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Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

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Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#21

Post by RomanAlexander »

jncfhnb wrote: post #12
cultureswitch wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all. Deliberately missing out getting blocked to make the opponent think they have an opening is not a particularly high level play in other games. It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes t…

Pulling off moves is very easy. Pulling off specific sequences of moves is not.

That's not true. Geese Howard's pretzel move is very difficult on its own. Even high level players mess up EWGFs. Complicate all this even further by playing in an arcade with a square gate. And not to mention the extreme moves like pentagram input from arcana hearts 3.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#22

Post by SliceOfWaifu »

jncfhnb wrote: post #17

Tekken feels particularly bad to play if you don’t know what you’re doing imo. It’s the least approachable. Unexpected shoutout to Thems Fighting Herds, the mlp fan spinoff turned OC quadruped fighting game. Regardless of your care for the aesthetics, the single player story was extremely good imo. Enemies were NOT just random CPUs but unique characters with formulaic strategies. Wolf that just does crouching attacks…

Compared to other 3D fighters like SoulCalibur, Dead or Alive, Bloody Roar, etc, Tekken is completely unintuitive for a casual button masher. Tekken, like Virtua Fighter, requires you to sit down in Training Mode for hours just to learn a single character's basic moveset, BnBs, and gameplan. Compare this to 2D fighting games, where all you gotta do is learn the basic Street Fighter 2 movelist, and you can quickly figure out how a character plays by taking one glance at their movelist. The funny thing about this is that Tekken hardly has any motion inputs, which is what most casual players are intimidated by when picking up fighting games.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#23

Post by ZephyrBlu »

jncfhnb wrote: post #13
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.

Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts. Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.

This makes no sense. For one, a large component of real-time games is mechanics and execution. Also, the idea of being able to mindlessly "flowchart" a real-time game at a competitive level is absurd. It assumes a non-interactive opponent. If it was true there would be no such thing as yomi.

There are also a lot of other fundamental differences around resource management, opponent interaction, etc. They are only similar on the most basic level.

What level have you played card games and fighting games or another real-time game at?

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#24

Post by orbital-decay »

jncfhnb wrote: post #13
ZephyrBlu wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I had never thought of it as something closer to a fast-paced Magic, the Gathering Very confused how you got that impression from this article. The cards are a just a way to visualize information. Fighting games don't play like a fast-paced card game, they are fundamentally different.

Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts. Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.

>once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts

This can be applied to any high-skill competition, basically - from FPS to F-1.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#25

Post by SliceOfWaifu »

ranting-moth wrote: post #6

Back in the day me and my buddy spent ages playing Mortal Combat on a PC. I decided to learn all the combos (crazy fast keyboard patterns). The combos gave you disproportional damage wielding power. I spent hours and hours practicing it when we were playing. My buddy won pretty much every single game, while laughing at my combo attempts. Then I mastered it one day. I won every single game. Buddy said this combo shit…

The problem with playing competitive games casually is that the moment one player actually bothers to learn anything about the game, it immediately ruins the experience for the other player if they're unwilling to do the same.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#26

Post by starburst »

grog454 wrote: post #19
coldpie wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you want to give it a try, Street Fighter 6 is really, really good. Aside from just being an amazingly well thought-out fighting game[1], it's also got a big player base so you'll have plenty of other noobs to play with in the ranked matchmaking mode, and the networking code is perfect[2] so you can just hop on and start having fun. If you do decide to jump in, just remember that you will be terrible at the start.…

The second article mentions delay based and rollback both of which seem to be appropriate for peer to peer graphs, but there is a third option: server authority. I created a game with mechanics very roughly analogous to fighting games (nebulous.io) where there is no client side prediction, no rollback, and a 20hz update loop. Clients just render what the server reports (with some smoothing). I never get complaints ab…

I suggest you read again about rollback input based deterministic simulation, it is the superior option by far, especially for competitive, you have in practice “no lag”.

That you never got any complaints doesn’t means your solution doesn’t have plenty of issues, also 20hz is pretty low.

There is a reason why no multiplayer fighting will even be considered competitive if they don’t use rollback netcode in this day and age.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#27

Post by chupasaurus »

cultureswitch wrote: post #9
BaculumMeumEst wrote: post #3

One thing that's very tricky about these kind of simplified visual explanations of fighting game mechanics is that you don't capture all the strategic implications of move properties. The visualizations make simple scenarios clear, for example if you block a sweep point blank (or whatever a highly punishable tekken equivalent would be, a snake edge or a hellsweep or whatever), then you are at advantage and can land a…

I think I follow the gist of what you're talking about and it doesn't sound all that advanced at all. Deliberately missing out getting blocked to make the opponent think they have an opening is not a particularly high level play in other games. It still baffles me that traditional 2D fighting games and Tekken in particular are so complex and that it is so hard to even pull off a specific move due to control schemes t…

Tekken never was a 2D fighting game. M&B doesn't have more than 5 moves with any weapon IIRC.

Re: Visualizing fighting game mechanics (2020)

#30

Post by jncfhnb »

ZephyrBlu wrote: post #23
jncfhnb wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hmm no they kind of do. The basic insight with most fighting games is that once you are competent you know everything that opponent can do and the list of viable options is discrete and small with fairly standard flowcharts. Tekken is a bit more nebulous than this.

This makes no sense. For one, a large component of real-time games is mechanics and execution. Also, the idea of being able to mindlessly "flowchart" a real-time game at a competitive level is absurd. It assumes a non-interactive opponent. If it was true there would be no such thing as yomi. There are also a lot of other fundamental differences around resource management, opponent interaction, etc. They are only simi…

Oh please. You can absolutely flow chart fighting games. That is in fact the entire concept behind combos- sequences of moves that your opponent can’t do anything during outside of more modern combo breaker mechanics.

Yeah there’s niche dynamic considerations for making these combos work for slightly different distances and weights and heights and power meters and whatever. But for 99% of the player base you’re going to be best off learning a few bread and butter ideas and then executing on them without much variation.

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