Strategy vs Execution: Where do you stand?

Current Fighting Games Fighting Game Discussion
461

I’m still calling bullshit on this. MvC2 would like to have a word with you…

This is bullshit too:

What about Yipes? He won MvC2 @ EVO2K7. He is known for his Execution with Magneto. Out of of the 3 (JWong, Sanford, Yipes), Yipes has the best execution.

If you wanna talk just tournaments in general, what about Yipes winning Seasons Beatings Redemption? Or what about Marlin Pie winning UMvC3 @ Shadaloo Showdown? He fuckin’ won in LOSERS. Not only that but he managed to reset the bracket vs. FChamp and win with a goddamn PERFECT!

You sure do like to spew out bullshit without evidence to back up your claims.

High Execution can be seen as another form of Mindgames.

Even high execution games like MvC2 has tons of mindgames:

(skip to 6:18)
[media=youtube]1pwi5x97WvY[/media]

(skip to 5:22) - Fanatiq Yomi?
[media=youtube]JcdzMyH0M0w[/media]
Yipes does a tri-dash and Fanatiq dashes under it + Psylocke assist.

Also, it adds to a player’s Strategy. Look at Tominaga’s Makoto in 3S. He is the king of executing Makoto’s 100%. He’s is the only Makoto (that I know of) that can execute it so consistently. You look at other Makoto players and they don’t even try to do it.

If you practice your execution to the point where you can consistently execute something most people cannot, then that is your reward.

Nobody is forcing anyone to use training mode. Learn by playing real opponents, just don’t complain when you lose a lot, because you will lose WAY more if you don’t practice your combos, setups, etc. Sure you can practice by playing people but it’s going to take you a helluva lot longer to get your combos and setups down. That’s because you have to worry about a ton of other shit, and not just on executing stuff consistently.

If people are having trouble executing shit, then they should hit up training mode and practice their execution. If you don’t want to use training mode, then play against other players but expect to lose WAY more often.

462

…because you need to know that status of the character at all times? How do you trigger animations if you don’t flag? If the character is not currently executing a move, what do you do, just keep his old status in the structure and hope nothing breaks?

But then neutral is a move.

Also, I obviously haven’t looked at your code, but it sounds like you made this far more complicated than you really needed to.

Did you script this or code it?

I don’t understand what this has to do with a playerstate attribute and that one of those attributes would read as “neutral”.

You don’t measure in display frames, you measure by cycles. How much real time passes is not relevant to the computation.

So you measure from when the last possible cycle could potentially impact to the first cycle we accept a new move. This isn’t rocket science, and they have to flag this stuff anyway, or the game would be an absolute mess.

Look, I think it’s really cool that you’re interested in how this stuff works and it sounds like you spent a lot of time on your projects, but the cases you listed have to be handled by code SOMEWHERE or else they wouldn’t happen at all.

Things like multihit attacks, a specific character’s alternate animation, or moves that can be canceled into other moves do not change the fact that a character’s state has to be handled by the game, and when that state changes, the game knows the state changes and we can record when it changed. The engineers can know when a move changes from a passive frame to an active one, because the code has to handle that change or the game wouldn’t work. The engineers are not surprised when range changes the called animation, because there had to be a system in place to handle that.

As I mentioned, this may be difficult to do if you are just looking at data and doing simple mods, but the structure for deriving this data has to be in the game or else the game would not function properly. There really isn’t any way around that.

Anyway, show me your game. Disagreements aside, I love checking out indie projects.

463

The percentages say around 70% for strategy and around 30% for execution. Cannot we just leave it at: A perfect fighting game would have 30% execution 70% strategy?

There are lots of FGs anyway. Some can be more execution heavy, others less so. There’s room for everyone. Even for 30something married guys with a daughter and 2 jobs like me.

464

At places like Super Arcade in Walnut California, you see why execution skills make the game more fun.

465

not complicated at all. you answered your questions, neutral is a move, no, it is not flagged in any sort of special way.
moves are often associated with a cancel list.
you can cancel normals to specials and supers, cancel specials to supers.
and you can cancel standing with walking forward or normals or specials or supers or throws, and so on.

this was my implementation and I found LATER that sf4 did it the same way.

yes, it is plenty possible.
no, it wouldnt be that hard to add in a set of new flags to identify startup, recovery, and neutral states. but if a game is 30 characters and you didn’t start doing it when you started… or even if you did, it is a whole lot of extra work to tag all these parts of these animations. Especially if you tag them just for the sake of some data that arguably wouldnt improve the game enough to justify it.

2d fighting game engines generally run at exactly 60fps with a mainloop running once for each frame, meaning a frame is usually the same as a “cycle”. glad you decided to “correct” me over something completely fucking irrelevant to the point at hand.

sf4 runs at a variable framerate and probably uses time-based modelling meaning that doing this won’t be entirely exact either unless i suppose you added code to pause the game and then increment set a key to increment the game time by a fixed amount.

There never was a completed game, I wrote the engine in C# (it is missing sound and netplay code but it was written with these things in mind). I didn’t have a consistent artist to work with:
[media=youtube]_nCdcefcorc[/media]

466

Its funny to be stuck on this aside, but given that the information is readily available it can’t possibly be that hard to get.

If it was, we wouldn’t always have it.

467

I’d say that using it as a tool to help players learn more about the game is plenty good reason to justify it. Especially if you have a hit box viewer, just like Skullgirls’s which identifies multiple states for its hit and hurt boxes. Admittedly, the states Mike “tags” aren’t slightly different, but the idea is the same - teach folks exactly what’s going on in certain moves.
http://wiki.shoryuken.com/Skullgirls/Hit_Box_Ref

468

It’s completely separate. The act of identifying the jump and reacting to it fast enough is one thing.

The manual dexterity to perform dragon punch is another. A DP is an easy motion. A motion that any veteran street fighter player has done at a minimum thousands of times. I assume anyone who can do a DP ten times in a row has mastered the motion. The difficulty in this situation is not performing a DP, which is a move with low level execution requirements.

No one has difficulty performing a DP. But many have difficulty hitting Claw out of his jump. That in and of itself should suggest that the issue is not execution. Anyone who plays SF beyond the beginner level can perform a DP. The difficulty is reacting to the jump.

Hypothetically, if a standing forward had godly anti-air properties and was able to stop Claw the same way a DP could, more people would be able to react in time. That’s because it’s a simple one button input, the brain doesn’t have to do as much processing. However a person’s mind has to recognize the jump,* and* tell it to perform a 3-direction input in response. That’s a more complex act that takes more time. Not everyone reacts fast enough to the initial jump to do that in time.

The combination of reaction and execution can simply be called hand-eye coordination. But the mental process of reacting to a given stimulus, and the manual dexterity to perform a series of inputs on a stick/pad are two separate factors.

Also why is your SN so familiar? I can’t remember where I’ve heard that name before.

I don’t see why people have such serious gripes about execution. Execution can be developed through practice in a relatively simple manner. It is much easier to improve one’s execution ability than it is to improve one’s reaction ability. Even when execution barriers are minimized(since they are impossible to remove completely), it just puts emphasis on other player skills, such as reaction.

Actually, I’m giving serious consideration to expounding on that post and making it a new topic. Originally it was longer, but I trimmed it. I may add in the meatier stuff and post it later.

I’d also like to point out something. I’m noticing that a lot of guys who don’t make the distinction between execution and reaction, and people who say execution > strategy are only using 2-D fighters as a frame of reference. Not surprising consider 2-D is the big emphasis on this site, but having a singular frame of reference distorts overall perspective.

469

I disagree. There is a difference between reacting in time and executing in time. Reacting with DP in SFIV is retardedly easy because you can buffer df, d, df during normals, and then just press the button. In ST you have to do the proper motion within a shorter window.

470

its all over the place in fighters, you guys just keep calling them artificial barriers

wave dashing in mvc2. You can move faster if you step up your execution.

reversals in ST. You can get out of frame traps if you have 1f reversal execution.

cvs2 has roll cancel. This gives characters invincibility if you have pretty good execution.

these are all examples of how the game gets deeper with tougher execution. By having more execution, you have the ability to use more tools. Just like having more strategy gives you different strategies to use.

look @ kof short jumping\hyper hopping. This is a slight executional input but what it gives yous are 6 more jumping angles to use. The extra execution is allowing for 6 more movement layers and everyone here knows that movement opens up the whole game. Well most of everyone here knows that, I think…

471

while reading some old reviews elsewhere, these comments seemed relevant:

neonxaos:While execution in SFIV is lenient, combo linking is more stringent than ever. It’s a strange tradeoff, resulting in good players absolutely ruining less capable ones. I’m a long-time player of both Tekken and Street Fighter, and I’ve never met anyone in Tekken against whom I had absolutely no chance, but if your opponent knows his links in SF, you’re dead. I think older fighting games actually weren’t that divisive.

@neonxaos - I think you’re right. Capcom mentioned that games like 3rd Strike were inaccessible due to the complexity of parrying etc, and thats why Focus Attack and lenient input’s were introduced… only to then include the most 1-frame links any SF game has ever had. Combos in Super Turbo are easier to do.

What that has achieved is that it hasn’t removed the dexterity bar (the fact that you could be someone simply because you could move your fingers quicker rather than your tactics being sound), but simply moved the bar higher, so that there are now fewer people who could reach that dexterity bar.

The gap between people who can pull off consistent 1-frame links and those who can’t is much larger than the gap in previous games of people who could parry or even pull off a hadouken/tiger knee. Capcom certainly did make SSF4 more accessible, but they also resultantly introduced a divisive tier of elites players who’s sole distinction is dexterity. I agreed with David Sirlin’s sentiments about Dexterity not being the factor that should decide the outcome of a match.

Great posts by Ranger101 and neonxaos (again! hey Neon ^_^). It’s a complete myth that SF4 increased accessibility overall. It only got people to be able to do the basic special moves more easily - everything else was much harder than in many other fighting games.
The ONLY Street Fighter game to ever increase actual accessibility to higher level play is SSF2T HD Remix.

472

You have not answered my question at all.
I asked for examples of HOW BEING DIFFICULT adds depth in itself. If you have a valid option that could also be easier, that’s not an answer because you could just make it easier and the tactical game will look the same at high levels.
If you have a move that is too good and only “balanced” by being hard, (which as I said I think it’s a horrible way to balance a game) then it actually removes depth from the game because then the reward for grinding training mode is that you need to think a bit less in order to win in a match, since you now have access to tools that are too good.

We know you’d like fighting games to measure not only X (decision making) but also Y (how much time you grinded hard execution) but I’m asking how the Y adds to the X, because so far it doesn’t. You can design games to have as much X in them or even more without the Y.
So again I ask, show me how extremely hard execution adds depth to a game, in a way that you can’t get otherwise.

473

People who don’t like execution aren’t athletic in real life.

but uhh risk assessment as a result of execution does add to a game’s decision trees and so do the reads you can try to make based on how someone else deals with that risk assessment

it might not add “depth”, i guess if we’re going by the “accepted” (lol) definition of depth but i would hope having more strategical choices available to you at a given time can be construed as a good thing

474

People keep saying the same thing, if you don’t put the time/effort in then blah blah… some derogatory remark It’s not that people don’t want to put in time/effort as such, people want to put time in playing the damn game, not grinding muscle memory in a grid paper training room with monotonous music. It takes months and months, even years of playing fighting games before you’re really ‘playing’ fighting games.

475

How do you think people got good at these games before near-arcade-perfect ports were an option?

All truly competitive games require grinding shit out. You want to play chess at a competitive level? I hope you enjoy reading about chess strategy.

It doesn’t take anybody who cares at all (unless they have a legit physical disability) anywhere near “years” to execute well enough in a fighting game to “play the actual game.”

476

People complain about “execution” barriers being to high, then turn around and complain that easy combos, magic series etc cater to scrubs (when they lose to “less skilled” or “random” players). If the execution in game ‘X’ is too hard, spend more time in training mode or play something else. I have no issues spending time in training mode learning combos, strats, etc; I thought it was part of learning a FG on a more serious level.
Capcom games have set the bar low enough for the influx of 09+ers (like myself) to be “successful”. I’m salty enough about SFxT’s brainless boost combos.

477

Oversimplifying and misleading. Execution barriers can be too high AND having a game be too combo-centric (emphasis on the “too” which is subjective-ish) are separate issues, and addressing one doesn’t necessarily lead to the other.

Repeatedly refuted and not even valid. As tataki and others keep mentioning, it’s perfectly fine to train and practice and whatnot, but they’d prefer to have the execution hill be as easy a climb as reasonably possible, to put all effort on the strategy/mindgames/matchup specifics hills. We know X = Y right now, and you re-affirming that, yes, X = Y is pointless. We’re arguing for why X should be different.

If you honestly feel that’s the biggest sin SFxT has committed, I can fairly say you’re clueless, and I’m not even a top player at anything.

478

Yes, I probably would. A damn sight more interesting than execution grinding.

479

Great, so you’d rather grind out opening moves than physical dexterity. It’s still grinding.

480

Well in the real beginning (from someone who was around at the time) the real way to get good was to play with/against the best players you possibly could. Most of us didn’t have good relationships with arcade owners/staff to the point that they’d put the games on freeplay just so we could practice, or would force other people to stay away from the machine so we could practice in peace.

There are two different paradigms for practice available to us.

The first is solo lab time
The second is competing.

Execution barriers emphasize labtime practice and deemphasize practice with other players, and to me its a pretty clearcut case as to what we should be pushing. That’s always what it should be (<-another rare absolute)** go out there and get people actually playing.**

The years thing is a reference to schoultz saying that it takes years to master Sentinel fly/unfly though, so that came from somebody arguing that years of practice being required is a good thing :stuck_out_tongue: