“Nerd” as in “math nerd”, I mean.
You’d be surprised how many people on here don’t actually play fighters.
:lol: And this is just flat out wrong. So was the rest of it about “any tiered character can win with perfect execution” but the part I quoted sticked out the most.
Play more fighters. Knowledge in match ups > * You can have so-so execution and still be a beast if you know your match up like the back of your hand.
Ok, I’m pissed cause I just lost an enormous post here, but hopefully I can sum it up.
Y’all are acting like I said fighting games are 100% execution 0% Game Knowledge. I didn’t say that, obviously game knowledge is neccesarry to win. Implying like I said that would be the same as me implying you all said you could just spam a couple safe moves aimplessly if you know the matchup and win. Obviously that’s not true either. (Unless you’re playing a complete scrub.)
I don’t know whether your mean to say that I think you can have so-so execution and still win, or whether that’s something that you also feel is true. But either way I disagree with it. So-so execution isn’t going to win you a match period. Someone who has excellent execution can win a matchup that they know very little about however, provided they know their own character well enough.
I think we’re confused about the definition of the term “execution.” I don’t define it to mean “the ability to do moves/combos.” I define it to mean “the ability to time moves such that they hit your opponent and/or the ability to then combo/hit confirm them for more damage.”
Kyokuji is right that someone could win with throws and one normal, but they couldn’t do that without exellent execution, if they just sit there and whiff those 2 moves, they’re opening themselves up for big punishment. I feel like spacing is something that requires execution too. If you don’t space yourself correctly, you could whiff, or get hit by a move you thought you were out of the range of and therefore take damage.
Let’s look at reversals. Sometimes you only have 1 frame in which to pull off a reversal. I could KNOW what my character’s reversal is, but not be able to execute it in one frame. Therefore if it comes down to both characters having so little life that chip damage will kill them, and I’m waking up, unless I pull off that 1 frame reversal, I’m going to lose, but if I CAN execute it, I’ll win.
I know plenty of people who can tell you exactly how to win certain matchups, but when they play them, they lose anyway. I believe it’s called “theory fighter.” What it really comes down to is “can you execute well enough to win this matchup?” Basically there is a difference between knowledge and application. I know that you can dp Blanka out of a roll, and Dhalsim out of a c.FP. I know that Hugo can red parry into Gigas, but can I do them? Can I do them reliably? That’s execution, that’s the difference between GOOD players and the BEST players.
Maybe it’s unfair for me to give it a 80/20 split, but I feel like game knowledge is less important cause you only have to learn something once applying that knowledge, execution, is something you have to do every time you play the game.
BTW, as far as the millisecond question goes. I realize 1/60 = .01666666, but are we sure that just because a game runs at 60fps (for that matter are we even sure the games do run at 60fps?) that 1 frame is literally .017 seconds? That seems like an awfully small amount of time to input a 1 frame reversal for example.
MrDhalsim, don’t listen to the haters, this is an excellent idea… mechanics are the basis of safe solid play. it doesn’t matter how good you are at strategy if you can’t put your strategy into practice.
i told my friend today about this and he seemed really really interested
i’m going to mess around with it some after i get done with my software engineering homework
if possible could we get some source code? I’m a programmer and I’d at least want to look to see if I can help though I can’t think of more metrics to measure immediately at the moment other than move times on things (srks, qcfs, etc). I want to see how sloppy my mechanics are in numbers.
Execution Aid
Amen! Well said. That’s why I capitalize the word Execution because it seems to be far underrated. It’s one thing to know theory- but putting that theory into actual practice? A whole other question indeed. This is critical because once you DO start popping out those reversals, your FEAR FACTOR goes way the hell up- your opponents just fear the hell out of you and suddenly you can get away with waaay more aggressive moves and tactics. When your opponent sees you pick ryu or some character they’ve seen 50 other people play that day, they stop and ask themselves before taking risks, “Do I feel lucky? Well? Do I?” S-kill wrote a while ago about that fear factor. I think Execution paves the way.
Fair question, I think the answer is most likely yes… pressing backspace during a GGPO ST game shows the framerate at or around 60 FPS (though, I don’t know if that could be the emulator running it at such ie updating it 60 times each second whether anything is new or not, or, nFBA is actually getting that number from the game itself? I figure it’s the game itself). My program Execution Aid runs at 60 FPS (I thought about lowering it to reduce overheard and give more cycles to cpu for the emulator, but stuck with it to keep more consistent with game’s framerate timing). I’ve written a simple test program that shows updates according to 60FPS framerate, and it was usually 16 ms, sometimes as high as 18, sometimes as low as 14 or so.
And yes, it certainly IS a small amount of time to input a 1 frame reversal. That just goes to show how good we’ve conditioned ourselves over the years of playing these games. Kind of like Lantis said, only, the exact opposite conclusion:
“This is some straight ass nerd shit. As if I’m gonna be like “Hmmmm my 5 frames of DP vs. his 7 frames of HK, coupled with half-a-second input and 1.3 seconds lag, OH NOES odds against me!”, all this in a second worth of time? Ummmm, that’s not realistically gonna happen, sorry.” Ummmm, actually it happens every single day, in arcades and on GGPO, we just do it in real-time and don’t put words to it when we do. (and 1.3 seconds of lag is a lifetime and most players would consider it unplayable of course.)
Another indication of how fast that is- when my program plays back previously recorded inputs, it shoots by too fast for most people to catch easily. I had a pause/play toggle button but for now you can open it up in Excel/Calc and see the raw data for yourself in any case.
Thanks Anotak, I appreciate the encouragement and feedback. I will answer questions about the source code and how I set it up but don’t really feel like releasing it in whole (there’s a lot of GUI code just for the menus, for example).
XSPR
Well, it’s no wonder you disagree with everyone. Probably just best to agree that we disagree, then.
The reason theory fighters lose is the same reason most people play theory fighter in the first place - they don’t have the actual game to play. So while they do have frame data and can say “oh yeah, Bison’s LK scissors is +0 on block and is completely safe”, they don’t have another vital part of knowledge of the game: hitbox data.
You wouldn’t know from looking at the frame data that Bison’s headstomp beats out almost everything, or that Chun-li’s neutral jump Roundhouse hits behind her and on the way down, or that Blanka’s slide is a solid anti-air. Without information like that, it’s no wonder that theory fighters lack the ability to zone and space (go ahead and fight SFIV Bison without knowing about how much space his headstomp controls and see how well you do!) and inevitably lose… plus, chalk it up to general inexperience with the game.
things i’ve noticed thus far: my hadukens are actually tiger knees i just am always hitting punch before the up part comes into play
3rd strike short short super looks unclean as hell like d lk t d lk t lk dt lk dt lk is my input and somehow it works most of the time
i keep buttons held down too long
edit: i just finally managed to learn how to get my c.mk to super down so much cleaner with only 2 button presses and none of this down-back 3/8ths circle forward shit that was plaguing me before causing hurricane kick to come out.
THANKS.
seriously. People that said this shit was useless really don’t know what they’re talking about.
what actually happens
Me too! that was one of the first things I noticed about my Execution. After years of fb’ing I never figured I was rollling the stick up that far but sometimes that’s what happens. I think this is just the early part of discovering what else might be going on when we actually play. Professional athletes commonly use video footage of their play to review form and how they react under pressure of competition. Good chess and go players review their games and work to find the critical moves that made the most difference (it’s a shame more players don’t bother to do this- you’ve spent all that time thinking during the game, but it can easily go to waste if you don’t learn anything from it).
btw POVhat shows it a little more clearly because the diagonals are considered unique directions. (Axis combines two directions for diagonals, same thing basically.)
Another thing I was going to mention before was, when Daigo or a top player plays, sure he does fireballs here and there, and sometimes that dragon punch move thing. Well, so what, we can do fireballs and dragon punches, too; and ours tend to look exactly the same on screen, in fact, every single frame is identical to the frames when he does it. So why is Daigo so special? I’m kind of like Daigo, my ryu’s fb/dp’s look just like his ryu’s, especially if I choose the same color, so what’s the big deal?
Is the Execution of ours and his the same? If not, what are the differences (however small or subtle, what are they)? What separates the gold medalists from the silver medalists?
i noticed that my SRKs go a little down-back before they go down-forward. probably why they tend to be a little slower than other people’s even though i’ve worked on them.
my dashes tend to have a little bit of an up-forward thing to them, hence why when i fuck up i get a jump (already figured this one but good to see it to know i’m not crazy)
The FB Execution matters a lot in ST for example when canceling low roundhouse (hard kick) into fireball because if you mess it up it can have big consequences, letting pressure off the opponent and not keeping him grounded etc.
After being able to cancel low roundhouse into fb, in actual matches, the next step is be able to do it immediately after walking up to an opponent. That’s also important because you don’t want a dragon punch to come out which often happens for those attempts until you get the timing down. The walking towards opponent counts as the first input of a srk, and crosses muscle memory so I think we (or I did, at least) tend to hit the punch a little too early and get a srk instead of a fb.
Do the diagnostic tools posted here work for pad as well as stick?
Also, are you all using FBA?
I also think I tend to have more trouble with SRK motions than I do with supers.
Is it recording negative edge? It seems like it.
Execution Aid specs
It should work fine with a joy pad as well as stick. You can choose between Axis or POVhat which some pads have (PS2 dualshock type of sticks/pads let you toggle between those with the Analog button in the center). No keyboard support just yet (or those special sticks that map functions to keyboard keys, as far as I know, but I don’t have one of them to test with).
I’ve tested it with GGPO’s FBA (nFBA?), both the one in the .exe in the GGPO folder as well as playing live networked with other people. No reason why it shouldn’t work with any other emulator on the PC also, though, or any other PC game/program for that matter.
When you say negative edge I think this is the new term for releasing a button to get a special move or super to come out, as opposed to pressing the button? Basically yes, it shows you all info for directionals and 6 buttons, i.e. whether each
individual input is ON vs OFF (off shows nothing). This is concurrent too so say, you hold down mid-punch, while tapping left on the stick, then let go of mid-punch, it will show that. There is a “Lines” feature in the menu that displays lines for each input, accurrate to the frame (or, the 0.017 seconds length we mentioned before).
XSPR
yeah it shows negative edge
and yeah i’m using this with mame not FBA
If you could react and DP in a 1 frame window on a consistent basis (impossible I know, just playing Devil’s Advocate), you could win most if not all matchups.
Many asian guys are still waiting for this to be proven true…
DP’ing consistently
It’s actually not so impossible as you might think.
I have played some really, really good players who can reversal DP fairly consistently, especially in recent years. These are guys you haven’t really heard of but they probably have seen their fair share of great competition to hone their consistency. On a good day, I can be fairly consistent with reversal DPs myself but it’s just not every day. Just in the past two or three days, I played in ST against a great Cammy (serosin sp?), and new Sagat player (toz) who had no problems doing it and so the gameplay was a lot different.
We don’t even need to focus on getting it out in 1 frame, as much as simply getting it out when we need it and not messing it up.
What would REALLY help me is hitboxes during hitstun and blockstun. Sirlin had a good idea when he put hitboxes in HD Remix, but a frame-by-frame slideshow of all the characters specials, supers, normals, hitstun, blockstun, EVERYTHING in the game, would have been great!! Here’s hoping it’s part of the patch…
Oh, I didn’t mean a reverasal per se – I was talking about SEEING someone stick a move out and DP it on reaction with a 1-frame window.
well considering that the average human reaction time would be somewhere around 10-20 frames…
if someone had a 1 frame reaction time…they’d be a parry god
Execution Aid version 2
That feature of displaying the hitboxes had been in demand well before Sirlin lobbied for it (our good idea) by myself and many others. And I totally agree, I am all for full disclosure of each frame-by-frame of hitboxes. Why is it so hard to find out the full set of rules of these games we play so much? Why does that have to be such a big secret? I actually made another free program called Wrectangles a few years ago to have the community try their best guess at hitboxes (it can grab the frames from a movie, pause/shuttle jog frame-by-frame, and lets you draw your best estimate of the hitboxes yourself directly on each frame).
Hm yeah admittedly it’s hard to say how feasible that would be-- it really delves into the skill of anticipation (not just reaction) and favoring the prepared srk motion beforehand, but in any case the closer you can get to that ability of actually reacting to it in real-time, the better your game will be.
Ok well Execution Aid has been out for a little while now… so what are your times? In how many frames can you manage to get out fireballs, and dragon punches, on average?