USB Gecko is the new Action Replay! (added potential goals)

[phish-it]

I've actually grown to Brawl as it is. A couple of days ago I went to try out Melee just for kicks and I couldn't properly L-Cancel or do other advanced techniques, this was because I've gotten used to a more realistic gravity system with lag animations that make sense.

*Double Jumps with Ganon and does a forward-air

*lands

Yeah, that makes alot of sense.




By the way, just because Brawl isn't as technical as Melee was, doesn't mean it is more mind game oriented than Melee.

Higher potential of Techskill =/= Lower potential of Mindgames

 

[PK-ow!]

Goals for 'official' physics changes:

Goal Set 1 (no balance testing necessary and straightforward to implement)
- remove tripping
I don't think this requires balance testing and should be doable.

Sp'duh.

Goal Set 2 (heavy balance testing necessary and straightforward to implement, probably)
- increase hit lag
- increase shield lag and/or decrease shield hit stun
- increase overall gravitational constant

Whoa whoa, what? That would take serious consideration. How could we know where to set a value like hit lag? Anything you do there would drastically alter game balance, in the sense that you could be changing it into one where the character dynamic is essentially different.

Gravitational constant, meh, I guess. I really don't understand why people love their high gravity so much.

Goal Set 3 (light balance testing necessary and difficult to implement, probably)
- take out the "auto recovery" feature
(reduce the "edge size" (maximum distance the edge can be grabbed) slightly)
(disable B moves from snapping to the edge before the end of the move)
- allow characters to immediately drop from the edge after grabbing and reduce the invincibility time gained from grabing the edge to balance this
- leave edge occupied for a short period of time after a character rolls back on the stage
- restore dash dancing

Removing auto-recovery? BULL****. Let's look at the reason for it:

The auto recovery just removes an important element of smash games. Forcing people to think about how they recover and time properly will only add to the game. Dash dancing will allow for players more options in terms of spacing, and may possible restore the Melee style pivot also.

How is that "an important element of smash games"? I see no necessary connection between the smash series and the essentiality of precise recoveries. The way I see it, grabbing the ledge is what you want the character to do, and if you're character were more than an idiotic automaton, he'd grab the ledge when you aimed for it. Grabbing the ledge early is nothing more than an automatic input of a command that they don't have the ability to implement a suitable command for yet.
There is the middle ground of not allowing it for moves like Dolphin Slash and Screw Attack, yet for moves like ExtremeSpeed or Quick Attack, but I can't really put that forward as again it could become arbitrary and very much disturb character power level.

Reducing the edge size slightly is a good move, though. Characters should reach the length of their limbs, not anything else.

The second bullet point, and some value of the third point, are also good ideas. But I hope people agree with me, that in some degree, making edge guarding harder makes it that much more skill-testing to pull it off.
Right now, it's practically impossible - you have to time it so you grab on and hog it with your invincibility frames. This is arguably too hard, as it simply favours the conservative non-hog choice.
I believe Melee's though were too long, there's no reason the other character can't grab on when the first guy is not actually standing there anymore.

The ledge should be hogged so long as some part of the character is at the ledge, filling the space the other char needs to grab. This is a handful of frames difference, I'm sure.

Restoring dash dancing... I'll leave that to other "Melee v.2 bashers" and their arguments, as I am too pissed to even consider that point right now.

The "edge size" probably an other value or values in the memory. [/I]

It could be a specification of a 'hit space' surrounding the edge on each map.

Goal Set 4 (probably too awesome to actually happen, but worth investigating)
- restore L cancel like functionality
Enough said.

Oh for ---- sake's.... *no*

Why? Just why? (see my quote+reply to your anticipatory "why are you turning this into Melee" section)

Regarding possible character balance changes:
I would like to work towards making a large majority of characters playable competitively and prevent any single strategy from being completely broken. Basically, make changes only when characters are completely unusable or there are strategies that completely broken. Trying to take out tiers is unrealistic, imo.

Well okay.

Beyond these, I do not expect to make any more 'official' changes to the physics, because I think it would be best to keep it simple as possible while making the game more competitive, but I cant predict what people will find so it could change. If there is code that will restore wavedashing and it works well in a balanced way, I don't see a problem with adding it, and there might be more things like that in the future.

Why do these changes look like we are trying to turn this game into Melee?
Short answer: Because, we are.
Long answer: We are simply trying to make Brawl more competitive with as little changes as possible. Instead of pulling random ideas out of our heads that could make the game more competitive and testing them for long periods of time, it is easier to use what has been successful in the past (Melee). If we do run across something completely unique that makes Brawl more competitive without imbalancing the game, we may add it also.

"as little changes as possible". At some point you have to tell yourself what makes Brawl Brawl. I think auto-"L'-cancelling is included in that; it's basically a property of some moves having no lag if you use them a certain way, and other moves always carrying risk.

This I am particularly curious about, since how was it anything other than skill-de-emphasizing to have every move L cancellable? Pressing L every time it applies is easy enough, so it's no threshold to the game; and so it just makes motion through your moves incredibly low risk.

Anticipating, I expect the reply is that it removes the risk of your opponent's counterattacks/mindgames, allowing the whole interaction to be more high stakes, but to prevent camping (as it would favour offense over defense). This is indeed a substantial point. But I think this is something we should maybe try to avoid changing, if some other way to turn Brawl away from campiness can be found, because as I said, the auto-cancelling seems like an essentially Brawl feature.

Other Goals:
- debug menu?
- get frame data
- make the neutral stages from subspace selectable from versus mode
- increase replay time limit to 8-10 minutes
- enable full shield even on light button press (if there is no analog shield implemented)
Probably will be a lot more of these types of projects as more people start working on it.

debug menu?
Ah, sweet possibility on #3.
The limitation on 4, I'm sure you suspect, could simply be hard-coded memory-economization from the game.

And yes, please, enable that fifth one. However, you are hopefully aware that if you cannot implement that soon, it would throw off people's learned timing for certain L/R inputs (for people who configure L or R to other buttons, such as myself, and people who play with their left foot, for example).

 

[KillL0ck]

*Double Jumps with Ganon and does a forward-air

*lands

Yeah, that makes alot of sense.




By the way, just because Brawl isn't as technical as Melee was, doesn't mean it is more mind game oriented than Melee.

Higher potential of Techskill =/= Lower potential of Mindgames

If everyone being 10 tons of weight classifies as making sense, than I'm all arms. I think people are just too use to the change of weight from "Melee" to "Brawl". If any of these changes were to be implemented, cement weight shouldn't be one of them. I'm all in it for combo's though, thats something we all can agree on, obviously.

 

[phish-it]

If everyone being 10 tons of weight classifies as making sense, than I'm all arms. I think people are just too use to the change of weight from "Melee" to "Brawl". If any of these changes were to be implemented, cement weight shouldn't be one of them. I'm all in it for combo's though, thats something we all can agree on, obviously.

Hmmm, you quoted my post, but that...didn't have anything to do with what I said. Character gravity is different from lag from arial attacks (if thats what you were referring to).

 

[Thingy Person]

Woah...didn't read close enough there. I agree with that wall of text. (and when I saw octopusman's username I thought you were another troll)
Autosweetspotting is good for Smash. It forces people to go off the edge instead of tutling. Brawl's physics allow this for all characters, so why remove it?
As for L-Cancelling...no comment.

 

[E-bomb]

If you guys are trying to make Brawl as much like Melee as you can, why not just play Melee?

Really. The only characters you tourney tards ever use are Fox, Falco, and those others that were high tier in Melee. No one bothered to make a tier list for Brawl, so you stuck with those characters.

Smash wasn't made for competitive play. It was made to be enjoyed. And winning money from tournaments does not count as enjoying the game. That's enjoying money.

I actually LOVE Brawl, with everything new it has. The new stages are all great, but you tourney tards only play on friggin Final Destination. So you don't like all the cool things the stages do.

You're saying "It's Melee 2.0". Why don't you just hack Melee? You will have all the wave dashing crap you want and you could do it without me having to worry that I'm facing a hacker on Wi-fi.








Actually, nevermind. Don't go back to Melee. Just get a f*cking life. Stop playing video games 24/7. Seriously. All of you need to shut the f*ck up and do something else for once.

 

[talking_chicken]

Autosweetspotting is good for Smash. It forces people to go off the edge instead of tutling. Brawl's physics allow this for all characters, so why remove it?

Ike, ROB and Snake do not like the way you think.

I'm not on either side for autosweetspotting, but I will ask this: Which side to you want to make it harder on - the edgeguarder, who will have to find some other way to edgeguard (and I don't think it was THAT easy to edgeguard in Melee, unless you were uberpro), or the person recovering, so they'll have to time their sweetspot properly? Whichever way you go, you're making it hard for one person and easier for the other. So, which is it?

 

[Wind Owl]

The fact is, Brawl is not an elaborate game of rock-paper-scissors. Nor is it tic-tac-toe. This GUARANTEES the presence of a metagame as long as one is willing to look for it. A metagame does not depend on physics exploits. The fact is a game in which both players turtle, is, by definition, one that never ends. So somebody's going to have to figure out a way to work around that.

Is my argument that people shouldn't be doing this, that they're some kind of Brawl-playing heathen? No, it's not. My argument is that I will continue to play Brawl, because despite what anyone may tell you, we don't know a lot about it.

And I respect that opinion. I also believe the metagame will develop, possibly even enough to make it fun for me again without hacking it. But if this works, this will basically guarantee that Brawl is fun again. It's a win/win situation, and it's not hurting anybody.

Take, for example, tripping. At some point the Brawl community decided that tripping is simply determined by a random number generator when you start a dash. I will personally buy one of these USB geckos for anyone who can prove this to me.

As XEN2.0 already posted, http://youtube.com/watch?v=PmCtH2QTsPw

... it's apparent that we don't know everything we could about the physics engine.

Yes, I agree.

2. The device required for this is essentially a hex editor. Despite all of the other features that basically make "cheating" easier, the device is technically *just* a hex editor. Now, I've used hex editors before. In fact, I'd say, compared to the average person, I use them very frequently. It's a very maticulous process, using a hex editor. To accomplish some of the easiest goals (even "disabling" tripping) would take quite a fair bit of work and just as much research.[/QUOTE]
Yes, I've used them to and it's not a cakewalk. DragonBlade even stated this could take over a year, so we know what we're getting ourselves into.

To accomplish something with a serious impact on the metagame (say, re-enabling l-cancelling) would be to modify a game that was made using the most advanced technology (in the field) in the world, one that took years to make, with one of the most mundane and basic tools available.

You're right, we wouldn't be able to reprogram L-cancelling, but L-cancelling was in the game in an earlier version, so if we can activate a debug menu we might be able to restore that functionality.

This issue is also compouned by the fact that we know so little about the game, that once we get in there (so to speak), we won't know where we're going. It would be like tearing down the Empire State Building using a hammer and nails, while wearing a blindfold.

That's... an accurate and daunting analogy... I guess we'll see how it goes.

Do I think you shouldn't do this? No, I don't; if people have more fun playing this way, then what's the harm? After all, the ultimate purpose of a videogame is to have fun. But I think your goals are a little unrealistic and part of a larger problem.

We shall see.

No, of course not. Not once in this 40 page thread did I ever think of that possibility. I've just been trolling my own thread with "z0mg brawl sucks/melee rocks" this whole time. I'm glad we have such intelligent people on smashboards to point out things like this or we could never get anything done. Thanks!

Can it be making a forum tiem nao?

Sp'duh.

That's the first time I've ever seen that interjection...

Whoa whoa, what? That would take serious consideration. How could we know where to set a value like hit lag?

As stated in the OP, there are stickers that do it.

Anything you do there would drastically alter game balance, in the sense that you could be changing it into one where the character dynamic is essentially different.

Yes, once we overcome the daunting task of actually figuring out how to do any of this, there will have to be a lot of balance tweaking. But we feel increased hitlag is necessary to a competitive fighter, but I won't get into why because that is not what this thread is for. If you want some good arguments for it, see this thread.

Gravitational constant, meh, I guess. I really don't understand why people love their high gravity so much.

It would give an overall boost to the speed of the game.

Removing auto-recovery? BULL****. Let's look at the reason for it:
How is that "an important element of smash games"? I see no necessary connection between the smash series and the essentiality of precise recoveries. The way I see it, grabbing the ledge is what you want the character to do, and if you're character were more than an idiotic automaton, he'd grab the ledge when you aimed for it.[/QUOTE]
The way we see it, grabbing the ledge is a major part of competitive play. Knowing how to recover with a character is also part of knowing your character. Brawl's way, some you have to figure out (Zelda, Olimar) but for the mostpart you can just recover with anyone.

Grabbing the ledge early is nothing more than an automatic input of a command that they don't have the ability to implement a suitable command for yet.

Uh, what? Sakurai may have had the wrong intentions, but this game is near flawlessly programmed. "Don't have the ability to implement a suitable command for yet?" First of all, what's that 'yet' for? Like they're going to figure it out in SSB4? Second, that's ridiculous. Each character has their own way to recover, and you're proposing that "magical ledgegrab command" was too difficult for the programmers so instead they did it the way that every other Smash game did it.

There is the middle ground of not allowing it for moves like Dolphin Slash and Screw Attack, yet for moves like ExtremeSpeed or Quick Attack, but I can't really put that forward as again it could become arbitrary and very much disturb character power level.

Yes, recovery is a factor in how good a character is, but did you even play SSB64 or Melee? In SSB64, Pikachu had nigh the best recovery in the game. You had to control it manually, and it was easy to suicide, but the pro's could get to the edge every time. In Melee, one of the Pikachu AT's was QA Edgehogging, where you stood on the edge and QA'd from the ground to the edge. It was very difficult, but now due to dumbing down recovery, that isn't possible anymore.

The second bullet point, and some value of the third point, are also good ideas. But I hope people agree with me, that in some degree, making edge guarding harder makes it that much more skill-testing to pull it off.
Right now, it's practically impossible - you have to time it so you grab on and hog it with your invincibility frames. This is arguably too hard, as it simply favours the conservative non-hog choice.
I believe Melee's though were too long, there's no reason the other character can't grab on when the first guy is not actually standing there anymore.
The ledge should be hogged so long as some part of the character is at the ledge, filling the space the other char needs to grab. This is a handful of frames difference, I'm sure.

Actually, I do agree with this. A middle ground would be nice.

Restoring dash dancing... I'll leave that to other "Melee v.2 bashers" and their arguments, as I am too pissed to even consider that point right now.

Uh, whatever.

It could be a specification of a 'hit space' surrounding the edge on each map.

You mean like a hitbox? Hopefully we would then be able to find the edgebox for each stage and decrease it, but it seems fairly standard.

"as little changes as possible". At some point you have to tell yourself what makes Brawl Brawl. I think auto-"L'-cancelling is included in that; it's basically a property of some moves having no lag if you use them a certain way, and other moves always carrying risk.

The core principal of this project is that we don't care what makes Brawl Brawl. We want a Brawl that is fun, not a Brawl that is Brawl.

This I am particularly curious about, since how was it anything other than skill-de-emphasizing to have every move L cancellable? Pressing L every time it applies is easy enough, so it's no threshold to the game; and so it just makes motion through your moves incredibly low risk.

Z-cancelling in SSB64 was pretty broken. Shielding an aerial would get YOU grabbed. But Melee's L-cancelling was balanced. There was some lag, enough to punish sometimes, and it sped up the game and separated noobs from serious players (you may not care about this or feel such a gap should not exist, and I'm not here to debate that point.) But moreover, it was a matter of character viability. In Brawl, Ganondorf, Falcon, Bowser, and others are all terrible characters because for every aerial they do, their opponent can get like 3 in, and for every aerial they fail, they get punished hard.

Anticipating, I expect the reply is that it removes the risk of your opponent's counterattacks/mindgames, allowing the whole interaction to be more high stakes, but to prevent camping (as it would favour offense over defense). This is indeed a substantial point. But I think this is something we should maybe try to avoid changing, if some other way to turn Brawl away from campiness can be found, because as I said, the auto-cancelling seems like an essentially Brawl feature.

Well, we'd prefer to use a method we know works, instead of one that may or may not exist.

(Casual elitist ranting)

Get out.

 

[XEN2.0]

Why do u guys make such a big deal out of us change the game? Like many other things in life, things evolve, or are tweaked. For instance: Hockey was created in a guys backyard as a leisure game. They used sticks and hamburger patties. Now, at some point they decided to try to make the game more competitive, they put in penalties, offside, icing etc. This made the game more competitive and to many it was more fun becasue it was competitive. And look, we still have kids playing on the street without offside, icing etc. And guesse what, both versions of hockey are fun, and many people play both, so please if we want to play hack-brawl melee, then dont make such a big fuss, OK

 

[leafgreen386]

If you guys are trying to make Brawl as much like Melee as you can, why not just play Melee?

Really. The only characters you tourney tards ever use are Fox, Falco, and those others that were high tier in Melee. No one bothered to make a tier list for Brawl, so you stuck with those characters.

Smash wasn't made for competitive play. It was made to be enjoyed. And winning money from tournaments does not count as enjoying the game. That's enjoying money.

I actually LOVE Brawl, with everything new it has. The new stages are all great, but you tourney tards only play on friggin Final Destination. So you don't like all the cool things the stages do.

You're saying "It's Melee 2.0". Why don't you just hack Melee? You will have all the wave dashing crap you want and you could do it without me having to worry that I'm facing a hacker on Wi-fi.
4






Actually, nevermind. Don't go back to Melee. Just get a f*cking life. Stop playing video games 24/7. Seriously. All of you need to shut the f*ck up and do something else for once.

I'll be brief.

1) People enjoy playing in tourneys, and playing competitively. The top 3 in a tourney aren't the only ones who have fun. This is just our preferred method of play. Too bad your feeble mind can't comprehend that.
2) Top tiers in brawl: snake, metaknight. We may not have an official tier list, but we still know who's good, based on tourney placings. People play a wide variety of characters.
3) Actually FD kinda sucks this time around. In a campy game, no platforms sucks, and the ledges trap people under them. We use a bunch of stages, not like you would know that, though.
4) You'll face hackers on wifi regardless.

Ah, the smell of fresh nubs in the morning.

 

[Smooth Criminal]

~snip.~

Reported for great justice.

Smooth Criminal

 

[Proverbs]

My opinion:

Let's not go overboard here. I think the main things that should be changed are: tripping, hitstun, MAYBE gravity.

Gravity should be changed only slightly if at all. We don't want to redefine Brawl's physics, but less floaty characters could be good (except characters like Toon Link who are made to be that way).

The game could be tweaked a bit, but let's not remake Melee.

And definitely no l-cancelling. The game is already incredibly smooth. Unless we're looking for zero lag l-cancelling which would be a little ridiculous and some moves already have no landing lag.

 

[Hizi]

I can understand getting rid of tripping and the problem with pressing the trigger down all the way for the shield along with it being too easy to block, but just about everything else will only make the already better characters better. There are a few other things I like about this, but overall it's for the worse.

 

[Wafflekin]

Why do u guys make such a big deal out of us change the game? Like many other things in life, things evolve, or are tweaked. For instance: Hockey was created in a guys backyard as a leisure game. They used sticks and hamburger patties. Now, at some point they decided to try to make the game more competitive, they put in penalties, offside, icing etc. This made the game more competitive and to many it was more fun becasue it was competitive. And look, we still have kids playing on the street without offside, icing etc. And guesse what, both versions of hockey are fun, and many people play both, so please if we want to play hack-brawl melee, then dont make such a big fuss, OK

The game was changed, but you don't see people petitioning the NHL or whatever to go back to using Hamburger patties.

 

[The Executive]

<censored due to scanners indicating epic ľl>

NO

1) People enjoy playing in tourneys, and playing competitively. The top 3 in a tourney aren't the only ones who have fun. This is just our preferred method of play. Too bad your feeble mind can't comprehend that.
2) Top tiers in brawl: snake, metaknight. We may not have an official tier list, but we still know who's good, based on tourney placings. People play a wide variety of characters.
3) Actually FD kinda sucks this time around. In a campy game, no platforms sucks, and the ledges trap people under them. We use a bunch of stages, not like you would know that, though.
4) You'll face hackers on wifi regardless.

YES

 

[11j]

someone has too much time

 

[Wind Owl]

NO U 10 Chars

 

[The Executive]

someone has too much time

Is it any wonder I've got TOOOOO MUCH TIME ON MY HANDS
...
and it's ticking away TIIIICKING AWAAAAAAY FROM MEEEEEEEEEE.

My, how this board degenerates.

 

[JohnAnon]

As much as I think this is a stupid idea for tourney***s who INSIST Melee is more "complex" than Brawl, if you even had a small shred of sense and change around characters to alter their attacks to MAKE THEM BALANCED, I'd actually approve this.

 

[Wind Owl]

Ugh. Is this thread even going anywhere? I'm totally making our own forums.

 

[Wind Owl]

Wow, get the **** out.

 

[Unseen_Killa]

You should consider getting a website and/or forums so you can post progress and people can discuss balance, maybe help you, etc. I know it has already been said, but I feel the need to stress that thought.

 

[Dustero]

I don't understand you guys, tripping isn't that bad and it hardly ever happens, you don't need to ruin the online part of the game even more by changing the games code. I hope Ninendo figures out about this and changes the Wii's coding to not allow it to be used on the Wii.

 

[SaxDude93]

I'm not sure if this has been brought up, but isn't breaking some sort of copyright or intellectual property law. I mean, people are modifying the game in ways that aren't supported by Nintendo in order to play tournaments that give out cash prizes. I wouldn't be surprised if this is fought with a lawsuit.

 

[Grunt]

Someone grab the BANHAMMER.

 

[Grunt]

I'm not sure if this has been brought up, but isn't breaking some sort of copyright or intellectual property law. I mean, people are modifying the game in ways that aren't supported by Nintendo in order to play tournaments that give out cash prizes. I wouldn't be surprised if this is fought with a lawsuit.

NO!
Again!
This WILL NOT be used in any major tournaments, it is only for personal lulz and maybe small local tournies hosted by people who fully comprehend the new physics.
A gameshark is not illegal, so this has no need to be either.

 

[Grunt]

Dude stop it.

 

[Yawgmoth]

i was about to report this guy, but then i realize 1/2 the posts in this thread are pretty much the same. at least hes a concise and honest troll. good work joe.

 

[zomg]

Just play ****ing Melee, god****. Brawl is Brawl, if you don't like it you don't have to play it.

 

[SaxDude93]

I didn't read the whole topic, but what are these "personal lulz" Do these include going online and using a new code to screw over people who just want to have fun online? If so Nintendo should do an Apple and brick their Wii's

 

[Wafflekin]

AverageJoe is here, representing the average Joe in this topic.

 

[Kreyn]

I think its a good idea, but there will need to be alot of work put into this to not make certain characters have useless abilitys. And also, would it be allowed in professional tournaments (evo, MLG).

 

[Grunt]

I didn't read the whole topic, but what are these "personal lulz" Do these include going online and using a new code to screw over people who just want to have fun online? If so Nintendo should do an Apple and brick their Wii's

I'm sure nintendo has something to block access to online play if your data is different in any way. personal lulz probably wasn't the best phrase, but i think i got my point across.

@whoever posted above me:
No, EVO / MLG will not allow any modded games most likely.

 

[Tristan Fattest of All Kids]

\#\
(>^_^(>o_O)>Just play Melee!

I reported you. I find you quite ridiculous for trying to mess up our post. I'll see to it that your account gets banned.
Me? I am simply the Public Relations Manager of this thread.

 

[zomg]

I reported you. I find you quite ridiculous for trying to mess up our post. I'll see to it that your account gets banned.
Me? I am simply the Public Relations Manager of this thread.

Terrible troll. I reported you.

 

[Tristan Fattest of All Kids]

Terrible troll. I reported you.

What is wrong with you. What did I do?
Oh, you mean this guy.

 

[Tristan Fattest of All Kids]

Just play Melee! <(^_^<)

Also, threads shouldn't need PR people~

Wow, you are really dumb if you don't realize your stupidity.

 

[Wafflekin]

What is wrong with you. What did I do?
Oh, you mean this guy.

The 1st amendment would like to speak with you.

Hint: Freedom of speech

 

[Grunt]

hmm, well at least it's not a bot, but you've got some serious determination, i'll give you that.

 

[Tristan Fattest of All Kids]

The 1st amendment would like to speak with you.

I think you are not realizing who I was talking to here.
Anyways, I just don't like how he can just ruin our post.