Jul -- The Cutting Room Floor: Random topics of debate

Rick
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Posted on 04-01-11 03:25:51 PM

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Aha, I never thought of that! Thanks!

Maybe I can see if someone could give a workaround of some sort to this...

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Torentsu
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Posted on 04-01-11 04:34:47 PM

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Originally posted by Rick
True, though back in those days, if something wasn't programmed to be played, it was gonna let you know.

Just some of it kind of baffles me, as I have no idea if because of the game programming, if some of the characters just somehow cobbled themselves together into some kind of playability or if they were legitimately made to be played by a human controlled character and just disabled.

In the case of Mortal Kombat II between SNES and Genesis (playing as the hidden characters and bosses), the Genesis versions seem to be more complete in initial playability, whereas the SNES version is really, really freaking weird. It's almost like each fighter has...something like two sets of movelists or something. One for before "FIGHT!", and one after.

How do I know? Well, here's a test you can do. Use the character modifier code 7E2EF8?? and for the ??, put in 0C (Kintaro), 0D (Shao Khan), 0E (Smoke), 0F (Noob Saibot), or 10 (Jade). Hold "Forward" after the match starts and any of those will walk forward normally. However, if you let go of the button and try to press it again, the game goes kaplooey. I have no idea why either.

It doesn't do this on the Genesis.

Oh boy right up my alley!

Mortal Kombat handles opponents differently than most fighting games. While your standard CPS2 fighting game uses a CPU flag Mortal Kombat does not. Capcom generally programs all the characters with a moveset and commands for those moves, but just never gives the player access to them normally. This way they can just activate a CPU or not flag on characters . At its simpliest this was just make the CPU control the character, but it can also do special stuff like like make them harder or use CPU only moves.

Mortal Kombat does this completely differently. Each character that a human can control consist of 2 variables:
The character itself (name data, voice clips, etc)
The Move set

The move set is what hinders attempts to play as bosses with hacking. You can easily set your character as Noob Saibot and your move set to Sub-Zero and play as "Noob" with no problems, but unfortunately the bosses have no like character that they can load a moveset from.

To handle CPU characters Mortal Kombat loads up a Character variable, and a list of moves that character can do. This allows them to "piece" together the secret characters like in MK2, and allow Reptile to have Scorpion and Sub Zero's moves in MK1, despite Reptile not even being in the character array at all. Noob Saibot is just a completely black Sub-Zero but with Scorpion's spear listed as available. This also makes the CPU able to do all those nasty tricks only it can do like the duck your uppercut and having tremendous priority on all versions of its attacks. The CPU throw can be used to demonstrate this. Make yourself a boss character and don't press anything so that it wont crash. The CPU will try to walk up to you and try to execute a throw and the game will lock up because it has no animation for a boss being thrown. As human character you can't even use a throw against CPU boss characters, even by setting P2 to a boss character and walking up to them and pressing LP. I'm not completely sure of the specifics of this but to my understanding this is how it works.

Furthermore, the CPU in MK2 in particular has some special effects that have baffled hackers on the MAME cheat boards for ages. Its interesting to note you can still modify the CPU character with Body/Move set modifiers but they still retain CPU only properties For example You can use Cheats to make yourself Smoke in MK2 with a usable move set, but you won't smoke. Only the CPU has the property that allows it to emit the smoke effect. Jade's projectile invulnerability is another one of these properties. It seems like Jade's projectile invulnerability can be loaded by changing yourself to Jade and leaving the move set alone, but the game will crash if you try to move.

Now when you hack the game to play as these characters if fine with loading up the Announcer sound clips and name data, but when you go to enter a command most of them will point to junk or something not recognizable.

Why the Genesis version handles this so much better than the others is anyone's guess. Perhaps they started working on programming them in to give the Genesis an edge in content that it lacked in graphics. Its interesting to note that in UMK3 Noob Saibot is fully usable by humans when hacked despite the game still using the same method of loading characters. Even the arcade version can take some commands with secret characters. Perhaps they just fell luckily into a movement range in the games data or they started programming them and just never finished.

Sorry for Wall o text. Feel free to correct or disprove any of it.

Rick
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Posted on 04-01-11 05:00:46 PM (last edited by Rick at 04-01-11 02:01 PM)

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I honestly have to sort of wonder if the Smoke effect is a property of the CPU thing. Remember when you do Raiden's electrocution fatality? It calls upon the smoke routine for whatever character is being electrocuted too, from what I'm noticing. It seems to me that the smoke thing can be turned "on" or "off" somehow, but whatever it is that activates it is bizarro, I guess.

So, I'm guessing what I'm getting out of this is that as far as the movesets go too, they're made up of flags that are either toggled "on" or "off" as necessary? It almost makes me wonder if workarounds could be hacked like that to, say, have it so if you were to hack yourself as Kintaro, and then make it so it calls upon the routine to do a teleport stomp by pressing "Up" or something?

I also could tell that MK2 was always trying to call upon some kind of "generic fighter" thing for Kintaro and Shao Khan too. I could still put in the movements for characters and they'd still make sounds that the playable characters would (such as pressing "A" for Kintaro has him do a "ya!" sound like the regular fighters do for attacking), so I knew that it was a mess there to begin with.

Also, some fun experimenting that I don't know if it means anything! If you hack yourself as Motaro in UMK3, you can actually freely move around without worry of crashing. Attacking is a different story, but perhaps they worked on him a little bit too? He crashes hard if you try to do anything with him in MK3, but UMK3 is also a different story. Weirdness!

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Rachel Mae

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Posted on 04-01-11 06:34:05 PM

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	I'd be inclined to believe that Motaro was being considered as a playable character if that's the case. They'd really have no reason to change his code otherwise. Actually, I thought he was legitimately playable in one of the home versions, though I'm probably mistaken... ____________________

Rick
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Posted on 04-01-11 07:05:20 PM (last edited by Rick at 04-01-11 04:47 PM)

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Yeah, both he and Shao Khan are playable in the SNES/Genesis home versions (MK3 and UMK3 both), but not the arcade versions.

Edit: I have found so far, upon further investigation, that the main playability difference with Motaro in the arcade versions of MK3 and UMK3 is that for some reason, trying to move Motaro forward does not freeze the game in UMK3. Everything else seems to apply properly. UMK3 also does not have Motaro 'locked' into a stage like in MK3. In MK3, if you play as Motaro, the game forces you to fight in The Balcony stage. UMK3 does not do this. It seems evidence of making Motaro more playable is now a moot point?

Also, random factoid. Jade in the Genesis MK2 is probably the most playable out of the three hidden fighters. You can actually do her fan throw just fine! In fact, that's her only special move. Double-tapping back, holding back and pressing Punch, or doing a low kick still strangely freezes the game. The only exception is that if you successfully connect with a Low Kick as the last hit of the match, then the game won't freeze. I'm assuming this is just the "Round Win!" routine out-prioritizes whatever weird error that occurs with the Low Kick.

The Low Kick thing doesn't even seem to glitch. It just...freezes in mid-recovery, which doesn't make any sense to me.

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Torentsu
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Posted on 04-01-11 08:44:40 PM

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Its possible they started experimenting with making Motaro and Shao Kahn playable with codes or something but because of how the CPU uses moves it would have made it difficult to make it work, or they'd have to program the CPU not to use things like throws against the bosses. Also this thread might have something interesting.

http://www.mamecheat.co.uk/forums/viewtopic.php?f=16&t=3433

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