Quick Questions XIII: Answers Return

I’m just going to recommend Fight Night Champion again here

it finally started working in RPCS3 too!

Is it just me or is it really hard to see if you score a hit in that game?

the person playing it in the video isn’t very good but it’s still more ambiguous than the average fighting game yeah

Everyone needs some priority system for attacks; the simplest is just ‘whatever hits the hurtbox interrupts’ but if you start to think, maybe heavy attacks shouldn’t be interrupted by footsies, you’ve already started establishing a system of attack priorities.

Souls complicates this in two ways. One, because characters are distinguished by levels, they need to systematize it so that heavy weapon attacks from low-level characters don’t have as much recoil impact as that from a high-level character. Two, and this is the really strange design decision, they expose the stat to the player and don’t explain. So they’ve got this really complicated interaction and no help and internet lore is born.

God of War (2018) has a pared-down version of this; characters have both a recoil impact and recoil resistance stat, it’s affected by level and attack, and very importantly, it’s not broadcasted to the player, and its effects are crystal-clear, telegraphed by the unparryable/unblockable color rings and the flinch response of enemies.

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Fairly certain this is part of the allure.

I’m not exactly sure I understand why not knowing the values is better than knowing values but not knowing how they work?

Obviously this is me reworking part of Moon Fields, so if you’d indulge me:

Regarding getting hit, The Moon Fields has 2 states. There’s normal and armored. If you get hit while you’re in a normal state, you get stunned. If you get hit while you’re in an armored state, you don’t. You still take damage both ways. Generally the “armored state” is when you’ve already put all your energy into a heavy weapon and it’s already moving based off sheer momentum e.g. your mega hammer is falling. This was always per weapon and even per attack. I’d have a blue burst appear when this was activated during an attack to show that “something big happened”. Outside of the particularity of the blue burst, I think this is pretty run of the mill FG stuff.

At one point I introduced a kind of armored running. I called it “barreling” which was essentially gaining armor while running at max speed, but because you’re losing speed inbetween mashes you can’t maintain armor the whole time. So if you’re rushing down you’re trying to mash right before that arrow hits you so you can tank the hit and get in their face. If you did get clipped you had a half second where you couldn’t dash, but that was fine because you’d still be like a native Pinoy running through colonists’ bullets.

Anyways, this got me thinking of varying levels of armor. I really like the concept of barreling at full speed, but I also thought it’d be cool if other states could be rewarded in terms of being hit. A list of (too many) possible states and possible effects

-“Armored” - takes damage, zero stun
-Running At Full Speed - takes damage, zero stun, stops running for an amount of time

-Standing Still- takes damage, reduce stun by %, and reduce stun by an amount of time
-Walking - takes damage, reduce stun by %
-Starting To Run, Attacking, Airborne - takes damage, full stun

The goal is to reward safer, slower movements like Standing Still or Walking. More active actions like running, attacking, and being in the air seem like you’d be more off balance so you could get stunned for the full amount of time. I initially stacked the list as 5 different states, but I think it’s more manageable as 2 different lists. I do worry that it’s too much, and maybe I could just combine Standing Still/Walking.

Anyways, wow, those are my thoughts. I kinda wish this was in The Moon Fields thread. IDK how to post/crosspost/etc but yeah that’s that.

Street Fighter IV had a lot of armor and types/tiers of armor and some of the mechanics are fairly functionally similar to Poise

I think that’s all fine; the experience of fighting games is that you can have that complexity and if it jibes with expectations of how ‘heavy’ the attacks look it’s ok for casual players and the hardcore can categorize it.

Watch yourself for consistency so you’re not sending mixed messages about weight and power, as that’s what will trip up players.

The weird bit is putting it as a player-facing stat, inviting players who aren’t ready to think about that complexity to do so, and then the added transformation of the the stat affected attacks’ base values.

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The concept of “armor” appears in most every fighting game to some extent I think, although it’s not always presented visually as such.

Invincible moves like shoryukens have a kind of armor at the cost of being very punishable;

high crush/low crush moves in Tekken will beat moves of a particular height and visually present it as your character maybe hopping in the air over a low attack or ducking down under a high attack;

in Virtua Fighter when two attacks collide the more damaging move will “armor” through the weaker move to provide an advantage to using those slower moves, and any attack can “armor” through throws;

and of course super moves and super modes often provide Super Armor to make them powerful counterattack options (like Street Fighter 4’s focus attacks).

Its all about trying to provide a reason to use a particular move despite its faults and or to dissuade an opponent from using particular options that could be overpowering. So I don’t think it would be weird for such concepts to exist in your game. I guess the hard part is making it feel logical for why a particular move has a particular kind of armor, due to its use and its visual animations.

Did you install scps3? That rewrites your bluetooth drivers.

Alternately there is a setting deep deep deep in security that can disable microphone, webcam, bluetooth and no where else will acknowledge it.

Does anyone have a link to the blog that (at least used to) do the year in review for MAME? Mame has grown and grown and now with just in the folder from Poster X of this very website I have 9000 zip files it is impossible to figure out what is going on with mame outside of watching that one Russian guy that releases a showcase of everything newly playable with each update. The last (japanese) PCB was 5 years ago. The casual 7/10 year rule now covers the history of Arcades.

Like it seems like for MAME proper Model 2/3, Naomi, Type-X emulation is still awful and well I guess I am asking because the one model 3 emulator causes my laptop to hardlock and messing around with Star Wars Arcade sounds great.

Point is google/bing is corrupted and you cannot find “year in review mame blog”.

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use model 2 emulator for model 2 emulation and demul for naomi/atomiswave/some other dc-based hardwares.

demul sucks in many ways, but it’s the best we’ve got. supermodel’s the only thing for model 3, too, unfortunately.

type x games are just pc games, but i’m sure there was a launcher to make stuff like control configuration possible

Naomi/atomiswave work in retroarch now so that’s nice. Better than dealing with demul.

i haven’t played an Etrian Odyssey since 3 and im ready to make a party of cool anime’s and go draw a dungeon. Does anyone have strong opinions in favor of 4, 5, or Nexus (the MonHun Generations-esque crossover fan smorgasbord)?

i played demos of 4 and 5 — 4 seemed more trad, while 5 had some weird classes and a race system that seemed like it could be interesting. (and then Nexus looks fun but “old classes return!” obviously = “check out our upscaled reused assets!”)

Also, though i miss the FM Towns style Koshiro music, the compositions remain really gorgeous and smooth


like holy shit i could listen to this all day

edit: i answered this myself once i realized that in Etrian Odyssey 5, 1) you can pick voice clips for each character and they aren’t matched by gender (i.e. you can choose a male voice sample for a character that has a female portrait) 2) a good number of the portraits can be read as androgynous (the Masurao portraits are especially good in this regard, also this is sadly the only way to redeem the otherwise cool Necromancer class) and 3) one of the lady Dragoon portraits is an ultra-powerful stone cold betty with an eyepatch and i can’t not have her be the main character of my personal video game

Also the tabletop-esque floor events in Etrian Odyssey 5: V reward you with some EXP afterward, and that automatically makes it the best one in the series.

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I know this is all abstract and nonsense to me but can y’all explain what exactly opengl/vulkan/direct3d are and am I better off not knowing the difference? Knowing the difference? Trying random settings with random things until one of them works??

I’ve always understood APIs like opengl etc. as being like a layer between a software developer and the actual machine code the computer “understands” so instead of having to write programs in BASIC or whatever they can just go through something like opengl which is a bit easier? This is particularly with regard to 3D graphics.

in retroarch specifically or?

they’re different 3D APIs, Direct3D is Microsoft platforms only and generally the most popular, OpenGL was for years the only alternative that was widely used and had an open spec but the tooling left a lot to be desired and most implementations weren’t as efficient as a result, and Vulkan is a successor to OpenGL that lets you do more things from scratch and isn’t as crufty but isn’t practical for many people to write

They’re different technical standards defining how the game engine talks to the graphics driver. There can exist one graphics driver per permutation of OS x GPU x standard. On Windows, at least the Direct3D driver will always exist, and on other operating systems at least the OpenGL driver will exist, so typically games target those specifically, but they also have the option of having a setting to target OpenGL or Vulkan if they want. Vulkan is very new and really fast in the as-yet-rare cases it’s supported at all.

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does the newest dirt game still have the twin peaks sheriff station (dirtfish rally school) in it

any reason to keep/get rid of GeForce Experience in 2019