Tag: fighting games

Posted On

I pushed an update earlier today to fg-reference-screens, which is a repository of captures I have set up you can use to plan layouts for various fighting games by seeing how they will display without having to set up a capture.

I gave it an actual release at 1.0 this time. You can download the ZIP of the screens if you want or check out the repository at any time using the link above.

If you have a specific request I can fill, please file an issue against the repository and I’ll see what I can do as long as I have access to the game—I’m a few games behind in my collection at this point.

Here’s the change log for version 1.0:

* Update Street Fighter V to use Arcade Edition visual changes.
* Add Divekick.
* Add Dragonball FighterZ.
* Add Gang Beasts.
* Add Guilty Gear Xrd Rev 2.
* Add Injustice 2. (Yes; I know the match screen is currently missing. Will update that later.)
* Add Lethal League.
* Add Nidhogg.
* Add Nidhogg 2.
* Add NitroPlus Blasterz Heroines Infinite Duel.
* Add Tekken 7.
* Add TowerFall Ascension.
* Add UNIST.
* Add Windjammers.

The next step for this repository is going to be adding some JSON bits to the various directories, so if you want to pull the screens into another application, you can read that data and use it for display.

Have a great Christmas!

Posted On

This will be my fourth year attending Combo Breaker, and my third year helping staff the event. Combo Breaker is an event like no other, staffed with amazing people who go the extra mile and ensure the experience is top-tier for everyone involved.

I’m not even sure yet what I’ll be doing this year staff-wise, but I’m excited to find out. I’ve run brackets, helped with security, manned the TO desk, done A/V setup and lighting, and generally been available to help with anything needed.

Is this the year I submit a commentary reel and get behind the mic? Stream run? Run emcee for an Auction Tournament? Camera op? My quest to do literally everything I can behind the scenes at a fighting game major continues.

Think about attending and find out with me. Over 700 people have already registered, and it’s only been a few hours. Come celebrate the best of the fighting game community in the Midwest for one weekend to start the summer. I promise you’ll have a great time.

Plan to be in the west suburbs of Chicago on Memorial Day weekend. Don’t miss out.

Posted On

Bear dropped this on Twitter in reply to PerfectLegend, and I thought it worth it to mention something about how I handle it. Using this method, I have never had a problem with the following problem:

Here’s how you make this less of a problem:

Talk about this with your players before you start your bracket.

Issue clear expectations for things like bathroom and smoke breaks, because players will ask you for these things. Let them know that they need to ask for them immediately after one of their matches, and that you have to OK them by looking at the bracket and seeing what time is available for people to do so. Also let them know that when you and they agree on a time limit for these activities, and they go over the time limit, they can be DQ’d.

Know where you are in the bracket and how long matches take.

You can’t be honest with players regarding the time available to them for a break unless you know how much room you have in a bracket for those things. You’re generally only going to be able to give them break time in the first couple of rounds, because that is the only time you have a lot more matches to play than stations.

Make sure you are playing out matches by rounds as much as possible to give players time to rest between their matches. Don’t run one person way through the bracket before you have had other players get their matches in.

Write breaks down on the bracket sheet or a notebook/notepad (if using electronic bracketing, which you shouldn’t be in most cases), and make sure the player sees you do it.

When I have a player ask for a break, I talk to them briefly about what they are leaving to do and ask them how long it will take them to do it. I check the time on my watch, and then tell them exactly when I expect they will be back for their next match. I then write their player name and the agreed-upon return time on the bracket, showing them as I do this, and let them go have their break.

This becomes a two-way agreement; I let them take the break, and they agree they’ll be back by that time. If they aren’t back by that time, I generally give them two to three minutes’ grace period before issuing a DQ loss. (This also means that when budgeting the time for their break, I give them two to three minutes less than I actually have for them.)

Above all, be fair and respectful.

Before every bracket I run, I set expectations that I’m going to respect players’ time, and that in return, I expect certain courtesies from them. It’s only in partnership with your players that you’ll be able to run an efficient and well-received bracket. Respect your players’ time and communicate with them clearly, and they will respect the decisions you may have to make.

Posted On

It’s time to look forward to WordCamp US at the end of the year: seeing lots of familiar faces, attending fantastic sessions by creative and knowledgeable people, and volunteering to help create a great event for every attendee.

Last year, I gave a lightning talk on code review that I thought went very well; it was an adaptation of a talk I gave earlier in the year at WordCamp St. Louis based on the experience I’ve had with code review as a culture-centric thing at Automattic and specifically on the WordPress.com VIP team.

The deadline for talk submissions for this year is tomorrow, and so far, I have submitted two talks (I’ll bring up the third in a bit here):

Security, the VIP Way

My VIP team colleagues suggested this topic. We deal with some pretty large sites with lots of users, and can be the target of attacks by unsavory people, so we have developed security policies and best practices that we have found to be successful. I think I could relay some of these practices and give good examples in an engaging way.

I submitted this as a 50-minute talk, but it could be adapted as a lightning talk. I think this talk is pretty straightforward and would need some creative slide deck management to make it my particular style of engaging.

User Support: Playing to Win

OK, so this one is a long shot—and to be honest, I haven’t written it yet, but it’s nearly-fully-formed in my head. Support has been my career for over a decade now.

I have also played fighting games for a huge chunk of my life, but only in the last few years have I taken playing them seriously and competitively.

Fighting games are about resource management, spacing, timing, and adaptation. It struck me at one point that a lot of that is very similar to how I approach support interactions. I want to find a way to bridge those metaphors in a talk.

This would almost definitely be a lightning talk, and I submitted it that way. The slide deck would be really challenging and enjoyable to create. I’m secretly hoping this one is chosen.

A Third Talk?

Just a bit earlier this evening, I considered submitting a third talk based on my blog post from last night, regarding advice for applying to Automattic. After I wrote it, it occurred to me that a lot of what I talk about in the back half of the post is less specific to Automattic and more interesting in the context of open-source-related companies, of which Automattic is one.

But when it came time to write the abstract, I couldn’t come up with a good way to frame the talk that wouldn’t come across as “hey, you should come work at Automattic.”

The concept I had: I would talk with some other people at other WordPress-ecosystem and maybe even other OSS-ecosystem companies, and gather some more information from them about their workplaces and what they like to see.

In the end, because of where I work, there are optics to consider. Does it come across as a recruitment effort? Some people might look at it and think that it does, especially since I would be referencing a post that’s specifically advice for people who might want to work here. What I would love to get across is that there are lots of great companies in WordPress orbit people can work for, or could start, and I suspect they share these open-source traits. It’d probably be interesting.

But I won’t be submitting that one. I feel comfortable talking on my own space here about the work culture of Automattic and why I love working there (and I do this often because it’s all true), but I’m not comfortable making that the subject of a talk at one of the two large-focus gatherings of people from all of the WordPress community. It could be interpreted in a way I’d rather not evoke if I can avoid it.

How’s The Third Talk Different from The First Talk?

(Thought I’d address it because I know someone will think it.)

To be concise: I think there’s a big difference between sharing best practices concerning the WordPress software and supporting users and giving a talk where my workplace is a focus. Bonus: at VIP, we work in partnership with various agencies and WordPress users, so many of those best practices have developed in active collaboration. I feel comfortable sharing those practices in a broader arena without making it overly Automattic-centric.

Posted On

Around a year or so ago, I posted a bunch of reference screens captured from various fighting games, to help streamers plan their UI against the actual game without needing to hook up a capture device or to search for images on Google.

It struck me today that putting that here was probably not the easiest thing to find, or the easiest thing for people to use in their projects, so today, I moved the whole thing over to GitHub as a new repository:

https://github.com/ryanmarkel/fg-reference-screens

Contributions are welcome, and requests for screens should be filed as issues. I hope these are useful to you in your stream production.

Posted On

I’ve actually never played this game before, but this tournament(?) of matches for an (I’m assuming relatively) obscure Neo-Geo title with the timer set to only one second is beautifully insane:

A port of the title to PS4 was released last week, and you can buy that here for $7.99.

It’s been confirmed the one-second round timer is possible in the port:

If anyone knows any of the other rules that were used in the Japanese tournament video, let me know; it looks like it’s at least set to Level 1. I’m not sure there are any other settings that matter. :)

Posted On

For my stream tonight, I went over some basics for setting up a PS4 to be a fighting game tournament setup that doesn’t annoy with pop-up notifications and also makes it harder to do things like pause or take screenshots.

The video is less than 20 minutes long; if there is enough interest in it, I’ll do something that is more effectively edited and not full of my rambling while waiting for things to load and forgetting where some settings are.

Posted On

Since I have been thinking a bunch recently about broadcast graphics and best practices, I decided that it might be a good idea to take a look at some examples of television broadcasts and what they have established.

I’d written about this before, but it’s often the case that Twitch broadcasts don’t pay much attention to “broadcast safe” areas even though it’s true that many people now watch Twitch streams on televisions. TVs have to deal with the rather annoying but real matter of overscan. (I may write more about this later.)

Something specific that I use on my stream and I’d love to see more of on event streams—specifically fighting game tournament streams—is a ticker across the bottom of the screen. (I’m actively researching and hoping to build one.) ESPN has been using one for a long time. Here’s what I found when I took a look at it:

Screen Shot 2016-12-26 at 8.19.21 PM

I had to match them up by eye, and the screen capture isn’t an exact science, but I’m pretty sure they reserve the bottom 100 pixels of a 1080p signal for the ticker. The bottom 50 pixels receives absolutely no information; it’s just a grey stripe. This is “blank” because many televisions will not display this information at all due to overscan. The ticker information is placed within the next 50 pixels, and there’s even a bit more margin before the text baseline.

You can also see that there is a bounding line to the left, where they do not place any text information. That line is 84 pixels from the left of the frame.

It’s clear that if you want a fighting game to be broadcast safe, you will have to adjust at least the UI elements of the scene, if not the output of the console itself. As I mentioned in a tweet recently:

(There is even more information available in that thread talking about this, including the fact that Mortal Kombat’s meters are pushed way to the edge of the frame.)

As was pointed out to me on Twitter by @logichole, who has had some pretty great back-and-forths with me on this subject:

Is this something streamers should concern themselves with? Do we care if our broadcasts are being shown on televisions with overscan? Toss me a tweet reply or write up a post and let me know what you think.

 

Posted On

I was messing around with doing some (very early) work with NodeCG tonight.

(It’s not going well so far, but that’s because I’m generally clueless.)

While doing this, I considered the idea of fighting game overlays that could be used with a “toggle” for whatever game is being played (or even key off an external API like Challonge). I then realized that it is really useful to have static reference images for various games to make sure you are not putting overlay images in bad places.

This has a lot of utility even for setting up OBS or Xsplit, because you can add the image as a background and then maneuver your layout stuff as you need to make sure you are not obscuring any screen items, especially meters.

I’ll put this behind a more link just so casual visitors to my site don’t get hit with OMG WALL OF IMAGES. If there is a game that is not represented here that you would like to see, or I have made a mistake, please drop me a note and let me know which one. I’ll see if I have it and can whip up some images for you.

All HUD elements are in default locations.

Click on any image to view as full-size.

You can also download a ZIP archive of all current screens. If you stream large events with regularity, please contact me and I can give you access to a Dropbox share of these images. If you want to know when I update the screens, you should follow me on Twitter.

Use the images to do cool things with your streams. :) If you find them helpful or useful, please consider dropping me a tip or just following my Twitch channel where I play games poorly.

Continue reading “Reference Images for FGC Broadcast Graphics”

Posted On

There was an interesting post on r/kappa (warning: subreddit isn’t completely SFW) today talking about unlocking colors for characters in Street Fighter V without having to really grind Survival mode, which interests me because that’s annoying to have to do it per-character and per-costume.

(I’m going to hide the remainder of this behind a jump because it’s going to get long and it’s going to have a bunch of API request dumps in it. You probably don’t want to read those if that’s not what you came here for.)

By the way, after I wrote this and before I published it, the complete list of codes was published in a thread on r/kappa as well, so now I’m pushing it out there. I was holding onto it for disclosure’s sake, but now it’s in the open and there’s no reason for me to not publish it at this point.

Continue reading “Street Fighter V Unlock Web Request Sample”