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Spent the latter half of the day refining the engine and optimizing things. This includes but is not limited to (because I forgot it all):
-Complete rewrite of the floorhugging code to formalize it outside of the tumble code. Now if you're grounded when hit, you run through an ASDI and floorhugging check that will keep you grounded if you floorhug properly. This also makes the thresholds a lot more malleable, cleans up the tumble script, and makes everything much more reliable. Plus it has the added benefit of allowing techs, flops, and staggers (all symptoms of floorhugs) to carry horizontal speed.
-Adjustments to the camera to snap it to the proper zoom faster and also just look... better (hard to explain).
-Adjustments to the CPU so that it no longer floorhug techs as often as it did before (it was a menace) while keeping its normal tech chances in tact.
-Addition of "DI smoothing," something to help out keyboard players and allow players a mindset of "DI out or DI in" instead of having to learn every last launch angle to get optimal DI. If you're a little over half of the way toward one of the optimal angles, you get the optimal angle. This means you can focus on doing survival DI or combo DI and not have to worry about hitting extreme angles--and keyboard players can get perfect DI without access to all the angles of controller players.
-Match structure now exists, kicking players back to the CSS and repopulating it (mostly) correctly whenever a match ends either by force or by stock rules.
-Other various bug fixes.
In other news, I think the pace of the game is doing okay so far. There are very obviously busted moves I need to tone down a bit (Mococo's nspecial is a menace in the air, and every spike is disgustingly strong), and a few things I need to tweak so they're not so punishing (stage spikes are absurdly strong, a holdover from when floor bounces didn't have such a high threshold), but things are coming along nicely. There is still a slight bit of uncertainty that sent me down a goose chase of reducing knockback speed and player movement speed today before ultimately reverting everything, and that comes from how I'm testing it out.
Currently, I can only test against the CPU, which is, to put it lightly, a little bit of a crackhead. Yes, it can combo you into oblivion and provides a decent challenge if you engage with it on its terms, but it's also a masher, and that means it's a bad representative of the general game flow. Couple that with the fact it's playing the most volatile character on the roster at the moment (Gura), and it sums up to a very polarized testing experience. Sooner or later I'll get a good chance to crank out some matches against a real person and get a better experience, but for now it's must me and the bot that can't figure out how to drop through a platform if you're underneath it. What does give me some hope is that if you don't engage on the bot's terms and instead play patient, you can still compete against it. In fact, you might even do better by taking it slow, waiting for a bad approach, anti-airing, etc. It's complicated. But I think things are going well!
Also, did anyone watch EN Recollection? I tuned in for a while with Gura's POV and thought it was pretty neat!
