Music:

1st – tha Trickaz – Heritage (CloZee remix)
2nd – C5 & Seanyy – Battlecry
3rd – Skan & Krale – No Glory (feat. M.I.M.E & Drama B) [Nimez & LEVR Remix]

Released: 10/24/2017

Combos and Editing by Cjbqulix

Highlights: 0:40- Nasty EX Mine conversion against Nash utilizing FANG’S good juggle potential, 1:06- Crush Counter Sweep Combo’d into throw followed up by a sneaky reset, 1:34- Unveiling of one of FANG’s true 50/50’s off of a normal wake-up in the corner, 2:10 Tight coward crouch follow-up after a combo leading into a meaty super on Nash (may be character specific?), 2:24 The holy grail of FANG combos AKA a 30 hit stylish combo featuring a wide variety of links, all three meters, and v-trigger! More optimal versions of this combo exist for less hits with a possibility to reach up to 90% damage!

Music: Song 1- Control Freak- Hyrule(zoo)
Song 2- JaySounds – Told ‘Em All

Released: 9/1/2016

Combos and Editing by Cjbqulix

SF4 Game Mechanics: Focus Attacks
SF4 Game Mechanics: Blocking and Blockstrings
SF4 Game Mechanics: Meaties and Safe Jumps
SF4 Game Mechanics: Option Selects
SF4 Game Mechanics: Frame Traps

SF4 Game Mechanics: Tutorial Video Playlist

This is an incredible resource for anyone who wants to learn the technical side of competitive Street Fighter 4, and all of it still applies to SSF4AE2012. In addition to his SF4 Game Mechanics series, 3nigmat1c wrote two extra articles on avoiding projectiles and punishing mistakes.

Fireball Avoidance Patterns
The Art of Punishing: Practical Applications of Frame and Hitbox Data

Most of his examples revolve around Balrog, but the underlying concepts can be applied to just about about any character in Super Street Fighter 4 Arcade Edition 2012.

In older Capcom games, a dummy’s vulnerable area consists of invisible rectangles that loosely follow the sprites displayed on the screen. Using a hitbox viewer to peek under the hood, we can see the game engine handling these combat interactions. Red boxes represent attacks and blue boxes represent vulnerable spaces.

We can see that SFA2 Zangief’s hittable boxes stay rectangular no matter what his sprite does. Even if his sprite is bending over or leaning back, it doesn’t effect the combo.

In Street Fighter 4, recovery hittable boxes are procedurally generated and closely follow the character model. Even a slight movement, like the subtle rising of Claw’s head here, can be used for a meaty setup.

Notice that Abel’s hand is outstretched for several frames before Vega headbutts him. Because every character has a different model in Street Fighter 4, it’s possible for the same combo to work differently on every member of the cast.

Please note that although recovery frames follow the model very closely, active frames and startup frames are similar to the old-style boxes.

Chun Li’s far s.HP consistently whiffs through Balrog’s crouching hitbox in SF4, despite her fist clearly touching his shoulder. In any hitbox-based fighting game, there are bound to be at least a few visually misleading interactions.

Each character also has many different reactions to being hit – based on where they are hit and the distance from the attack. Above you can see a standing Honda getting hit by Ryu’s c.MP from two different ranges. Up close, Honda gets hit in his ribs and turns to the side. From further away, Honda gets hit in his stomach and bends over.

Here you can see that Claw has different reactions to Dictator’s j.HP depending on whether he gets hit low, medium, or high. These different hit stuns can seem quite random because extremely minor changes can cause huge differences. Figuring out what kind of reaction you want and how to cause it is very important.

You might think that identifying which characters are good combo dummies is a straightforward process: just pick the tallest and fattest guys, and do all combos on Zangief and Sagat. However, even characters that are normally horrible for combos can be used in some unique meaty setups, because of their varied hit reactions.

It’s pointless to mention every character in detail – once you get a combo idea, you really need to try it on nearly every character to find the best target. It helps to know that Blanka, Dictator, Balrog and most of the women are hard to combo on the ground, and the tall muscle men are easy. However it would be remiss of me not to talk about some of the best combo dummies.

SETH

One of the first steps to designing an SFIV combo is coming up with an excuse not to do it on Seth. Seriously, this guy has everything. He’s almost as tall as Sagat, he has one of the widest hitboxes, he has some of Dhalsim’s reach tricks, he has the lowest vitality and stun in the game, and it just feels really good to hit him.

ROSE

Rose has the most unique setups by far. She has a good dash and the slowest fireball in the game, allowing for the best fireball trade combos. She also has a unique far s.LK – if it trades, it still counts as a counterhit. On top of that, her crouching hitbox is almost as small as Chun Li’s.

DHALSIM

Dhalsim doesn’t quite have the speed or reach of Seth, but he has a lot more useful angles. He also has the most useful EX fireball and ultra for trade setups.

E.HONDA

Honda has a really small pushbox, letting you to practically stand inside him. This allows for longer link combos and registers close attacks from slightly farther away than normal, like Gouken.

THE FIST BUMP

Many characters’ hands extend past their bodies during hit stun, allowing them to be struck by standing attacks from far away. Sagat, Seth, Abel, and Chun Li all have useful hands.

THE LEAN BACK

A common reaction to being hit in the head is for the head to swing back and then return forward. This allows meaty setups by placing an attack where the head was – when the head returns, you score a delayed hit.

THE DUCK

When a character gets hit low, they often duck down or to the side. Because the head is briefly out of the way, it can be used for meaty setups such as Chun Li’s LK Spinning Bird Kick loop.

THE WIDE CROUCHING HONDA

Crouching Honda is deceptively short and surprisingly wide. Crouching characters in general are easier to hit with low attacks from long range.

This covers the most commonly used combo dummies in Street Fighter 4. However for almost every character in the game, there exists a combo that only works on them. If you come up with an amazingly groundbreaking combo idea, don’t give up until you’ve tested it on the entire cast.

How it works: A certain number of frames are played normally, then one frame is dropped, then some more normal frames, then another drop, and so on. During a dropped frame, everything in the game world continues to happen, but it doesn’t get displayed. In the span of one real-life frame, two in-game frames get processed by the machine. This has the effect of making everything except music and sound effects faster: startup, recovery, impact freeze, walk speed, charge requirements, background animations, etc. all get faster.

1	1	0
2	2	1
3	3	2
4		3
	1	4
1	2	5
2	3	6
3		7
4	1	8
	2	9
1	3	10
2		11
3	1	12
4	2	13
5	3	14
		15
1	1	16
2	2	17
3	3	18

The other consequence is you can’t send any input during the dropped frames. Any controls held or not held before the skip remain that way during the skip. The increased speed and the temporary loss of control make frameskip important to competitive play and combo videos, but for different reasons:

• Being randomly unable to control your character makes combos more likely to fail. Combos that are less reliable can make the game more unpredictable and exciting—and can weaken any overpowered strategies the developers left in. One-frame links can end up as zero-frame links.
• Likewise, an exhibition combo with tight timing will fail if the frame needed for a link, jump, CC activation, etc. is skipped. This is especially prominent when recording input with an emulator and savestates: Once the action is started, the same frames will be lost no matter how many times you retry. You may have to kill some time before the initial setup to get it to work.
• But don’t do it at Normal unless you have to. Combos should be recorded at the same speed people play at (or faster) otherwise they just feel too slow.
• Ironically, frameskip can ameliorate the Youtube problem by constantly changing up which half of the frames get cut out by the encoder.
• In SF2HF, SSF2T and HSF2, frameskip can rob you of the ability to do reversals: if the one frame you need to execute the reversal gets skipped, you will be vulnerable for at least one frame and may be helpless against a meaty attack or tick throw.
• Frameskip will aggravate any effort to collect frame data. What’s less obvious is that it’s still there on Normal speed in some cases, like CvS 1.
• Adjustable speed presents a problem when you and someone else prefer different settings. What do you pick when you play against each other?

Except for the earlier implementations, the sequence of normal and dropped frames falls into distinct patterns. Shorter blocks of unskipped frames means a larger relative number of dropped frames and higher effective speed. The strip to the right illustrates SFA3 Ryu’s s.LK at Turbo 1 (4,4,5,4,4,5,…) and Turbo 2 (3,3,3,…). The frames that would get dropped are marked red, though the start of the cycle is going to be randomly placed.

Below is a table of frameskip patterns for most of the arcade games and some console games that use it. Also given is the overall speed relative to no frameskip, which is computed by dividing the in-game frames by the real-life frames elapsed in one cycle.

This data was collected by using an emulator and watching how the match timer goes down frame by frame at each speed setting. (Whenever it decrements by more than one unit you know a frame was skipped.) I used this Lua script to expedite the process.

* Some games have more stable patterns than others. The Marvel games are always on time with their skips, but sf2hf, ssf2t, dstlk, nwarr, and the PSX ports of Darkstalkers 3 and SFA2 are much more random. The timing might depend on the stage, how much action is going on, and possibly random factors.

Street Fighter II series

sf2hf*

ssf2t*

hsf2

There’s no frameskip in sf2, sf2ce or ssf2.

Rufus has found the patterns for HDR by looking for dropped frames in footage of Chun-Li’s lightning legs.

HD Remix

Street Fighter Alpha series

sfa

sfa2, sfz2al

sfa3

Darkstalkers series

dstlk*

nwarr*

vsav

vhunt2, vsav2

Pocket Fighter

sgemf

Marvel series

msh

xmvsf

mshvsf, mvsc

There’s no frameskip in xmcota.

NAOMI games

sfz3ugd (SFZ3 Upper)

capsnk (CvS 1), cvsgd (CvS Pro), mvsc2 (MvC 2)

cvs2gd (CvS 2)

Selected console versions

Street Fighter II Turbo (SNES)

Turbo speeds above 4 require a code to unlock.

Street Fighter Alpha 2 (PSX)*

Darkstalkers 3 (PSX)*

Marvel Super Heroes (PSX)

Capcom vs. SNK Pro (PSX)

Maj found the patterns for CFE using the beta version’s frame advance feature.

Capcom Fighting Evolution (PS2)

Street Fighter II: The World Warrior

Ryu has plenty of red – an invincible leg and an active space extending to his other knee, but has a vulnerable hit box below him. Ken has lots of invincibility and a large attack box.

Street Fighter II: Champion Edition

Ken learns to uppercut with his knee.

Street Fighter II: Hyper Fighting

Ryu’s attack box is slightly smaller vertically, and more vulnerable on his front leg, but he loses the blue box below him.

Super Street Fighter II

Ryu reverts back to his old vulnerability boxes.

Super Street Fighter II Turbo

Ryu has a more vulnerable leg. Ken becomes vulnerable to crossups, and can now hit with his head and foot, but strangely not his fist.

Street Fighter Alpha

Ryu’s foot is invincible, but he’s vulnerable everywhere else and can no longer cross up. Ken is invincible, but has a much smaller horizontal box than he does in SF2.

Street Fighter Alpha 2

Ryu no longer has an invincible foot. Ken now has leaner horizontal range with a skinny vulnerability box.

Street Fighter Alpha 3

Huge vulnerability boxes and tiny attack boxes – that’s how you know you’re doing an SFA3 jumping attack.

X-Men vs Street Fighter

Ryu has a large crossup-capable attack box.

Marvel Super Heroes vs Street Fighter

Ryu’s attack box becomes much smaller.

Marvel vs Capcom

Ken stance has slightly more horizontal range and a higher hitbox.

Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike

Ryu’s foot is mostly invulnerable. Ken has large vertical attack boxes, but huge vulnerability.

Street Fighter IV

Ryu has fairly large vulnerability boxes and a small attack box. Ken has a thin diagonal attack box and invulnerable legs.

Super Gem Fighter Mini-Mix

Ryu can only hit with his foot, but luckily he has a huge invulnerable foot. Ken only has an invulnerable fist.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo

Ryu has no jump attacks, but the Shoryuken hitbox is so big it’s basically a full screen move.

(If you would like to view hitboxes for yourself, use these lua scripts written by Dammit.)

Street Fighter
Problem: In the (MAME) arcade version, one of two sound channels handles sound effects while the other predominantly handles music. Unfortunately, some of the sound effects such as the impact noise and the kick whooshing sound come through the music channel. Therefore, muting the music channel leaves the sound effects sounding flat.
Solution: PS2/Xbox Capcom Classics Collection 2 includes a version of SF1 with an audio option menu which lets you adjust music and sound effects levels individually. It’s not available from the main menu before loading the game, so it’s easy to miss. You have to load SF1 and then press Select to bring up the Pause Menu. Access Audio Setup to take Music Volume all the way down while leaving SFX Volume alone.

CPS1 SF2 Trilogy: World Warrior, Champion Edition, Hyper Fighting
Problem: Same problem, except the other way around – some of the musical drum beats are handled by the sound effects channel.
Solution: Creating a MAME save state and loading it from any of the three introductory game loading screens (hardware check, game identification, regional warning) magically mutes the background music where the state was loaded. Unfortunately the soundtrack changes when one of the characters gets under 30% vitality and that brings back the music. So if you intend to do a combo with 1P against 2P, beat up the 1P character until the music changes and then save the state. That way the music won’t change even if your combo does 100% damage against 2P. This limits your options somewhat but it should be good enough for most cases.

CPS2 Library: SSF2/ST, Alpha series, Marvel series, Darkstalkers series, etc.
Solution: Kawaks does the trick with Sound -> QSound options -> Disable QSound music and other emulators have similar options. Otherwise, you can request custom soundtrack muting cheats, which simply silence the music without altering anything else.

Street Fighter Collection: SSF2 and ST
Solution: PSX/Saturn versions let you shut off music within the Option screen by lowering the BGM Volume stars down to zero while leaving the SE Volume setting alone. (This is the version that gives Guile access to CPS1 chains in both SSF2 and ST.)

HSF2 and HSFA plus the rest of SFA Anthology
Solution: While neither of these PS2 titles offer BGM muting options, they do benefit from the awesome PS2 feature of being able to eject the disc during gameplay. Since the music is read off the disc in real time, removing it stops the music while preserving all other sound effects. The game will keep running as long as you don’t encounter any loading screens. In most cases you can even change characters without having to put the disc back in.

SF3 Trilogy: New Generation, 2nd Impact, and 3rd Strike
Solution: Dreamcast versions of Double Impact and 3rd Strike as well as PS2 3S (SFAC) all have convenient soundtrack muting options.

Street Fighter IV and SSF4
Problem: Xbox360/PS3 versions let you shut off music via Options -> Sound Settings but it still remains faintly audible even at the lowest volume level.
Solution: The best way to completely shut off background music in SF4 is to create a silent MP3 file, put it on a USB drive, load it onto the console, and play it after you start the game. I do it when i reach the mode menu and it stays in effect until i turn off the PS3. If you don’t want to go through the trouble of making your own, here’s mine. (Unfortunately there’s no way to isolate the announcer samples and shut him up without disabling the character voices too.)

Capcom vs SNK, CvSPro, and Marvel vs Capcom 2
Solution: Dreamcast versions don’t have any volume control options whatsoever, so you’ll have to create custom soundtrack remixes with silent non-looping audio files. It’s kind of a hassle, but fairly straightforward as far as hassles go.

Capcom vs SNK 2
Solution: The Dreamcast version lets you shut off music via Option Mode -> Sound Option. You can even save VS Mode matches onto your VMU and then watch them in Replay Mode after turning off BGM from the menu. But personally i keep BGM off at all times because there’s no bigger waste of time than having to rerecord a combo due to this oversight.

Capcom Fighting Evolution/Jam
Solution: Xbox/PS2 versions can disable music via Option Mode -> Sound Option -> BGM Level.

SvC Chaos
Solution: Kawaks has a great little feature where you can press numpad + or – keys to scroll through the game’s music selection. Using this feature, you can flip through all the stage soundtracks until you reach one of the short samples like the Game Over tune. Let it play out and you’ll have the rest of the round to do whatever you want in silence. For other emulators, you’ll probably have to go through the cheat code route to artificially silence the music without altering anything else.

Marvel vs Capcom 3
Solution: Xbox360/PS3 versions can turn music off through Options -> Sound -> BGM Volume.

Well, that covers basically every major Capcom fighting game series of the past twenty years. If anyone happens to have similar information regarding other titles, please post it as a comment to help us gather every solution in one convenient place.

Sprite flickering was especially prominent in 2D games to indicate that something was appearing, disappearing, invisible, or invincible. It’s also employed in situations where there are more sprites on screen than the hardware can handle. Dropped frames cause flickering objects to remain solid or disappear entirely. Maj recently reupped his SF? Guile Exhibition in high res, and that’s what happened to the barrel debris in the bonus stage intermission.

Sonic Booms present a similar problem: the animation cycle is in four parts, with the sprite changing on each frame. With half those frames gone, the animation looks incomplete. The difference can be easily spotted at around 1:11 when the Sonic Boom on screen goes from half to fully animated during the KO slowdown. Hadoukens also have a four-part animation, but two frames pass between segments, so losing every other frame makes no discernible difference.

You may be able to reduce the inevitable quality damage by performing the framedrop with your own video editing software before uploading. Let’s examine a short sample clip from the barrel dropping bonus stage in the arcade version of Street Fighter II: Champion Edition. This clip has lots of flickering and high-frequency effects that have the potential to be spoiled: The barrel debris, the scoreboard, the Hadoukens and the rapid-fire punches and kicks.

I’ll be using Avisynth scripts to describe the editing operations. You can use most any video editor to do these things but Avisynth is controlled by plain-text scripts that can easily be shared. Here is the avs script file used for the examples below. Click on the headers to download the video that results after filtering and encoding.

Unaltered

This is what it’s supposed to look like. We want to keep it as close as possible to this after reducing the framerate.

Even and odd separately

selecteven/selectodd simply keeps every other frame and drops the rest. In this case, even makes the barrels vanish, while odd keeps the debris solid. Actually the solid doesn’t look too bad, except for the fact that player 1’s light-up tally isn’t being shown. (The reason the lights are bright on both sides in the Guile video is that clip is from World Warrior, and the flickering was introduced in CE.) Hadoukens flicker on and off for two frames each, so they appear normal after the frame loss.

Merged

Here, the clip is divided into both even and odd frames, then the two sets are mashed together with merge. Each pair of frames dissolves together like this:

Flickering objects are effectively rendered half transparent and appear a little dim. It’s possible to intensify some objects by weighting the merge operation toward one set, but this would also cause the complementary set to dim and the light-up boards on each side would appear at different brightness. Another downside of any blending is that it blurs all graphical changes. Moving sprites and scrolling backgrounds get smeared out over an extra frame.

Interleaved

Instead of merging even and odd frames, you can alternate them. This can be done by halving the original frames twice and then interleaving. Since there’s no blending there’s no blur, but the animation is a little choppy because an unequal amount of time passes between consecutive displayed frames: Instead of skipping every other frame, it’s alternating between skipping zero and two. This means the flicker effect is preserved (at half rate) in the barrel debris and lights, which change every frame. However, the animation for Hadoukens and rapid fire punches and kicks changes every two frames, so now they are prone to being spoiled. In this case, the Hadoukens are OK but the punches and kicks don’t animate. If the even/odd filter pattern is changed up you can reverse that but something’s going to be broken.

Change FPS

changefps sets the framerate to the specified value by simply deleting frames while maintaining the duration. Youtube’s method is likely to be similar to this. Since the source framerate, at 59.6, is not an exact multiple of 30, the result alternates between showing the even and odd frames, which you can tell from the periodic disappearance of each player’s score display.

Convert FPS

Avisynth has a special filter, convertfps, just for dealing with this kind of problem, but it didn’t work so well. This filter seems to divide the screen into an even domain and an odd domain, with the boundary determined by the third argument, zone. The result is barrel pieces disappearing at the top of the screen then fading back in at the bottom, and only one player’s scoreboard visible.

Keep in mind that it’s not necessary to do anything if the effects can still be observed at the reduced framerate: In the Guile Exhibition, the debris in the first oil drum clip (9:34) doesn’t flicker properly, but it looks better in the next clip. This is because the second clip is from Hyper Fighting. The random frameskip in HF effectively makes the flickering pattern random and avoids the masking effect of the framedrop.

Has anyone got any other tricks or suggestions on how to deal with this?

Thanks to error1 and Maj for input on this.

Picking Up Tokido on Being a Scrub

I saw option selects I’ve never seen before. He did dive kick option select teleport on Toxy and followed Toxy’s teleport with his own teleport and cancelled into his Ultra II the Roflcopter for massive damage. He did this many times. I saw every single method of punishing teleport known to man. Walk up follow and sweep, option select tatsu, option select Raging Demon, option select teleport. You cannot escape Tokido’s Akuma. I even saw him do option jump back off a safe jump against Bison!

The Stages of Learning on AoGGaA

In our fast paced instant gratification society, it becomes hard for people to understand that life is a process of stages. This is how most people should think about learning how to play Street Fighter or anything else in life whether is a musical instrument or a sport that the learning process is a long organic process that takes time.