Viewers, Trainers & Modules - Oh My! A Library of Tech Knowledge

Fickle-BLM

With access to older titles seeming to increase by the day, I've run into an issue I'm sure many of us have faced or are facing: a lack of reliable information when learning a fighting game (FG), or having to jump through hoops during configuration.

With this thread, I'm hoping to pool the community's collective knowledge to facilitate the creation and development of features and tools that will make fighting games convenient to learn or set up. Examples include: hitbox viewers, combo trainers, alternative user interlaces - literally anything that helps people play FGs, not fight to even play them.

Features like rollback integration are within the scope of this thread, but are robust enough topics to require their own thread. Rollback Netcode: What it is & how to use it. is already a solid starting point for discussing rollback in particular.

At the time writing this, I personally don't have the technical knowledge to initiate a project or feature, but I'm in the process of figuring out what I need to know. That said, I can name at least one feature I believe would be useful in most, if not all fighters.

In BlazBlue: Central Fiction, the challenge mode has an optional feature that plays a boop sound when you land a hit, which turns learning combos into a rhythm game of sorts. However, that feature is oddly absent in the training mode, or at least buried in a menu I cannot find. This is a prime example of something superficial on paper, but would be helpful to someone who is hard of hearing, or relies on audio cues over visual.

With all that said, here are some conversation starters and questions to guide the discussion:

Identifying what features a fighter needs that will service a community.
Planning the scope and development of said features.
Establishing what programming languages or tools are needed to create and integrate features.
Quality control to prevent feature creep and prioritize a base level of usability.
Who in the community has worked on, or is working on relevant features?
What features can be added to assist the disabled?

blueminder

For Dreamcast, NAOMI, & Atomiswave games, I made a universal Training Mode available in Flycast Dojo, which comes bundled with Fightcade. This was made to help folks lab in games that may or may not have one built-in. This has definitely been handy for games that have only seen an arcade release, but it also adds features to games with Training Modes already built-in.

Once in Training Mode hit TAB or your mapped Menu button and you will see Training Mode optons available to you.

The mode allows you to switch players on the same controller with a single press (F7), record/play/loop inputs on 3 different slots (F1-F6), load RetroArch cheat files and load/save states at will (F8, F9). As of the most recent pre-release (0.4.23), it also has input display available in the Melty Blood style, showing your current direction, buttons pressed, and the duration it is held down. It will also show the inputs for any recorded inputs during playback and looping.

Input display defaults to Numpad/Anime direction notation, but also has direction initials (U, D, L, R) available if you change it in the settings. These will soon be actual directions once I get Dear ImGui icon fonts in.

This can either be accessed through the Test Game button via Fightcade, or by setting TRAIN in the top right menu when you open the emulator by itself. For details on how to use this, check out the Training Mode section of the README.

For Virtua Fighter 3tb, VF Harpoon created a tutorial video on how to use the Training Mode features with the game.

The Hokuto no Ken Discord has a tutorial note showing how to use savestates with Training Mode, complete with a cheat file for the game.

Flycast is also in the early days of Lua support. There's an example Lua script available for those of you who want to make any scripts or trainers for the emulator for your games of choice. It should be automatically loaded when you keep the file in the same directory as the emulator. It's not documented much yet, so your best bet for support right now is asking flyinghead, the Flycast author, in the Flycast Discord.

Anyone who wishes to help make the Training Mode features better or write scripts for specific games are more than welcome to do so. You can contribute on the Flycast Dojo GitHub project and chat with us on the Flycast Discord. You can also share your wisdom in the Wiki We'd love to see what the community comes up with!

mountainmanjed

Can't think of anything really with Lua on Flycast other some add some simple 3d shapes(Sphere, Cylinder, and Boxes) for lua to render for collision in the few 3d fighters on the hardware but that probably ain't till way later though.

I know this is alot but after superficial lua stuff of life and time edits with some rules. People are going to need to dig deeper with a proper SH4a debugger to figure out how collision/mechanics works.

blueminder

mountainmanjed You should already be able to draw 2D shapes and overlays in the Lua implementation that's available. 3D ones might be a bit more complex.

As far as debugger goes, the user lhs_azevedo in the Flycast Discord has been working on just that:

No clue about progress at this point, but he chimes in on the general chat every so often.

You can also use RetroArch's built in cheat finder with the Flycast core to mess with the memory.

mountainmanjed

Does the break points trigger on a memory writes and/or reads not just code execution. Code execution break points is wonderful if you have a symbol table or disassembly already.

I'm Just trying to think of stuff other people will use and not just me. Cause i can go on how i use mame's debugger on stuff even dreamcast mvc2.