoints or watchpoints to manipulate branch results, rather than my old guess & check methods. In some cases the solution dropped in easily, but some required swathes of new code to handle correctly. Once again I found that newer games are more systematic, while older games do everything the hard way.

BPs are applied in the same manner as described in the random SF2 damage post. That means most throws can only show up in MAME-rr with the debugger active. However, you can continue to use the new version normally in FBA-rr or without the debugger and still get all the rest of the functionality.

The actual breakpoint command to put in is printed in the Lua console when the game starts. Just copy it in and hit enter. To make it less tedious for the user, it's set up so that all BPs are merged into a single line. The BP addresses vary between different romsets (parents and clones), but the script is set to automatically adjust to whatever version you are running. Occasionally the game may glitch up as the BPs are entered, but this only happens once. Reset or load a savestate to proceed.

Be sure to enter bpc or bpclear before quitting or running a new game or MAME-rr will crash. If you want to run MAME with the debugger without having to launch from a command prompt window every time, you can create a batch file with the launch command in it and then just double click the .bat file.

Since these breakpoints work by scrawling some data into RAM where Lua can read it, it's possible they can interfere with the normal operation of the game if that RAM space is used for something else. It's difficult to confirm for certain there's no interference going on. (Ideally BPs would pass the info directly to the script. And ideally the user wouldn't have to deal with any of this.)

As was done with SF2, throws are inserted one frame ahead in the framebuffer so that they'll be drawn on the exact frame(s) they are attempted and not one frame too late. If the boxes aren't showing up at all, sometimes ground throws don't get attempted unless the opponent is on the ground, and likewise for air.

Below I'll discuss some findings for each game.

Frame data collector revised

The frame data collector script from a year ago has been greatly improved.

Like before, it works by watching when player 1 attacks player 2 and printing the relevant data to the console when everyone recovers. The same caveats apply: Avoid kara-ing or connecting meaty to get accurate startups, and knockdowns are not marked as such and usually result in large apparent frame advantage. Lua hotkey 1 inserts a blank line and hotkey 2 makes it ignore normal attacks, in order to better isolate button-code supers like Akuma's SGS.

The script can now be found in the MAME-rr Lua repository. (Eventually it should get a documentation wiki page.) Here's what's changed:

• savestates are not used at all, so it's less disruptive and not prone to crashing
• impact freeze is counted separately from hitstun
  • a "*" means P1 didn't get any hitfreeze and it was probably a projectile or throw
• if superfreeze is present, startup is subdivided into prefreeze, (freeze), and postfreeze
• startup is now considered to exclude the first active frame
• the heuristics are now built on functions instead of limited a =? b checks, so it's more versatile and easily extensible
• for the SF2 series, frameskip and projectile impact slowdown are automatically disabled