Velocities Q&A

[Acey]

Rednavi has accepted the invite to answer questions regarding the variety of velocities found in mugen. I know that I have seen a lot of concern about velocities over the years and a lot of aspiring creators could learn a thing or two from this information so this coversation is being moved out of PM into the forum.

Topic 1) Hit Velocities: In general hit velocities fall into 2 catoriges, ground velocity (x,y) and air velocity (x,y). I tend to code in a Capcom environment but I would imagine that the basics are cross compatable between Capcom & SNK.

a) Standing attack ground velocities - I tend to set these at (-6,0) across the board except in situations where there is a more powerful attack that throws the opponet across (-15,-7) the screen or a launcher (0,-16).

b) Standing attack air velocities - I tend to set these at (-5,0) across the board. Launchers in this case have less value than their ground counterpart (0,-13).

c) Jumping attack ground velocities - I tend to set these around (-5,0) across the board except in situations where the hit is a knock down in which the code is mostly controlled by fall = 1.

d) Jumping attack air velocities - I tend to set this around (0,(vel y)-.2) which gives P2 a little push back into the air during an arial rave. Exceptions are knock downs which is controlled by air.fall = 1.

Q1) Are there errors with these assumptions?
Q2) How should these values be changes in the context of combos?
Q3) Is the concept of launchers and arial raves handled properly in these cases?

[rednavi]

I'd like to see someone else with experience joining to answer these questions aswell, hope I can contact someone soon. I assumed we were going to discuss different hitvels data between all of us, not everybody just asking me XD, I'm not a Capcom data guy at all I'm into SNK, however I might get some data if possible.

First of all I just talked to Jesuszilla requesting for some help regarding the Versus series. Seems like there's no artmoney table for the Versus games so the closest thing we have is Darkstalkers data which isnt too reliable for this kind of games anyway (But still a nice start).

Anyway, I'll like to know first, how many characters in X-Men Second Coming actually USE these rules and where you get those standards from?

Q1) Are there errors with these assumptions?

The main problem with the hitvels in pretty much every game that mimics MVC is how much people forgets that there's an extra value that should be taken in mind, the Y.accel. This is far more important that it seems, some people leave this at the default value of 0.5 when they shouldn't.

Then in the examples you posted here you also have no Y.velocity applied at all on the basic attacks (That arent launchers). I'm talking about this:

b) Standing attack air velocities - I tend to set these at (-5,0) across the board. Launchers in this case have less value than their ground counterpart (0,-13).

This hurts the game BAD, it looks innacurate as hell and it makes the game to look bad aswell. Aesthetical presentation in a game is very important, if it looks good then it's probably good. When hitting someone in the air with a groud attack the enemy either gets negative or positive Y.velocity, it's never really 0 AFAIK (Remind you, im more of a CVS/SNK guy).

Hitting someone in the air with a launcher shoudln't decrease it's y.velocity, this is atleast true in normal launchers like CapCom and Ryu's. There are other character specific example like spiderman's standing HK in MVC2 but we're not talking about that right now.

There's an extra item you should fix aswell, the recoverytime for the enemy to display the recovery animation properly, I know this is flawed as hell in XMSC to the point that hitting someone in the air makes him look like he was hit in the ground (I'll need to check this out more).

a) Standing attack ground velocities - I tend to set these at (-6,0) across the board except in situations where there is a more powerful attack that throws the opponet across (-15,-7) the screen or a launcher (0,-16).

that's another problem overall, you may want to try with different numbers instead of rounding them up or down, you have floats to work with (Look at my light punch hitvel, it's -5.796875), you're probably relying in hittime or slidetime to make the enemy go further when you hit them with a medium or hard punch but you actually need to use a different hitvel value for them aswell, they never use the same velocity as the light one.

c) Jumping attack ground velocities - I tend to set these around (-5,0) across the board except in situations where the hit is a knock down in which the code is mostly controlled by fall = 1.

When a move knocksdown you should give it some Y.velocity aswell, otherwise the enemy will look bad while falling, this happens all the time in XMSC and I didnt even try it that much. atleast positive but give it some, otherwise the enemy will only fall due to y.accel which will be at 0.5 if ommited.

d) Jumping attack air velocities - I tend to set this around (0,(vel y)-.2) which gives P2 a little push back into the air during an arial rave. Exceptions are knock downs which is controlled by air.fall = 1.

If there's something I never wanted to search about is aerial raves, it's quite bothersome to come out with a nice formula for this. I can tell you this, the Y.velocity in the hitvels don't depend of the current y.vel you have, they are always the same.

Q2) How should these values be changes in the context of combos?

For what I can tell so far, they dont change at all, even on ground, aerial and super jump combos they are still the same when used standalone or comboed into.

Q3) Is the concept of launchers and arial raves handled properly in these cases?

Tell me if this was answered with the stuff above or not... maybe I'm missing something.


BTW, before really moving forward with velocities and such I really, REALLY recommend you and your guys to get a custom cornerpush coding for the fullgames or characters, seriously. MUGEN's default cornerpush behaviour is what ruins most of the hitvel stuff when the enemies are cornered. There's really no sense to start fixing the hitvels until you implement the custom cornerpush system first (Which btw sets the cornerpush automatically, you dont even need to set the cornerpush values by yourself anymore, bah you'll have to set them at 0). The coding? I dont know where it is but you'll get it in no time if you request for "a good custom cornerpush" coding at mugenguild as several people over there like Vans and Jesuszilla knows about this already (I'm using a heavily modified version of Vans' coding, my fullgame requires an specific custom cornerpush coding).

Dunno if I left something unanswered or not. I also based all my responses on some MVC testing I just did via Kawaks as as I said, I'm not a Versus series guy in terms of exact data as I cant get an artmoney table for it (Quoting Jz: "if KFM doesnt have it, it doesnt exist").

[FerchogtX]

Well... I'm not a real expert on this, and most of my asumptions come from actually watching the game frame by frame (Yeah... shame on me, I'm unable to get a decent artmoney table for MVC/MVC2) but may help a lil' on what you need here. I wonder f you need ths info for SMvC

1.- There may be errors, because we cannot compare to the actual game (In terms of real values), but sometimes, measuring pixel by pixel may fix the issue, As Red says, not all hits gve the foe the same hitvel, sometimes a short jab gives a lower value than a extended light jab...

2.- Red already answered, but I can extend this by telling you that the vels don't cange because you got an extra factor in VS games: yaccel, this controls gravity when hitting on air, in terms of ground comboing, vels don't change, you just don't notice that becvause of the consecutive hits...

3.- The answer should be no... but can be fixed, you need to see which vel suits (sort of... lame on me) the hit you intend to do, in case of launchrs, vel never changes... answering Red, Spidey's launcher ONLY works if foe is alredy on air, buy has a fixed value, it does not change if foe is on ground or in a certain position on air (On ground, y is always 0, inless we are talking about medium punch launcher instead of the kick)

What you need here is to adjust y accel, VS game rely a LOT on this to achive some sort of "real" (?) hitvel gravity, the best way to do it is to use the opponent's yaccel constant + some extra acceleration... Nobuyuki knows a lot of this, His magneto (older versions, not this last one ) uses values like yaccel = (enemynear, const(movement.yaccel))+0.1, so, instead of adding, 0.5 or 0.6 to this parameter, you get different values depending of the foes gravity value (so every fighter feels lighter or heavier) for example, if Magneto has a yaccel or 0.49, then 0.49+0.1 = 0.59, if Captain commando has a vaue of 0.47 then that + 0.1 gives you 0.57 and so on, this emulates (not 100% but much closer) the air hit behaviour, of course, with that values, most y vels are lower than -2 or -3, but tat depends of the yaccel and the type of hit.

n tthe case of falling foes, rmember you have 2 cases: knockdown attacks (Air rave finishers and some moves like felicia's delta kick) and knock away attacks (Strider hiryu's Gram, Captan Kick, and some Fying screen moves, like Captain Sword, Magnetic shockwave...) Depending on which attack is and which character is the property given, for example, Delta kick knocks down when felicia is coming down, logical since she is tilting down the foe with her foot. Aerial rave finisher gets the same behaviour, because you are smashing the foe directly into the floor, there you have even a positive y vel and adding YACCEL, so they accelerate even more...

The difference then is that, if you tilt down your foe, you always get a positive y hitvel, but has yaccel too, but is the move is a knock away, then you get a negative y hitvel with y accel... just take in mind that knock aways can change into a ground auto recover, or a complete fall in the floor just depends on the property of the move, same goes for knock downs, moves that launch the foe into air and he recovers there after a while are neither a knockdown or knockback...

Maybe someone (like Nobuyuki, or Cloudius or Kamekaze) can help more on this.

See ya!!!

[Tha Lando ( Le CROM )]

ACEY and Rednavi, i am studying this like homework.