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| karasu99
89th Post
 
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|  "Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Thu 5 Mar 08:39
While playing around with some older NeoGeo games lately on the PS2 (specifically Art of Fighting 1 and 2) I was struck by the vast gulf in control precision present in these older games, versus newer titles like the King of Fighters. It started me thinking about what is responsible for the difference-- and it's not something only just noticed; anyone who has played the first Fatal Fury knows how hard it is to consistently perform special moves. Granted, part of the problem might have been the arcade joysticks and the rough treatment they received, but playing through these games on the PS2 makes it clear that the games have stiffer control response, even with a nicely maintained Hori joystick like I'm using.
So this leads me to believe that it's an issue of how the control is implemented in the game-- perhaps making the detection of player input more forgiving in newer titles? Clearly SNK had figured the control scheme out by... let's say KOF94, where fairly complex moves can be performed pretty easily. What I'm interested in is what those adjustments were, although it may even stretch the otherwise broad bounds of the esoteric here on this board.
Does anyone else here share my obscure interest? I'm sure someone somewhere has reverse-engineered some of SNK's fighting game code, given the amount of sprite-ripping, emulation, and decompiling that goes on in the world, but a cursory Google search doesn't turn up much in English, so I thought perhaps someone knew a little more of the details form the Japanese-language world. For that matter, does anyone know what SNK used to code games on the NeoGeo?
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| Toxico 4710th Post
Platinum Carpet V.I.P- Board Master
    
     
     
     
  
|  "Re(1):Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Thu 5 Mar 09:55
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anyone who has played the first Fatal Fury knows how hard it is to consistently perform special moves.
Atemi > out door sex.
I see you haven't tried to get hadokens and shoeyukens on SF1. It needs extreme accuracy.
quote:
So this leads me to believe that it's an issue of how the control is implemented in the game-- perhaps making the detection of player input more forgiving in newer titles? Clearly SNK had figured the control scheme out by... let's say KOF94
I always used to try to get the most accurated secuences for the moves (me is southpaw  ), so I remember that in 94', when people did    on '94 to get Benimaru's super, I couldn't get it constantly... However, when I realized through magazines that the actual move secuence was   I could get it every time, even with faster than the people that did the other secuence.
I have never, in my life, performed shoryukens as  , only on certain crappy snes games, where that secuence is the "correct" one, and doesn't exist (like the TMNT tournament fighters).
Well, while not exactly on topic, but I remember that by the time that real bout 2 came out there it was a huge uproar due to fucking up almost every DM move secuence to a stupid universal method. I remember reading on this very same boards, long before Iggy was born (well, technically it was other, in other server, but you understand me by now). That said change was at the request of some arcade operators that reported 'miss use' from the players to the arcade sticks. Dunno how truthful is that. I do think that in that year (98) was pretty much the... begginging of "hard" to do move secuences. KoF had easy inputs for a while, but most of the other sagas that had hard to do moves, started to.... well.... banish into thin air.
I don't know what kind of encoding was used for the mvs, but I bet people like chazmaru or rugal have the info right under their pillows.
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| karasu99
91th Post
Occasional Customer
|  "Re(2):Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Thu 5 Mar 11:00
hikarutilmitt, Mortal Kombat was for me much harder to perform the moves than Street Fighter/KOF. I think there are those who feel just the opposite, that it's SF/KOF that is imprecise feeling. Honestly though, SNES era ports were awful, control wise, across the board.
quote:
Atemi > out door sex.
I see you haven't tried to get hadokens and shoeyukens on SF1. It needs extreme accuracy.
That's for sure. SF1 is a much better example, actually, since it was SO early. FF1 is easy in comparison.
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I have never, in my life, performed shoryukens as , only on certain crappy snes games, where that secuence is the "correct" one, and doesn't exist (like the TMNT tournament fighters).
Well, this touches on the fact that (like with Zangief's Spinning Piledriver) only a certain number of the key positions need to be met in sequence. I had a similar realization after years of only being able to do the piledriver with a 360 motion, before reading about the 'shortened' version. As for the Shouryuken, I had much more success with myself-- maybe that's why I'm a relatively poor player compared to some, as I blindly slam at the control.
I'm not sure exactly when this came about. It almost seems (and here I'll pick on AOF1 again) that a slower (or faster?) input speed is needed relative to the speed of the game itself, rather than a more complex or complete number of key positions being input.
quote:
Well, while not exactly on topic, but I remember that by the time that real bout 2 came out there it was a huge uproar due to fucking up almost every DM move secuence to a stupid universal method. I remember reading on this very same boards, long before Iggy was born (well, technically it was other, in other server, but you understand me by now). That said change was at the request of some arcade operators that reported 'miss use' from the players to the arcade sticks. Dunno how truthful is that. I do think that in that year (98) was pretty much the... begginging of "hard" to do move secuences. KoF had easy inputs for a while, but most of the other sagas that had hard to do moves, started to.... well.... banish into thin air.
I recall hearing the same thing, and it was unfortunate because it's part of what kept Real Bout 2 from being the very best game play of the RB sub-series. I wonder of it had to do with increasing complexity and complaints in that regard, especially at a time like that when arcades still had a little life remaining.
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I don't know what kind of encoding was used for the mvs, but I bet people like chazmaru or rugal have the info right under their pillows.
I thought there might be some individuals here who would know much more than I ever wanted to know on the subject, so I'm glad a few want to discuss it. Hopefully one of those named will arrive with the information before too long. I'm also hoping that one of those powerful people can also direct me to code examples, but I might have to bargain away my soul for that level of detail. At least then I would be able to know for sure what the answer to my question is.
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| CharlesProphony
53th Post
Occasional Customer
| "Re(2):Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Thu 5 Mar 14:19:
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I see you haven't tried to get hadokens and shoeyukens on SF1. It needs extreme accuracy.
Sometime ago I've been messing up with mame and some ooold fighting games... And I was surprised about the possibility of how the matter of difficulty is controlled on the game...
On default, just trying a hadouken takes you to a button mashing odyssey, but after losing the "n"th time to sagat, I just looked at the dipswitch config(yeah, no service menus at the time) and configured it to easy... From 7 tries mashing buttons, it started to miraculously spit fireballs almost like SF2. Make the command, ball flying, hit enemy, 35%dmg or something like that. And about dragon punches? Yeah, I think I know where snk got the idea for cheap bosses...
And Sagat became a piece of cake... Well, at least if he hasn't started with tiger rain and you end up dead with just 2 hits...
Ex-Prophony
[this message was edited by CharlesProphony on Thu 5 Mar 14:20] |
| karasu99
92th Post
Occasional Customer
|  "Re(3):Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Fri 6 Mar 01:28
quote:
I just looked at the dipswitch config(yeah, no service menus at the time) and configured it to easy... From 7 tries mashing buttons, it started to miraculously spit fireballs almost like SF2. Make the command, ball flying, hit enemy, 35%dmg or something like that. And about dragon punches? Yeah, I think I know where snk got the idea for cheap bosses...
I had never noticed that, but maybe it's because I've been playing SF1 on the PS2 port. This points to SF1 having 'simplified' inputs accessible just like later games. AND it tends to make me think (along with Toxico-sama's suggestion of pre-2000 KOFs as having less forgiving controls) that this whole thing is by design, not by a trial and error process of over the years realizing what works and what doesn't in terms of how input is handled. Or probably a combination of both, since I'm guessing controls got easier in 2000 in response to player/operator/marketing complaints or comments.
That definition of SNK Boss Syndrome is different from what I had always assumed-- that it was a matter of the bosses and their outrageous movesets/priority/unforgiving AI rather than one of player control interfering with beating them, but it makes sense.
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| Spoon 1737th Post
Tailored Carpet V.I.P- Platinum Member
| "Re(4):Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Fri 6 Mar 06:42
It's a well-known issue that in ST, not only is the window for special move input very tight, but it is somewhat random. They made the window larger and removed the randomness in HD Remix.
The thing is, the size of the window for doing special moves never shrinks to zero, so as long as you do it right and do it really fast, you will still get it all the time. If you do it a bit slower, you might find yourself blowing a tire at the precisely wrong moment, though. Maybe Capcom was thinking about something akin to "tripping" in Brawl, what with random failures tipping the scales of a fight, or at least injecting a burst of tension into it. Unfortunately, since a sufficiently practiced/skillful player will almost never have this problem, it becomes more a nuisance than anything else.
There are certainly tons of ways to implement a command parser. I remember when I first learned about regular expressions, I wondered "what would be the cost to run a bunch of these every 1/60th of a second...".
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| Maou 1608th Post
Red Carpet V.I.P- Platinum Member
| "Re(5):Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Sat 7 Mar 13:43
Great thread! For my part, I've always wondered to myself what makes some inputs seem harder when they should be equal...conveniently for me and my rival/teacher in all things Street Fighter, he's always preferred playing on the right, while I prefer the 1P position. To this day, I find it infinitely easier to do a Shouryuuken from the left than the right, even though quarter circles are no problem from either direction.
Possibly of interest is that as a Zero series fan, I found Third Strike much more difficult to input commands. I don't know if this is a tougher engine (what with the precision of the counter system), the PS2 port (I doubt it, it seems great), or what, but I find that the inputs are immeasurably more picky on this game than on say Zero 3, a cousin from around the same time.
人間はいつも私を驚かせてくれる。不思議なものだな、人間という存在は．．．
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| Mozex 358th Post
Silver Customer
| "Re(6):Fighting game code: old vs new" , posted Sun 8 Mar 00:50
quote:
Great thread! For my part, I've always wondered to myself what makes some inputs seem harder when they should be equal...conveniently for me and my rival/teacher in all things Street Fighter, he's always preferred playing on the right, while I prefer the 1P position. To this day, I find it infinitely easier to do a Shouryuuken from the left than the right, even though quarter circles are no problem from either direction.
Possibly of interest is that as a Zero series fan, I found Third Strike much more difficult to input commands. I don't know if this is a tougher engine (what with the precision of the counter system), the PS2 port (I doubt it, it seems great), or what, but I find that the inputs are immeasurably more picky on this game than on say Zero 3, a cousin from around the same time.
I'm the same way with the left/right thing, and it only gets worse when on a d-pad compared to a joystick.
I've not noticed any difficulty in doing motions on the arcade/ps2 versions of 3rd strike.
Be kind to goblins.
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