SF? Guile Exhibition (Evo2k7 Edition)

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
82

Haha, i did namedrop kind of a lot of FGD mods huh? Totally wasn’t keeping track. While i was making the video i just wrote down people’s names in a txt file whenever someone gave me a good editing suggestion or provided helpful feedback or whatever. But if you asked me to explain why any particular name is in there, i hella couldn’t remember now.

That’s cool, i know a lot of people feel that way. In the past i’ve done everything by hand on standard DC controllers, but i felt it was time to try out programmable controllers and such. That’s why at the end of the intro it says, “Look past the difficulty level of the gameplay and try to see the ideas.” I’m not trying to be modest there. I’m trying to say that i took the execution limitations out of the equation therefore you should take them out of your grading criteria.

Whenever you see dope ideas in the video, give me a point. If all you see is insanely difficult combos but no innovation, then i shouldn’t get any credit. That’s the essential grading rubric for tool-assisted videos.

All i care about is finding new stuff and redefining boundaries. It’s not my fault that the SF community has covered 90% of everything that exists within the practical limitations of human exection. For example, that WW triple Sonic Boom combo took me 3 weeks to develop with tool-assistance, including all of the different variations that i went through before i settled on that one. If i had to do it manually, it might have taken me 3 months before everything fell into place. So that combo would still be shown at Evo2k7, but the whole video would be about 45 seconds long and contain about 4 combos total. That makes it unrealistic to even attempt something of that caliber. But those are the kinds of combos i was interested in for this project so i had to go out and get programmable controllers.

I still don’t expect everyone to be cool with tool-assisted videos but you can’t please everyone. I’m comfortable with that.

83

I have mixed feelings about tool-assisted videos in general. Personally, in order for it to be enjoyable, I like to see the video specifically showcase some of the bizarre things about the game engine–not just glitches, but what the game is capable of when the rules are pushed beyond human limitations.

There is far more than enough worthwhile material in this vid to justify the use of a special controller (the triple sonic boom alone was a jaw dropper for me). I can’t say the same for a lot of the tool-assisted vids floating around out there.

84

yea, tool assisted does get a bad rap, but I’m for it. Shows you the type of game play engineering/play testing the developers did imo. Sure the brokeness is in the game, but no one can take advantage of it.

I say kudos for going tool assisted.

85

it takes a lot of skill to develop combos with programmable pads and such. that shit is not easy. fuck the haters. it still takes a shitton of creativity to make these combos that push the limit of the engine.

when i look at a combo video, when i see something cool, i never go “wow he can do that on a stick?”, instead i go “wow, i didnt know that could be done in the game”

the only time where human execution becomes mandatory in a video to be legit is pulling off shit in a match. combo videos are all about creativity, entertainment, and showing viewers things that have never been seen before in whatever game.

now, using emulators and splicing a combo together thru some save state editing, that i dont agree with. never fully getting a combo, instead you just break combos down in parts and save each part and peice em together to give an illusion that its one combo. now that shit is wack, and rather lazy. unless its used to form some kinda neat effect, (like how the changing versions during guile combo) but for regular combo showcase, now thats garbage\

just an IMO

edit: that cvs1 combo trailer was SICK

86

I’d love to show this video to the original developers at Capcom, but i’m pretty sure they’d have no idea that 90% of the stuff in my video is even in the game. In fact, i think we crossed that line a long long time ago. I’d say most of the stuff in TZW videos, Tosaka videos, zerokoubou videos, and even a lot of non-combo-videos like the new NKI video is way past the level that the original game developers/testers reached. I’m sure if you showed any modern top-level CvS2 match to the designers of that game, they would have no idea what’s going on and no way of reading the players’ gameplans.

The second sentence makes a really good point though. Most of the really advanced combos in my video deal with multiple Sonic Booms and stretching charge timing to the max. When a projectile connects in the SF2 series, it slows the game down to half speed. It does this by duplicating every frame for a short period of time. It turns out that every duplicated frame ignores inputs. Which means if you do j.HP, s.HP xx Sonic Boom, F+HP then you only have a 50% chance of that F+HP coming out. Of course you can mash it out and there’s a good chance it’ll come out. But i’ve had instances where i’ll do the first three hits and hold forward while i mash fierce, and Guile will literally walk all the way up to the opponent and throw them. I mean he’ll ignore like 5-8 attempts at backfist and nothing will come out until the opponent has already recovered from hitstun!

So if you factor this into combos that involve 2-3 Sonic Booms, plus charge timing so precise that you need to push the buttons within a 2-frame window for the combo to work, then it becomes totally impractical. You don’t have the luxury of mashing on c.LP because if it doesn’t come out the first time you press it, then whole rest of the combo will fall apart. Therefore, i’ve really done nothing to endanger the fairness of match play because there are very good safeguards which prevent these 100% combos from ever becoming realistic.

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Maj - fix the trailer link on your page

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Maj did all of the above, didn’t he? “[V]arious emulator features…”? I guess I sort of agree with you but for once I think the harsh language is uncalled for. I mean there’s no need to be such an asshole about it.

EDIT:
Thinking about it again:
“lazy”? You should fucking apologize, dude.

89

Fixed. Thanks for the heads up dude.

Actually i used a number of different emulators and a number of different tools. The SNES and GBA emulated combos were done using frame advance via the methods utilized by the Tool-Assisted Speedrun community. But i doubt anyone cares too deeply about those, especially since there were only a handful of those clips in the video.

Unfortunately i can’t go into detail about how i made the arcade game stuff because all of that was made using a modified emulator which my friend is developing. Until it’s finished and released, i’m not allowed to share information about it. But when it is released, i would be happy to share the exact input sequences i used to make the combos. Posting them now wouldn’t really make much sense anyway, cuz you’d need the program to figure out what the naming conventions mean.

And it’s cool, nobody needs to apologize. I’m not offended. Anyway everyone would have to wait until everything was released and revealed before making a final decision about whether they’re cool with the methods i used. For now the only things available for discussion are the combos themselves. And i guess you could form an opinion about the SNES/GBA clips but i wouldn’t bother cuz those are mostly just filler used either for the sake of completeness or for editing purposes.

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nohoho: uhm that part wasnt even into reference to maj. what the hell is your problem? if you cant take a little language, go somewhere else, and try not to use it yourself as well, to not make yourself look contradictory.

im responding to what people thought about tool assisted videos. and i had no gripes. i just dont like when a combo is manipulated using save states and spliced together. for instance, i saw an a3 video from LONG ago. done by some guys in the UK i think. and there was an a-guy combo, really lengthy combo, an extremely impressive combo, btw. but it looks like they were having a hard time getting the combo to work(im guessing). and midway through the combo, you see “save state loaded.” so basically what was done, was they did a combo half way, til the part where it was extremely difficult (or maybe not possible at all). then did another combo, did some generic combo to get the combo counter up to the required hits, so when it gets spliced to the first half of the combo, the # of hits will correspond to what is being shown. and it makes me wonder, if that combo was even possible, AT ALL. either that, or they dont have much know how on a program pad or something to program this combo to the frame, to make it work. i dunno. but it gives the viewer the idea that the combo isnt real. and thats where the problems happen.

I DO NOT have a problem using tools where you save state a combo half way thru, and start it up later(and it continues the recording) to continue the combo. cuz when its said and done, the combo is still real in the games engine(when played through again in its entirety). this is totally different to what im talking about above, where you take 2 separate combos, and put em together, to make a FAKE combo. which isnt being done here

maj’s combos dont look spliced at all. each combo clip looks “completed” from beginning to end. (atleast im hoping it is =/)

edit:

PS: FUCK SHIT WHORE SLUT! oops guess i have turrets syndrome or something :smile:

91

whoa settle down I wasnt trying to hate. I said I liked the video and it was impressive and fun to watch. And thats most important thing. But those kinda controlers make the video feel fake to me thats all. No more no less. Though to say yes, I think you yourself doing the combo is just as impressive as the idea if its some ridiculous combo. Being able to do those hard/random/innovative combos is important as well. shrug Its part of the crazyness of the video when your like not only was the combo random crazy but the fact that the dude did it. Doesnt anyone see some crazy combo ever and they try it themselves and there like damn that combo is hard as fuck. I wonder how long it took him to do it. When you know someone is useing those controlers… It takes away some of the fun, and makes it a litttle fake to me thats all shrug… Personaly I think if the combo can be done by hand, it should be. Even if it takes hours to get it done. If something is realisticly possible to do, even if its fucking retarded to get. Well it should be. Thats all… But whatever the case…

Anyway like I said i enjoyed the video and thats most important thing so good job. I wasnt trying to start a fight or anything shrug…

92

Well, i can say this much: All of the arcade combos used one save state. In a few cases, i used a temporary intermediate save state to test out a few of the combos when a really long setup was involved. For example, when i had to kill two characters in SFTM or when i had to get one character’s life down to the last pixel with block damage so that that the “First Attack” message would still come up on the first hit of the combo. But once i got the combo working, i actually went back to the original save state and recorded the whole thing in one shot. The uncompressed version of the last arcade ST clip is taking up 969MB on my computer, and the second SFTM combo is 1.91GB.

The SNES clip was actually recorded in one shot too, because i didn’t really know what i was doing back then. I must have pressed that frame advance key like 25,000 times, trying to get everything optimized. The GBA clip did use some rerecording and save state loading features, but that was made like two days before the deadline so i couldn’t waste any time. Anyway i have the entire command sequence written down from beginning to end so that one is a legit uncut combo sequence too.

I think i’m safe.

I didn’t think/say that you were. You brought up something that needed to be discussed sooner or later, and i shared my viewpoint to address it. Nothing more to it.

Thanks for your kind words and compliments. I’m glad you liked the video and i definitely sympathize with your reservations.

When you watch a manually executed combo video, you say to yourself, “Man i can’t believe i never thought to try that!”

But when you watch a tool-assisted combo video, you say to yourself, “Man i can’t believe that’s in the game!”

The first option is obviously the more satisfying one.

However, in my defense, if you look at my older videos … the kinds of combos i tended to do were the impossible one-in-a-thousand type situations anyway. Basically some elaborate setup and some crazy one-frame reversal bullshit, and i would try the same thing with the same timing three hundred times until i got lucky once. For me, because of my style, the line was a lot thinner than it is for a lot of other combo video makers. I really doubt that very many people saw my CvS2 Reversal Combovid and immediately spent an entire weekend trying to recreate that fucked up Rugal setup. I certainly don’t feel like i “mastered” that combo. I just knew it would work so i tried it a couple of hundred times until i got lucky once. Crossing over to the tool-assisted method is really not that big of a jump for me.

93

SaBrE - I got no problem with cursing. I thought you were calling Maj’s work “lazy garbage” and that pissed me off.

This is only if the person making the video has a certain level of sophistication. Amongst those TAS guys it seems like few are sensitive to this distinction. Most cheapen the whole thing as per what dialupsucky’s been writing. There’s a batch of emulator-jiggered Garou match videos out there that fall into that category. IMO the SF? Guile vid goes above and beyond into, say, Morimoto Gradius territory.

94

I really don’t see what’s so impressive about seeing something done that’s obviously possible, but simply requires crazy good execution, regardless of whether the execution is being done manually or not. That’s what I’ve always liked about Maj’s videos - they’re full of stuff that stretch the possibilities of the games engines as we know them, not just hard combos. When that’s your aim, it really doesn’t matter that it hasn’t been done manually.

95

Haha that video is tight! Heard about it before, but never seen it. My favorite part is how it builds up, cuz for the first 30 seconds i was thinking, “What’s so impressive about this? Hm, would i even be able to tell without having played the game before?”

Then he gets into the craziness! Instant smile.

96

Destroying a barrel is worth 1000 points. If the attack doesn’t destroy it, you get the points for the attack instead (100 points for a jab, etc).

Interesting. Looking forward to seeing what comes of that.

97

Good guess, but no. You get 100 points no matter what, regardless of the strength of the attack. Only 1,100 points out of the extra 5,100 points were obtained by scoring those 100 point bonuses. Where did the other 4,000 come from?

Since we’re talking about it anyway, i may as well go through and point out the stuff in it that’s truly innovative.

Ryu, Vice, O.Iori, and Akuma combos use that crazy Vega/Mai setup that was invented for this video. Definitely the most impressive thing about the whole thing, IMO. Ryu and Vice combos are unbelieavably cool whereas i think the O.Iori and Akuma combos are relatively boring.

The first two parts of the Zangief combo are not particularly advanced, but i sure as hell didn’t know there were redizzies in this game. Good find.

Terry combo and last part of Zangief combo use a really cool S-Groove trick where they kara-cancel a chained light attack into meter charge. For example, Gief does c.LP -> whiff c.LP xx meter charge, s.MP which links because the kara-cancel makes the first c.LP recover faster than it usually does. However, this technique first surfaced in the first full-length Harvest video by Sai-Rec, except that they were using it to interrupt Morrigan’s chains. Anyway this trick is difficult to spot but it requres less than full S-Groove meter so if you see C-Groove being used or if the S-Groove meter is full, then you can rule it out.

Kyo combo uses a similar trick, except the last s.LP is chained into a whiff jab which is kara-canceled a roll which is kara-canceled into Kyo’s lvl3 Orochinagi. The roll lets him gain a little ground to get within lvl3 super range.

Cammy, Terry, Raiden, Yamazaki, and E.Ryu combos use a cool setup where Zangief rolls behind a character and uses his c.HP to get hit by some backwards-facing attack. This avoids pushback and creates a pretty cool midscreen meaty link combo opportunity.

Raiden and Yamazaki combos both use a whiff 720 cancel trick which has been known for a while, although it’s surprising that it works for Yamazaki whose super does not recover particularly quickly.

Honda, Balrog, Sakura, Vega, Kim, and Joe combos aren’t groundbreaking technically, but they are all hella stylish. Especially the Vega combo.

Ken, Chun Li, Bison, King, Morrigan, and Nakoruru combos would have been cool if this was a video made in the first couple of months after CvS1 was released, but at this point they’re standard vanilla juggles.

Sagat combo isn’t technically groundbreaking either, but it’s cool that he found the spacing to make the first super connect as late as it does, so that he can land in time to juggle with the lvl2.

The setup for the Iori combo is not bad, but the combo itself was discovered a long, long time ago using CvS2 EX/S-Groove so he knew what to look for to make it work in CvSPro. Still doesn’t make sense that it works though. Not all glitches are explicable, i guess.

Dhalsim combo is awesome because that jab hits meaty. He does it early so that the flame pushes the opponent into the jab, which lets him link the short slide afterwards. Pretty creative.

Blanka and Rugal combos are almost identical copies of combos found in Sai-Rec CvS2 combo videos.

Guile combo is an almost identical copy of the CvS1 combo in my CvS2 Guile Addendum vid and the Ryo combo is an almost identical copy of the one in my CvS2 Reversal Combos vid.

Yuri infinite combo was discovered within the first week of CvSPro’s release by Mike Z, i think. Benimaru combo is pretty generic except for a glitch that jchensor explained in a video a long time ago.

Geese combo is pointless. The setup accomplishes nothing as far as i can tell.

Did i miss anyone?

Adding them all up, i’d say the majority of this video is new or at least stylish, so i dig it.

98

Just watched the video closely again, and it seems that he lands 2 hits simultaneously on the barrels at certain points (sonic boom + jumping roundhouse hitting at exactly the same frame), getting 1000 points per attack (2000 total) despite only hitting 1 barrel???

Then again with a sonic boom + jab just after. That’s all I could make out, but I’m guessing there’s 2 others in there somewhere.

Or am I smoking crack?

[edit] Saw one other sonic boom + jab. The only other place where 2000 points appear instead of 1000 is a crouching medium punch cancelled into flash kick, but I don’t understand why.

99

To respond to sabres post about that random vid with ‘save states’ or whatever. If It was made by who I think it was made by there’s no way he’d have done that. Here’s how I think it went. When you record a series of inputs in an emulator and then play them back. You’d be surprised how often (particularly with 1-frame links and stuff) the thing you recorded isn’t reproduced. There’s an unavoidable element of randomness in some games combined with the fact that if the emu is knocked out of sync even slightly, the combo will fail. I’d have to guess that they just started recording from different sections of the same combo and not just doing a random combo to get the counter up and cheating. I could be completely wrong but just thought I’d point that out regarding emulator recordings

100

Yup. When two attacks simultaneously break a barrel, the game gives you 1,000 points for each. Guile can take advanage of this cuz his Sonic Boom recovery is faster than any other projectile’s, but it’s still difficult to set up.

The second barrel is hit by j.HK + Sonic Boom while the the third, ninth, and nineteenth barrels are hit by s.LP + Sonic Boom.

If you’re referring to the fourth and fifth barrels, that’s because the Sonic Boom breaks the fourth barrel at the same time as the c.LP connects against the fifth barrel. But this plays out as expected, with 1,000 points from the fourth barrel, 100 points from the c.LP against the fifth barrel, and then 1,000 from the Flash Kick breaking the fifth barrel.

101

My take on the whole Programmable controller thing is this: don’t use it as a crutch or just 'cause you are lazy. If you use it simply because you don’t want to spend an hour on a perfectly performable combo, it’s not good enough. It’ll probably take you an hour to program anyhow! It has to be a Combo that is so full of stupidly random pieces that trying to perform it manually will cause your hands to fall off or cause you to kill your pets from total utter frustration. There was one Combo I recently tried to do that required two 2-frame-window links and one 1-frame-window link in the same Combo. And the 2 2-frame window links involved a lot of effort to even just get to the point where you could attempt it. And the section right before thw 1-frame-window link had a part that I had to time perfectly to get all the hits from the move I just performed. There was so many random variables involved in that combo that it drove me maaaaaaad, so I just used a programmable controller afterwards.

I also used the programmable stick for another combo that I DID get lazy on. But afterwards, I felt so bad that I went back and really learned how to do the combo manually, like the old days (lol) and it felt really good when I finally pulled it off, even if it WAS “random” when I got it to work, like Maj said. There was one slightly hard part and the one really hard part. And just getting past the really hard part the one time is all I needed. So in the end, I’m glad I went back and did it manually. Something like that doesn’t warrant a Programmable Controller and you get a whole lot of satisfaction out of performing it manually.