Dear Princess Celestia,
Today I learned how to defeat the training dummy
Collective Training Unit - FightingIsMagic training mode
Fighting Is Magic is a fan-made 2D fighting game
based on My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic. There is currently no official "training
mode" for FiM, and the developers so far have not expressed interest in creating one.
So, CTU was created to act as a sort of training-mode. While you can already enable
"HitJudge" to help a bit with training, CTU tries to offer more features.
Download
Latest version: version 0.1 - 18 Sep 2012
Installation
First, you need a copy of Fighting Is Magic. FiM hasn't been released yet, but a
pre-release build for Evo 2012 was leaked in mid-2012. I won't link to it here, but you
can find it by googling around pretty easily.
To "install" CTU, just copy the CTU exe to the same folder where FightingIsMagic.exe
is, and run the CTU exe. Currently this has only been tested with the leaked Evo
2012 build, and I have no idea if it works at all with anything else. I assume
it will need to be tweaked when different versions are made available.
The CTU executable must be in the same directory as FiM, and the FiM executable must
be called FightingIsMagic.exe. If nothing appears when you run CTU, then one of those
things is probably not right. You don't really get any information or error messages if
something is wrong. Yeah, it's annoying, I know.
How to use
When you run CTU, it will launch FiM. Choose a character, and then choose the
character for the training dummy; CTU automatically makes the player 1 controls start
to control player 2, for choosing a character. The "match" will then start, and you'll
notice the little window for info on the right will start to fill in with actual
values.
To change various settings, press whatever your "pause" key is during the fight.
These should be self-explanatory, or at least easy to figure out with some
experimentation.
Screenshot
Features
- In "recover" mode, the training dummy will try to block and air/ground tech
after getting hit once, so you can try out possible combos/links/etc pretty
easily.
- In "record/replay" mode, you can record actions for the training dummy to do,
and have it replay those actions in a loop.
- Automatic (configurable) health, meter, and magic regeneration, so you can
try to land that combo ending with a level-3 super, without having to build up
meter between attempts, or relying on that buggy "refill meter" button.
- Displays combo information, general stats, and recent input history.
- Volume adjustment (from the command-line), so you don't need to listen to the
Sweet Apple Acres theme a thousand times while learning a combo.
Non-features and missing features
- The interface is ugly (just like this page!), and doesn't work with fullscreen.
- CTU is amazingly inefficient. On some machines, running in Rainbow Dash's stage
causes noticeable performance issues. Currently we just force playing on Rarity's
stage, which seems easier to render. This would get better if more processing were
offloaded to our injected machine code, instead of breaking out all the time.
- The replay looping can be awkward, since we may trigger an accidental command
when looping back to the beginning of the recording. We currently try to avoid
this by adding a frame of neutral input, but this is not ideal.
- No way to reset back to the character select quickly, or reset back to the
center of the stage.
- In "recover" mode, there is no detection of whether we should be blocking high
or low (but the combo counter will reset, so it's obvious if you haven't linked
something properly).
- No "replay on reversal" feature, to figure out what is safe.
- No way to find out if something is a real block string, or unblockable. (We
never block for the first attack, unless we're replaying a recording.)
- The combo information gets a little incorrect for a raw level-3 super with
Twilight, and probably other characters (we don't count the meter usage).
The reasons for this are explained in the commit messages; it's a little complex
to explain here. Comboing into a level-3 super is fine.
- No documentation, really, besides this page.
- The code organization/modularization/etc is atrocious; I wasn't
really trying and just slapped some stuff together. Please do not assume all code
I write looks like this.
- Other missing features? Let me know! I don't usually play fighting games, so
I don't even know what a normal training mode looks like.
Developer information
The source is over here. The "build
system" actually requires Linux and a MinGW compiler, because I barely ever use Windows.
If you want to compile on Windows, feel free to send me a patch or something to make
doing so easier. Just running 'make' on Linux will work if everything expected is
installed. Just try looking around the Makefile for more details.
Contact information
Email: u.numbernumber at gmail.com. Feel free to send me bugs, patches, crits,
ideas, whatever. I am not associated with Mane6 or Hasbro in any way.