About 2 weeks ago I started tracking down how and where 3S stored the hitboxes using MAME. Well a few days ago I made some progress and using the MAME renderer I’m now able to draw the hitboxes to the screen while the game is running.
The patch file is only for people who want to compile the program using the mame source code
I’ve uploaded the source in the form of a patch file for MAME 0.135 but it should work with SDLMame as well.
Just put the patch in your top-level MAME source directory and patch with: patch -p1 -E < mameserver-0.1.patch
EDIT: I’m not sure what I am doing wrong. I downloaded the binary and placed sf3iiian.zip in the roms folder but it tells me I am missing required files (CHD files?). No biggie, I have seen it in action in your videos and that’s great.
screenshots please _
I honestly thought chun’s back fierce would be bigger - but hitboxes seem a lot different from other sf games, having hugely varied shapes and changing a lot with animations. I think that what’s making 3s hit detection and “impact” feel so unique and good compared to every other 2d fighter.
To go frame-by-frame you might want to get a copy of FRAPS and record at 30fps, i believe it will actually slow down the game to half-speed. Otherwise you’ll have to record at full-speed and then go over it frame-by-frame with an editor. There’s some good free ones out there but their names escape me.
An easier way is to run mame with the -debug command line option. Start the game and when the debug window appears hit F12 to hide it and run the game. Now anytime during the game you can hit the tilde key (`) to break into the debugger (what I used to track down the hitboxes) and now you can step through the frames by tapping the F8 key. Keep in mind that running in debug mode does seem to cause a slight performance drop.
As for cheats the usual place to get them is at: http://cheat.retrogames.com/
Just put the cheat.zip file that is inside either the .zip or .7z archives into the directory where the mame executable is located, run mame with the -cheat command line option and hit the tab key to see the cheat menu item. I actually made my own cheat file that I forgot to include in the release that shows all sorts of player data like the x and y values, the current value all meters (ex, stun, life, number of supers) and the current animation frame number and the delay time between switching animation frames.
I saw Chun’s Back Fierce hitbox and almost cried out in terror! Hahahaha. Given how crazy that move is, I can’t blame you for thinking it should be even bigger, but it’s amazing how small hitboxes need to be in order to be effective. And compared to all the other green boxes we saw in the two videos of Ryu and Chun, Chun’s Back Fierce green box is HUGE and has no vulnerable boxes to go with it!
One comment on Chun vid: if i understand correctly what is displayed, i conclude that last kick of SA2 can be avoided just by crouching, no need to be on guard? (at least for small chars)
Is it true? (I can’t test for the moment)
It’s not an interesting information at all, just by curiosity…
edit: just tested, and no. So, i don’t understand how it works…
