How Much Tool-Assistance Was Used in this Video?

[Maj]

I find myself asking this question a lot, so maybe it deserves its own thread. I just got done watching AC-Slayer's and Hyper Sonic's awesome Marvel vs. Capcom Combos 2010 video and it's got a lot of unbelievable stuff in it.

Of course it's possible that i'm way overestimating the difficulty level of these combos, but when every combo in a 20min video reaches the 60-second mark, that raises a few red flags. Since these guys are retiring, i doubt they'd want to "ruin" their last video by including a tool-assistance disclaimer so i'm asking here in case anyone knows. I'm just curious; not looking to make a big deal of it or anything.

Obviously they use some emulator help. I can't imagine that they would reset the game, reselect the characters and assists, land on the right stage, rebuild meter, and recreate these glitch setups every single time they screwed up a combo. I also doubt they were mashing Lighting Legs with their toes the entire time they were performing suki combos.

How much further did they go? Cuz when i see ground juggle patterns that change based on the dummy's vertical position, i figure they gotta be using save states mid-combo to at least test the possibilities. But maybe i'm wrong and they love Marvel One that much?

[error1]

I say it's tool assisted unless they say otherwise.

[Xenozip.]

And of course it ends up on Shiro420's channel. Color me not-surprised.

[Dark_Chaotix]

I just saw this vid too. TBH i never liked any VS stuff because combos are too long and I honestly dont think someone can remember all those hits and its intervals. Maybe im wrong but when I look at it again and see them doing quick small jumps and if i remember playing that game, that was kinda hard to do.

Altho, I have seen Toxy do xmen vs sf infinite combo in game and it was with cyclops btw. So I think what he did was legit in hand skills but I cant speak for the others.

[Maj]

Anyone know if majijam's KoF2k2UM TDCMs are tool-assisted? I tried asking on his last two videos but he never responds (to anyone's comments).

[Persona]

I was assuming they always were. I don't ever recall anyone being able to make combos like that manually even for OG 2002 (2002 series is probably the hardest KOF games to make combos for in terms of execution). I don't remember if you can record inputs in the game but I always assumed he recorded the inputs and then played them in a vs match or something.

One Takuma combo comes to mind. I'm not 100% sure if it was needed but he makes Takuma run forward and then perform his HSDM. Basically from looking at the HSDM, it should hit regardless of having to run. Either he wanted to challenge himself by making it harder and performing the HSDM at the very last frames or he just did it because he had leftover inputs to record (if you're using inputs, might as well make it look more flashy/difficult right?).

[Raine]

There is a macro record function in the game, and it even lets edit the macro on a frame by frame basis. Unfortunately there is no display to show whether it is being used or not. I would also assume it is TA given the fact that it's so accessible, and also due to the content of some of the combos that would require godlike execution to do by hand (and also difficult to setup).

[Dark_Chaotix]

Yeah his stuff is tool assisted. You can rec input commands and do it in either Vs or training mode. Unlike XI, it doesnt show up when you are execute a reced input command.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S06autGFOM0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-rJRdPAxGc - the terry sA links
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GWsWXA0wwZs - lin cB links

Those are just examples and to get that many at the exact same rhythm is hard. Just like Angel sB....I've only ever gotten 7 in a row.

[Tigre III]

Well, to say if something is tool assisted or not is always a difficult issue (especially after watching some Desk videos ) but, about the MvC CMV... I just say yes, its tool assisted.
There are some combo examples that are extraordinarily hard to do ONE TIME, like Wolverine super jump cancel with light kick in the first frames, or simply things like first Hulk combo, when he does gamma crush at the very first frames losing sight of your own char (you have to guess when Hulk arrives to the ground, otherwise the entire input can fail and you will do a normal) do that things one time is hard, but possible. But 15 or 20 times in the same combo? With all the other amazing stuff in the same combo? Woah, that is near the impossible, i think. And later in the video they do things even more harder...
And as Maj says, they must be using save states mid-combo, because to test if a one frame link works against a special dummy in a concrete position after repeat a 60 second brutal combo one time and another...
Of course i dont think that ALL the combos are tool assisted, but i think that some specific clips have some hex involved, and some emulator assist too.

[wolverine-master]

In reference to the mvc combo vid, i would say that 97% of the vid was tool assisted. In my experience with this game, being consistent is a problem. On alot of these combos, these guys went out of their way to show what an infinite is by doing multiple reps and staying on point every time.
MegaMan steve is the best megaman player i know. He does midscreen loops that regular people wont dare to try. However, i've never seen him charge a buster to go for that buster infinite. In this vid, they did that flawlessly.
Even on this part right here he releases charged busters without being charged. And what about the example that maj used about suki cancelling. What about the first combo...comboing into lightning legs is easy, comboing out of it however is a different story.

Now lemme say something after all that. I LOVE COMBO VIDEOS, I love tool assisted videos, so i dont pay attention to disclaimers and stuff. However, sometimes a combo might look extra pretty and i be wanting to know how its done. Combo vids were cool back then, but when tool assistance came into the picture it turned the trade into a work of art.
Does it make you less of a combomaker if you use a program to help you do stuff you cant normally do by hand?
Or is it the fact that they didnt mention it?
There are vids out here that will raise alot of questions about being tool assisted or not.
Breaking The Universe goes down as MY favorite combo vid of ALL TIME. Even though its not mentioned, i think the whole damn thing is tool assisted. What i look at is that it wouldnt have existed without the tools.
at about 2:30 there's a juggy fsd combo that is rediculously hard to do by hand, but its possible....doing it on command though, i dont think so.
Remember Demise?
He was the only guy that could have pulled off sentinel's infinite by hand. I DONT DOUBT THAT HE DID....i really think he did do it by hand, but what if he didnt?
What if the mvc vid had a disclaimer that said all combos were done by hand, would we still have balls to discuss it?
I think there are some guys who are tool assisted by coffee and dedication...Jason Hall, Demise, Desk etc....
As combomakers we all know what to look out for when it comes to combovids but when should it spark discussion?
Without a disclaimer, or with one we dont believe?

Sorry about the extremely long post, but i really like this topic.

[Persona]

After watching the videos that Dark Chaotix linked more carefully, he also does unnecessary movements between combos just like the Takuma combo. This is what comes to mind:

Difficulty of combos : he goes all out with the combos and IMO KOF 2002 is one of the hardest (if not the hardest) SNK games to make combos for since it's so easy to drop the combo. IMO KOF 2002 is one of those games where if the player isn't going to use some sort of tools then they're better off finding another game to make combos for.
VS mode: Even when the combos are difficult enough, he still does them in a real match.
Unnecessary movement: Adding the above two in, he even "fools around" between hits just to make things look more difficult. He runs between every juggle in the Billy combo. I'm pretty sure any normal player would be too focused on just timing the juggle so it hits deep and doesn't drop the combo but he makes it look like he knows exactly when to connect the next juggle at the last frame before the opponent drops to the ground. It's like saying, if you had 30 extra frames to connect a hit inbetween yet you always want to connect the hit at the last possible frame, either you're a pure masochist or you're using tools.

[Maj]

Cool, thanks for the insight. I'll start adding "tool-assisted" tags to majijam's videos.

And i always assumed that everyone involved in "Breaking The Universe" and its prequels/sequels was using various forms of tool-assistance. But all those guys would get ultra-defensive whenever they were asked about it, so i stopped paying attention to that whole crew. It wasn't a conscious decision. It was just too much of a headache to deal with, so i gradually lost interest in everything they were doing.

[wolverine-master]

It was just too much of a headache to deal with, so i gradually lost interest in everything they were doing.

You shouldn't.....they were the first of their kind when it came to combo making. They broke the vs series.
As you did cvs2 and GUILE.
Maybe someone of importance asked them about it before you did and they lied....after lying, there really isnt any turning back.
But the point is, we both know the truth.
I understand your point or reasoning though.

[Maj]

I'm not an expert on the Marvel series like you, so there was a lot more stuff that i didn't understand in those videos. It's hard for me to care about combos that make no sense to me. Unfortunately it was impossible to ask those guys questions because they couldn't explain anything.

Every conversation went like "How did you do this?" ... "We're super good "

It got old fast. The saddest thing was Lezard trying to explain his ST Guile combos which used cheat codes, and didn't even know enough about the game to cover it up. So they never wrote transcripts, never explained their combos, never explained their methods, and didn't seem to understand the games they were playing - just a really lame combination of attitude problems.

Anyway i can understand why you like their videos. I probably would too, if i was that big into Marvel. I'm not saying they're bad videos. I'm just saying their attitude made me stop paying attention.

[wolverine-master]

Every conversation went like "How did you do this?" ... "We're super good .

lmfao.
Now i really understand why you feel the way you do/did. That would frustrate the shit outa me......lol.
I'm no expert though....but i do love fast paced fighting games.
Question: When/why did tool assistance ecome such a big deal?

[Dark_Chaotix]

In the early KoF scene, it was very hard to distinguish manual from the hex vids. As time went on (back 3-5 years ago), the combos got more elaborate with setup (athena bug, screen lock) and it was obvious that hex was used but when ever someone asked about how to do it or even how to set the combo up no one would answer. I got burnt by liking a combomaker then finding out that he used hex but never said in his vids. It pretty much came to a point where it needed to be said because new players or viewers to the vids were either ignorant or stubborn to believe that hex was used, and some would try to do these combos manually and wonder why they can't get it. This was when in was back in CX days and CMV were coming out like every week, but unfortunately its not like that no more (Im not at CX anymore).

Nowadays, no one cares anymore......I can tell when someone is using hex or what not in a vid so it doesnt bother me and I'm not willing to go out my way to tell them "hey, put a disclaimer in".

Slightly off topic, I cant say the same for SF tho. Like when I see a VS cmv or early marvel super heroes cmv I straight away think "hex" but then again I have seen someone do infinite's in tho games haha.

[Maj]

On the Capcom side, it became a big issue starting around the CvS2/MvC2 era. That's when communication with Japan opened up and we started realizing that they had been using program pads all along. So that's when the initial arguments and debates over tool-assistance occurred.

The emulator stuff came a little later, but unlike the Japan situation (which was mostly due to lack of communication) the emulator situation involved outright secrecy and lies. But it was weird because all the people using emu tools were newcomers. A lot of those early vids were made by people we'd never heard of and they didn't even post on SRK. It felt like a mysterious offshoot of combovideos.com or something.

Japan took a long time to catch on to emu tools. In fact in all this time, i think the only Japanese users of emu tools were zerokoubou and izumojin (who showed up super-recently). Everyone else stuck to console. KYSG used Dreamcast 3S, Tosaka used Dreamcast/PS2 ST, Joo used Dreamcast MvC2/JBA and PS1 MSF, Sai-Rec used Dreamcast CvS1/CvS2, and so on.

America wasn't particularly big on emu usage either, until GGPO at least. I mean a lot of us had emulators and roms as novelties, but we didn't put any serious time into them. We played primarily on consoles and arcades.

So that's probably why a lot of the early emu vids came from outside the core English-speakin gcommunity - from areas of the world that adopted emulation as the primary medium way before the US and Japan did.

And it didn't help that everyone who used hexing lied about it, which meant nobody ever explained how it was done. So hexing spread very slowly behind the scenes and never actually expanded outside South America and China. To this day, i still don't know anyone in the US fighting game community who can explain how hexing is actually done. We all kind of know the concept behind it, but none of us have the slightest clue how to do it. (Unless that's how Lezard and co made their vids, but we'll probably never know for sure.)

[error1]

I've done hex editing before, not for combos but in my strider 2 tas
it's really completely pointless with tools like macrolua, TranScripter, and frameadvace

[Maj]

I agree, but hexing started in the SNK community with Kawaks rec files long before FrameMAME/MacroLua existed. Back then Kawaks macros had a limit of like 30 inputs without save state integration. Plus there was no W command so you had to burn inputs to wait between commands. Basically hopeless for the kind of stuff we're doing nowadays.

Frame advance goes way back, but from what i've seen it's only the method of choice for players with a TASing background, and that crazy Mario speedrun was all very new back then. SRK members only used frame advance to test random stuff like reversal windows, but even that was treated like witchcraft at first. Whenever a question came up, we always tried to solve it through conventional means and used frame advance as a last resort when all else failed.

Like i said, the core SRK community treated emulators as a novelty for playing side-scrollers and beating MSH with Dr.Doom - so when emu tools began to surface, it took a while to get over that unfamiliarity.

Don't forget that fighting game emulation started with CPS1 and CPS2 games during the Dreamcast era, so you had this catch-22 where most of the American players who cared about emulated games were too damn oldschool to learn all that crazy jive. The SRK members who were most likely to adopt emu tools were too busy playing MvC2, CvS2, and 3S.

[Dammit]

Is "hex" now catchall for emu work or do people still do it the hard way?

[Maj]

Nah, it's not a catch-all term. Hexing is directly editing emulator replay files. I guess the name comes from the fact that input recordings are stored in hexadecimal format?

[Dammit]

Yeah but the term is thrown around casually considering what a pain it is to actually do. I wondered if "hex" is considered an alt way to say "rerecording" or "TA" even though it isn't.

[Maj]

I don't know, it's possible that the meaning got lost along the way and certain people call everything "hexing" now. But it definitely referred to editing replays when it was coined / introduced. Anyway it's strictly an SNK community term. I've never heard it used in any other fighting game circles.

[Don Vecta]

Hex term was coined for the assistance of scripting with hexadecimal programs. Many SNK makers do this (some more proficient than others) and yeah, somehow it's a bit different from the use of macrolua or other tools used here. Before it was HEAVILY frowned upon (tons of drama in the old CX's out of it, especially since many people felt deceived (like D_C mentioned above). But yeah, now it's not an issue since most SNK emu combo videos are too old that manual execution it's too limited to bring out something new or with deeper investigation. Now it needs strict frame inputs, strict dummy positioning, complex bugs and set ups, etc.

[Maj]

Wait a minute, if you guys are suggesting that tool-assistance disclaimers aren't important anymore, then i have a simple scenario for you. Let's say i devote the next month to making a tool-assisted MvC3 combovid and release it on a brand new u2b channel under a different name.

It shows up on SRK and people start asking questions about how i'm executing stuff that desk can't do. I spend the next week dodging the question, then admit that i used program pads.

Would the reaction toward "me" / my actions / my video be:

a) positive?
b) negative?

I'm not saying disclaimers are absolutely necessary for every little clip anyone makes. Hell, i don't even bother putting disclaimers on my single-clip challenge bonus combos. But let's not confuse "we've become desensitized" with "it's no longer an issue."

The reality is that we, the core combo-making community, have figured out who uses tool-assistance and who doesn't, which is why this thread hasn't seen much activity in 18 months. But if the "disclaimer movement" had never happened, this whole issue would still be annoying as fuck right now.

[Rufus]

Wait a minute, if you guys are suggesting that tool-assistance disclaimers aren't important anymore, then i have a simple scenario for you. Let's say i devote the next month to making a tool-assisted MvC3 combovid and release it on a brand new u2b channel under a different name.
....
The reality is that we, the core combo-making community, have figured out who uses tool-assistance and who doesn't, which is why this thread hasn't seen much activity in 18 months. But if the "disclaimer movement" had never happened, this whole issue would still be annoying as fuck right now.

No doubt. People care:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHrxF-gQb_0
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kXN9TgnI5XA

[Persona]

Another big problem back then about hex was that the majority of people who hex had very bad attitudes. There was no logic in their argument other than, "FUCK U U SUCK I AM GOD I CAN MAKE SUPER COMBOS BAN ME IF U WANT U NOOB".

I don't have much of a problem with hex/tools anymore because I care more about how the combo was built rather than the execution (my honest opinion is that people who strictly do it for execution purposes just want people to tell them "HEY U R GOD I RESPECT U LOTS BECAUSE U DUN CHEAT LIKE OTHER PPL"). If I had tools, I would use them since it makes my life easier but I don't have them therefore I'm stuck with manual execution. From my point of view, I believe the more hardcore the person is in the fighting community, the more they respect manual execution over tools, but as some people have known about me by now, I no longer have much interest in being hardcore in fighting games therefore I don't tend to acknowledge manual execution anymore compared to back in the days where I would be more offended by hex/tools. Bring out a nice quality video either with manual execution/tools and I'll still like it equally. I care about the overall package now instead of the main point of "hey guys I can do these awesome combos with my bare hands! Ain't I cool?". I feel more happy when someone compliments my presentation or my creativity over my execution skills TBH.

If anything, I have more of a problem with people who over edit their videos... (still waiting for someone to make a combo vid with Rebecca Black's song in it)

[Keiko]

Well...i always had the same problem, everybody in the Snk community talked about Hex, hex this hex that, but wtf is Hex all about? i mean, wich programs are used and how does it actually works with the kawaks replays, can somebody provide me some information about it please? ...i have zero understanding about Tasing n' stuff like that...

[error1]

XVI32 is my go to hex editor
so when you open up a file it just give you a section on the left with the hex information and a section of the right with the same stuff as a text file
the hex is broken up into pairs that represent bytes, ie FF = 255 = the largest number you can store in eight bits
idk what the kawaks format is like but all formats that I've looked at are similar
basically you have the header at the top with info like number of frames, rerecords, name, etc
then for each frame you have some set of bytes that represent it, it's going to be different for every emulator so you have to know what your looking for
this is what you would need to know to understand a fba movie file in hex, but fba is a hard format to hex beacuse the keys are different for every game

[Dark_Chaotix]

Wait a minute, if you guys are suggesting that tool-assistance disclaimers aren't important anymore.

Well Im not saying that its not important, but It's not a major priority for me to see it or condone someone to have it in their vid. Again, since I have more knowledge on cmv's I can tell is Hex if used or not but another factor is that alot of the old kof games arent been done anymore (Thank god) and some makers like KCA / Kof Union have stepped to the console stuff.

When you came to CX and spoke about combomkaers putting the disclaimer in vids I was trying to get them to follow, but now I dont really care if it hasnt or not. I guess being an SNK ambassador for the disclaimer ended when I left CX and when the cmv scene died.