Is it possible to walk forward and pull off an hadoken in the same sequence? It always seems like you have to hit neutral for a second or so otherwise you get shoryuken. It has absolutely no practical application from what I can tell but I was just messing around with it on training and I couldn’t get it to work.
I don’t have any specific evidence, but from anecdotal experience there’s a brief period where the game stores certain inputs (towards in this case), and the player has to allow for the input to be ‘lost’ before they can do other inputs and not have conflicting special moves come out. So if you’re walking forward you have to stop at neutral briefly before continuing to the qcf input.
As you said, in Street Fighter 4 if you’re walking forward and input a quarter circle forward motion you will get a Dragon Punch, every time, regardless of the fact that you ended on towards. In other games there’s a different degree of input strictness, where in the exact same situation you might get a fireball instead because you ended on towards. This brings up an interesting distinction: whether the game is determining the move based on the inputs at the beginning or the end of the input. 'Cause ultimately we’re talking about a difference of starting at towards or ending at towards, we have a down and a down-towards in both. In Street Fighter 4 uppercuts take input priority pretty much every time.
I have no idea what the time for the input storage is. On another thread @Finkledoodoo was discussing just exactly how long of a window the player has before the towards is no longer registered (in that case using cr. mk xx Hadoken.) I was saying that I do a half circle forward when doing the cr. mk xx Hadoken in order to not get uppercut while walking forward, but they pointed out that it doesn’t matter because if you do what I suggested at an extremely fast pace you’ll still get uppercut, so it has to be a timing issue.
Either way, it’s a pain in the ass.
It has a LOT of practical application, but no, you can’t immediately go from walking into hadouken. It’s been like this since SFII.
The traditional directional inputs for a DP are:
forward, down, down-forward
When you do walk-forward and then fireball, you input these directions
forward, down, down-forward, forward
Notice the bolded part. The inputs for the DP overlap with the inputs for the hadouken. Since DPs have higher priority than fireballs, you will always get a DP.
In SFIV, the issue is further exacerbated because of input shortcuts and leniency. You have about 27frames in total to input a DP (in SFII it’s less than 20F), with about 12f frames between inputs on average (the exact values don’t matter). The inputs required are any forward direction, any downward direction, any forward direction.
Consider that most players roll from forward to down instead of going back to neutral. Then you get the inputs:
forward, down-forward, down, down-forward, forward
Which results in these valid DP inputs:
forward, down-forward, down-forward
forward, down, down-forward
forward, down, forward
forward, down-forward, down-forward
forward, down-forward, forward
etc etc ad nauseum.
In other words, its almost impossible to avoid walk-forward DP with regular delays between inputs. The best method is to just stop for a split second, do the fireball.
This COULD be prevented by making the attacks work with purely when the buttons are pressed for the first time as opposed to current situation where the attack input are also sort of like “refreshed” every frame as long as you’re holding any movement direction. Why don’t they just make fresh button/movement PRESSes relevant for special moves?
The system is designed to make special moves easier to do. Giving people a longer input buffer allows people more time to complete the motion. Not all that useful for a fireball, but noobs would find ultras and supers a lot harder to perform. If you don’t have it, DL the trial for HD remix and try doing a super in that game and you’ll see what I’m talking about.
Not really, but you can incorporate slight delays between you hadoken directional input and your button press. The faster you input the hadoken directions, the more you can delay the punch input allowing for an slight walk forward hadoken. You can use this to alter hadoken timings or even approach your opponent in new ways. You can do stuff like stand jab, hide a hadoken input walk foward into a hadoken. The next time you stand jab, walk foward and delay just enough to make another stand jab come out instead of a hadoken. Thats lets you see if your opponent will jump. You can also, poke with a crouch medium kick, hide a hadoken motion, step forward and give someone a face full of ex hadoken.
Even better you can utilize option selects where you negative edge a hadoken during the walk forward of your next fireball. The way it works is, after a knockdown you put a meaty fireball out but hold down a punch button. When the fireball is supposed to hit meaty perform a hadoken but take a step forward. After the step let go of the punch. If they blocked, you will perform a safe hadoken, if they avoided it, you will be walking forward so that you can go into position to punish.
The system that I suggested wouldn’t impact how hard the attacks are to pull off, just the way the inputs are registered would be more fresh