Unsung Heroes is our series about the many members of the Fighting Game Community who work behind the scenes to make our community a vibrant, positive, exciting place to be. If you would like to submit your own Unsung Heroes, contact us here or @toptiergg.
More so than any other genre of video game, fighting games test a player’s emotions. Competitors have to control their anger, confusion, despair, confidence, and fighting spirit. They have to know which of their intuitions to trust and which to suppress. But mastering emotion is not enough.
Underneath the turbulence of players’ minds, the games themselves are as steady and scientific as can be. As such, top players have to combine emotional self-control with an encyclopedic knowledge of a game’s mechanics, that is, its fundamental physics. They have to analyze frames, pixels, juggle points, damage scaling systems, and more. Needless to say, this is no easy task, especially because most fighters don’t have many (or, in some cases, any) built-in analytical tools.
This is the problem that Loïc “WydD” Petit encountered. A Cammy main since the days of Street Fighter IV, Petit picked her up in Street Fighter V and wanted to know how she functioned in the new game’s engine. “It started as, ‘Hmm, I would like to know the advantage of Cammy when she does a divekick,’ which is very dependent on a [diverse] set of conditions.” After a divekick, the player’s options grow or shrink depending on how high Cammy is when she starts the divekick, which strength of divekick she uses, whether the opposing character blocks standing or crouching, and more.
Petit “took it as an opportunity to dive a bit more in the memory injection to track the advantage in game. Then after getting the data, I didn’t understand how it behaved and I tried to study the game behaviour. A couple of days later, I had the base for a simulation of the move. Then it was interesting to see how far I could go.” So far, he’s gone very far indeed – and, if anything, he’s only just getting started.
Built To Code
In terms of his work in the FGC, Petit describes himself as a reverse engineer. In other words, he takes an existing game and studies it so closely that he can rebuild part of it from the ground up. That’s how his divekick project turned into sfvsim, a free online “simulator of the SFV gameplay engine.” It’s also how he built sfvdiff, “a gameplay asset viewer for people to see and compare assets across versions.”
Nor is he limited to Capcom titles. He built a hitbox viewer for King of Fighters, which he calls kofbox. And he’s best known for establishing genre-wide benchmarks for input lag, i.e., the delay between when a player sends a command to the game and when the game displays that command. Using ideas from Nigel “noodalls” Woodall (@noodalls) and others, Petit developed real-life testing methodologies that allowed him to precisely measure cyclic input lag when others were guesstimating lag using a camera pointed at the screen or even just using the naked eye. This may seem like a highly arcane subject, but input lag can break a fighting game. When Street Fighter V launched with eight frames of input lag, the community reacted so strongly that “SFV 8 frames lag” is still a suggested search in Google.
As a fighting game fan who also has a Ph.D. in computer science, Petit is especially well-trained to study these issues. He’s also a tinkerer at heart. ”I just like it. When I was a kid, I played with my grandfather’s electronic equipment to make lights blink. Then I got interested in more complex logic…That’s the fun part about science, even when you are an expert in a domain, you are barely scratching the surface.”
Beyond The Surface
Luckily, Petit’s influence on the FGC has been more than skin-deep. Indie developers have sought him out to gain the benefit of his expertise, larger studios have brought him on as a consultant, and he earned a short period of celebrity last year when SNK sent a game designer to his home to help test the input lag for the new Samurai Shodown.
On June 2, he tweeted that the SamSho demo had “the worst lag I have ever measured.” “And when the Community Manager of SNK saw that he pinged me on Twitter asking for more details to send to the devs. Then he pinged me later saying that [producer Yasuyuki] Oda wanted to take the matter very seriously…So that was a bit surreal, yeah. Having Oda tell you in DMs that he was happy with my collaboration – in French – was basically the moment when I realised that was weird.”
While the community rallied in support of Petit, this episode also led to a minor backlash against developers, which he opposes. “I am very critical about the movement of blaming devs for everything,” he says. “Usually devs just do what they can to create a novel game with a gorgeous look in this highly competitive industry, yelling at them won’t change the matter.” While he would prefer for studios to build features that allow players to see hitboxes and frame data, he knows that such requests are “way more complex than [they] sound” and that “sometimes it is very hard to have accurate tools.” This is a point that the community would do well to embrace: not every hero needs a villain.
Looking For What’s Next
What’s most important is that he’s proactively doing his part to move the industry forward and that he’ll keep doing so. As a gamer, he likes to explore and stretch himself: in addition to Cammy in SFV, he’s been experimenting with Wagner in Under-Night In Birth: Late[st], as well as playing Street Fighter Alpha 3 and Breakers Revenge. Similarly, he’s always seeking out new projects “to learn new stuff and new skills as a senior developer.”
Most recently, he’s been working on a way of measuring in-game lag, that is, the extent to which the game software overworksthe hardware and causes malfunctions such as dropped frames of animation. He’s still in the preliminary phases of testing, so he isn’t ready to announce any findings just yet. But you can rest assured that his discoveries will be backed by hard data, solid analysis, and a real love of the community.
“Having people interested in the stuff that I discover has pushed me to create more stuff and always go deeper,” he says. So show that you appreciate this hero by giving him a follow on Twitter so that you can keep up with his latest work, then going and exploring sfvsim, kofbox, his input lag encyclopedia, and his other awesome projects!
Eli Horowitz (@BODIEDnovel) is an author and software professional who lives in Pittsburgh. To learn more about his work, including his FGC novel, visit his website.