Balanced Brawl Version 2 Release

[MrGame&Rock]

Yes, thank you and Thinkaman for your amazing work on Balanced Brawl. If not for you guys I'd have quit smash for good a long time ago. *waits patiently for gameplay discussion from AA/Thinkaman at another point lol*

 

[Last Elixir]

Words

Thanks a lot for the update! Good to hear you guys are doing well and such.

 

[MrGame&Rock]

I'm going to try and get some small balanced brawl tourneys going... somewhere... I have no idea where my community's brawl players are though, so wish me luck! lol. Given my relative newsiness, it'll likely just be really minor stuff, and I'll have to get rid of the stage hacks over Luigi's Mansion and Brinstar, but if I get lucky, I can post results here.

Also, I'm working on a custom CSS specifically for BBrawl. (I posted a topic for technical support in the "customized content" section that got no replies but a fair number of views, link is: http://www.smashboards.com/showthread.php?t=317116)

I've seen this idea be tossed aside by Thinkaman, with the objection that "it's really easy to find one of your own". But I honestly, truly think we should have our very own, for a number of reasons.

1. It helps BBrawl stand out, especially compared to Brawl+. If people see our custom CSS and immediatly recognize it as ours, we get some recognition. It worked for Brawl+, it could work for us.
2. It will let us separate Samus and ZSS and give the latter her own slot on the selection screen. This will help avert the common "I don't remember she exists" problem with ZSS. This is why she's ignored, despite her awesomeness. A custom CSS will be the best buff she can ever have, and we don't even have to change her further! Honestly, this ZSS issue is on the same platform as DK's weakness to DDD chaingrabs or Wario's grab release issues or Luigi's awful Dash attack. It's something that honestly shouldn't be a problem, but is, and fixing it feels like something that should have happened the first time
3. Every single custom CSS I found online that satisfies the primary motive for one (ZSS selectable) also separates the Pokemon Trainer, which is a design decision Thinkaman and AA always opposed. If the downloadable ones that fix ZSS also mess up the PT's balancing, we need our own.

the CSS I came up with looks like Melee's design-wise, and I thought it looked awesome. I separated Zelda and Sheik as icons (iirc they can still transform) because it makes the CSS look all nice and symmetrical, and it doesn't affect either Zelda or Sheik's gameplay; both characters are recognized by the Brawl tier list individually in addition to as a team. It also makes Sheik slightly easier to select immediately, for a far lesser version of ZSS's fix.

I also think it looks quite nice from a design standpoint, with the two series with three characters occupying the edges, (the far left one is Sakuri's series so it's okay, no harm done mario, and space animals aren't complaining either) followed by character groups of four. (Mario main and sub series on the left, Pokemon and Zelda series on the right, unchanged in vertical position except TL and Zelda are switched. TL right under Link feels natural, and Sheik is to Zelda's immediate left anyway) Then the "outsider" characters are grouped together, with protagonists on the left, (CF, ICs, Olimar, and Pit) and the "misfits" on the right. (GW, ROB, Sheik, and the random slot) Finally, columns of two groups of two occupy the center. (PK bros and 3rd partiers on the left, Metroid series and Fire Emblem bros on the right)

I just can't make the files I need out if it, but you guys can... which could be an awesome aesthetic step in the right direction for Balanced Brawl. Give it some thought, at least

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

We've considered that suggestion at several points, but there are several reasons we don't agree.

1. One of our primary design goals is making only prudent changes to improve the game. Change for change's sake is something we very much reject, and honestly there's nothing wrong with the default CSS. In fact, the vertical series grouping it uses as well as the way you have that kinda smash 64ish top row we think is very aesthetically appealing. If the CSS is what sticks with people from a mod, then having a unique one would send the wrong message for us.

2. If memory served, B+ never escaped the fact that it had assorted technical hick-ups, and I think the CSS codes were involved. Like I know if you were mashing stuff while the CSS was loading in-between games B+ would sometimes (relatively rarely) lock up and I don't recall which codes were actually responsible but vaguely remember CSS being involved. It has been a while. For the professional level of polish we seek to present, introducing any new fatal errors in any aspect of the game is completely unacceptable. That's why we reverted our custom SSS even though it was mostly an improvement and represented some real work on my part; it caused a crash in the My Music menu if you tried to edit the music on Hanenbow, and we had no way to avoid that. Likewise, we took pride in fixing all known item bugs in BBrawl even though we don't suggest playing with items, and I actually did some testing in subspace emissary just to make sure nothing we implemented caused problems there (I found no problems). It's hard to express to a certain crowd why these things matter, but it mostly comes down to the fact that we want to be professional and appeal to the broadest possible audience and caring about this stuff is important. It's also why we consider fixes like our removal of Sheik's chain glitch very important changes; we removed a crash from the game that was there before we started! Sadly we weren't able to fix the Yoshi grab break crash, but we actually did try.

3. While we would agree that it's kinda odd how ZSS is handled by Brawl natively and would not have married her to Samus were we designing Brawl from the ground up, we also suspect that this actually helps her appeal among the more niche crowd that was always going to be drawn to her anyway so don't think that particular design decision is a problem.

4. We don't want to remake the image map on the website. Seriously, do you know how long this took to make?

http://balancedbrawl.net/characters/

5. This is going back to presentation, but part of what we always thought about BBrawl is "this should be believable as a balance patch for Brawl". A new CSS doesn't fit that criteria.

That was probably a bit long of a way to say "no", but I know we've had this discussion quite a few times and those are all the various reasons we always didn't think it was a good idea.

 

[ぱみゅ]

AA, it's always amazing to see your responses.

You have no idea how much I'd love a gameplay discussion (or at least some posts).

 

[Supreme Dirt]

AA, if you're up to it, what was your reasoning on the LGL as implemented? Why 5? Why an automatic getup instead of allowing some choice by the player?

Actually I have loads of questions on the balance choices, I'd love to have a conversation as well.

 

[Rainierman]

Hi AA. I must mention that thanks to you guys me and my RL friends had a great time playing Brawl today. So even if you had actually dropped the project, know that we're all as a matter of fact very grateful for everything you have done until now regardless. You're awesome! Thanks!

Change of subject. I don't know if you and Thinkaman will be going through the whole topic since you last posted, but just in case you don't, I mentioned some time ago that Jigglypuff's profile is missing her Healing Rest from the not technical list of changes. I think that might have been a slip, so just raising awareness of its absence just in case.

 

[Amazing Ampharos]

AA, if you're up to it, what was your reasoning on the LGL as implemented? Why 5? Why an automatic getup instead of allowing some choice by the player?

Actually I have loads of questions on the balance choices, I'd love to have a conversation as well.

First of all, I should clarify that as with several other things, we were constrained by possible implementations. A common suggestion is tweaking ledge invincibility, but we didn't find this possible so from the start we needed some solution to the planking question that functioned otherwise. There were some other smaller theoretical design issues with ledge invincibility, but despite my best efforts digging through code and for variables it proved inassailable so those theoretical concerns were never explored in depth to determine if they were going to be problems or whether that model was viable.

Our thought process was that both planking and scrooging were very serious abuses, that the rules the greater community adopted were band-aides at best that also raised serious questions about the fairness of their application across stages and match-ups (Norfair in particular is a sore edge case, and Norfair being legal was never a question to us since it is easily our collective favorite stage). Our view is that being forced into a situation in which game mechanics force you into "checkmate" is fine; that's actually kinda the design of smash (you get forced off-stage and die when you have no way to get back safely). That "checkmate" coming from an external ledge grab count rule is kinda bad though so doing something was absolutely imperative (particularly since it was trivally demonstratable how abusable scrooging was in a ton of match-ups, usually ones with Ganon or Bowser as the loser, so just saying planking and scrooging as they were was okay wasn't a good idea either). Ledge play is pretty interesting in general though so we didn't want to just remove it; our basic concept was that a player going in with the mentality of using the ledges to maximum advantage but never trying to just stay on them as a positional choice should be unaffected by mechanics changes in this area whereas players who do try to deliberately position on the ledge should be punished to just such an extent that that choice proves to be decisively unviable.

Testing, particularly on ledge heavy Norfair, established that 5 grabs was right. I know we tested out 4, but the extra one for 5 was better since once in a while you'd accidentally hit 4. We also tested out 7 actually (based off Ike's inherent Aether limit), but we found at that point tactics that were kinda like planking started to regain some viability especially with characters like MK who can spend a whole lot of time in-between grabs if they want to. We determined that just touching the ground wasn't enough early on; on some stages, that's not really inhibiting to scrooging style tactics (to not name stages that a lot of people hate, think about how little that restriction would be a restriction on Smashville). The idea is that you need to get off the ledge and somehow fight, and it proved much simpler to define getting in the fight as getting hit instead of landing hits (and getting hit also guarantees that if you are simply being edge-guarded, you get as many extra chances as you need). That did require some real work (special grab states were a pain since each one had to be accounted for individually; I recall Yoshi's Egg Lay was on some pretty obscure action IDs). We tested for lots of different match-ups on lots of different stages, and we found that if neither player was actually trying to stall our limit basically didn't come up. We also established a few quirks. The most important one was that Popo and Nana were counted separately but if they were synched and Popo hit the limit Nana would mimic his action which was a great relief (if they were counted together, that would make this code extremely unfair to Ice Climbers, and if not for the second part, that could lead to some extremely bad for ICs desynchs while in ledge trouble). We discovered that transformation characters turning into new characters reset it, but that's fine since the Zelda & Sheik transformation is the only air ok one, and that's not a viable tactic in a ledge situation. We discovered that tether grabs don't count toward the total, but then we considered how tether grabs were often used for a kind of ledge mindgame with the 3 count and the potentially very rapid grabs and declared it a feature and not a bug.

As per the punishment, it's not really possible code-wise to just disallow further ledge grabs (which was one of the considered solutions). Allowing ledge drops at all just allows further abuse. Really the only option left is forced ledge action between climb, roll, attack, and jump. If you think about the frame timings of what inputs would be required, allowing player choice isn't really realistic, and either way, we don't want to allow things like rolling past the opponent and then doing more run-away if you hit the limit you are supposed to be "caught" so permitting the roll or jump didn't make a lot of design sense anyway. As per the attack or climb, we decided that in general the attack was less favorable to the user in a forced situation than the climb and that further automatically attacking would be awkward within the context of the game (you automatically stand up neutral, not get-up attack, if you sit on the ground without teching for too long). The way the game handles ledge climbs it automatically selelcts for the under 100% or 100%+ climb based on damage as well so that was a relief (keeps the mechanics consistent).

We also were developing the ledge mechanics in parallel with water mechanics changes. We had some earlier, and problematic, solutions to water issues that were causing forced drownings when players were trying not to be abusive and while I thought it was interesting it did show itself to be too big of a deviation from Brawl's norms for our project mission. In many match-ups, repeatedly entering water is a powerful stalling tactic (especially on the Pirate Ship), and we have the further issue on said Pirate Ship of rudder stalling. The goal is to make repeated water entries for stalling not good but to allow the water to be used as a recovery tool as clearly originally designed. Since the main stage on which these abuses is feasible, Pirate Ship, has ledges right over the water, making them run off the same variable but setting the water limit to a higher count was sensible to us (since forced drowning is much worse than forced ledge climb but we don't want players trading off between two types of stalling to max run the clock). The rudder stalling was an easy fix with a timer; drowning if you spend too much time underwater is... oddly intuitive.

We playtested extensively, and I stress that even in match-ups wherein we were constantly wanting to grab ledges (like G&W vs anyone on Norfair) we very seldom hit the cap unless we either started trying to stall or if we were just winning so badly that we weren't getting hit but that wasn't really a problem either since winning so badly also means that you just lose a little offensive momentum you can sacrifice. I do know there have been some concerns in this topic about characters weak in that area getting ledge-trapped, but if you're making a serious effort to get back on and manage to fail to get back five times in a row (ignoring potential tether grabs) and also don't get hit, then you've either way still failed to recover really badly and some degree of punishment isn't awful here. More often we found it happened when the ledge player wasn't making a serious effort to get back but was just trying to hang out on the ledge until his opponent let up, backed off, or made a mistake, and that's really not better than planking so I suppose the code had the mostly positive side-effect of making ledge traps a more real thing in more match-ups. Some interpretation would suggest that it hurts characters with weak ledge games, but I disagree. The counter-side to the added pressure put on characters with weaker ledge games is that these characters can now actually apply pressure to opponents on ledges whereas before the opponent could just stay on the ledge forever and know that the ledge trapper was too weak off-stage to jump off after them. Like Link will never jump off stage after someone, but now he can stay on stage and try to create a strong ledge trap that covers all of his opponent's recovery options knowing that they can't just stay down there.

I hope that probably too long response clarifies all of our thoughts on that code. I wrote that code myself and spent a ton of time on it, and while I know it isn't unanimous that it's awesome, I'm really proud of it honestly and do think it makes Brawl a whole lot better. If somehow in all of that I missed something critical, feel free to ask. I'm pretty open at this point to answering assorted questions.

 

[ぱみゅ]

inb4 your character sucks at getting up from the ledge. Deal with it.

I think I know where are you trying to get at: many times, you can't really tell if someone is stalling to wait for an opening or actually planking. I somehow agree that that code is very punishing in some cases, but it's just a side effect of preventing major abuses.

If x character still have some really bad matchups, well, that's why further testing was needed in the first place...

 

[Supreme Dirt]

That's actually exactly the length of response I was hoping for, AA. I don't have the time to read through it atm but I will, be assured of that.

 

[King_Mos]

Does anyone know how to turn into ZSS mid game?? On the Bbrawl dojo site there is footage of samus changing into ZSS after doing a taut. I am using PAL version 2 through Riivolution.

 

[ぱみゅ]

It can be done at any moment, and has nothing to do with hacks, it's on the normal Brawl build.
Is something with pressing up and down taunts very quickly, If I remember correctly. I can't do it as I have never really practiced it.

 

[Supreme Dirt]

Up taunt -> Down Taunt x4 in the first 10 frames of the initial UTaunt iirc

 

[King_Mos]

ahh so it does lol Any word of Bbrawl V3 for PAL yet

 

[Rainierman]

ahh so it does lol Any word of Bbrawl V3 for PAL yet

One page ago.

And happy anniversary to AA, if that means anything to you :D.

 

[Sleek Media]

So, hey guys. Sorry Thinkaman and I have been mega-AWOL for quite a while. Life kinda caught up with both of us, especially Thinkaman who as of a few weeks ago is a college graduate. As per our focuses on the project, we hope to finalize a real BBrawlv3 release soon (we have explored some stuff that is quite interesting but kinda tangential so it's not like we've just been completely negelcting the project), as opposed to the current kinda silly "half released" BBrawl3 we have now and make sure we have proper PAL support and everything.

Honestly, this is likely to be the last version of BBrawl, but we don't look at it so much as the project ending as entering the final stage of development. We'd actually like to be able to broaden our net here and try to do a Japanese version and actually put out support for it on par with our NTSC release. That basically means that we would really like to translate the website into Japanese as well. The problem is that neither of us actually speak Japanese nor do we own Japanese Wiis for testing though we are technically proficient enough to make files as needed (though we would need to do some careful research into region specific codes for a JPN version, I'm sure it's not insurmountable). If anyone is or knows someone who can help us on the translation front, we'd really appreciate it. If we can't find anyone, this particular plan ends up going nowhere and we just do the NTSC and PAL versions like before, but we have seen that there are some diverse and interesting people playing BBrawl so we figure it wouldn't hurt to ask.

Sorry that I'm not going to jump into gameplay related discussion right now even though I always do love a huge post talking to everyone in the thread at once in its own section, but I will say to everyone here thanks for your support and I hope that what is likely our final BBrawl release will provide a good, stable version that you can enjoy for the indefinite future.

Your work is much appreciated. It is hands-down the best Brawl mod, and in my opinion functions as the game should have been when originally released. If you want to start a fund to get yourselves a jWii, I will make a donation.

Also, I know it's early, but can we count on you guys to fix SSB4 if Sakurai blows it again? At the very least, custom music would be amazing to have. =-D

 

[ぱみゅ]

Ehem... you can add music of your own, BBrawl does not encourage it, but they do not even say it's not recommended.

www.brawlcustommusic.com serve yourself, is a full buffette.

 

[Sleek Media]

Ehem... you can add music of your own, BBrawl does not encourage it, but they do not even say it's not recommended.

www.brawlcustommusic.com serve yourself, is a full buffette.

Yeah, I know. I made a custom code sheet or whatever. What I meant was having custom music in SSB4.

 

[ぱみゅ]

I somehow didn't read that. I apologize.

And custom systems are tricky, almost no videogame corporation includes them in the original design, I think that's because there's a lot of copyright and stuff of the likes involved.
Fans always figure how to break that barrier anyway....

 

[Tesh]

^I'm pretty sure I remember my older brother always having lots of music on his XBOX from CDs and some games let him play whatever music he wanted (mostly racing games like Sega GT).

Also i havent looked at bbrawl in a while (just in here trying to figure out how to run stacksmash with a different hack pack) could anyone give me a subjective rundown of the coolest changes in the past few months.

 

[Supreme Dirt]

coolest changes in the past few months.

Absolutely nothing.

 

[Caranthir]

Is there a way to play custom stages with balanced brawl?

 

[ぱみゅ]

If you're loading it via Stack Smash (the default BBrawl method), there isn't.
If you use whatever other load method (Gecko, Riivolution, etc), you can.

 

[Caranthir]

Ok, I got the homebrew channel, how do I load it through the other methods?

 

[ぱみゅ]

Google "Gecko OS" and download it.
I think it goes with a couple instructions for its setup. It is easy anyway.
Then erase the stage within the Balanced Brawl download (located in the folder Root:\private\wii\app\rsbe\st\st_080805_0933.bin), and everytime you want to run BBrawl, just load the Homebrew Channel and Gecko.
Then, if you want to run regular Brawl, you can keep the SD inside the wii and nothing will happen.

 

[G.D.]

Oh, it's a post from that one guy no one remembers, who's only here for Balanced.

I'm not sure if this is the right place to post this, but, I love BBrawl. The extent I've played this particular mod has spoiled me, it seems. I've been virtually obsessed with this mod since first release, and rarely go to other versions (even vanilla) unless I'm dying to play the game and can't find anyone else willing to play Balanced.

After spending several months away from Brawl, I'm now finding it harder and harder to find a BB player of remotely similar skill level... especially if I'm just wanting to play some wifi matches. Despite this still being the far-and-away best mod for Brawl, it seems destined to not be the most popular. That said, I'm sticking with it until SSB4 is released.

Is there any way the old BB chat on the site could be revived? Is there any sort of online community specifically for dedicated BBrawl players? Or is there anyone here who wouldn't mind playing some (ir)regular Balanced Brawl wifi matches with me? Heck, if all else failed and I attempted to make some kind of organized Balanced Brawl community, would anyone be interested?

 

[Supreme Dirt]

Balanced Brawl isn't the far and away best mod for Brawl, because it still fails to address several fundamental flaws in the design of the game itself.

Regardless, you'll probably find it extremely hard to form a community for Balanced Brawl, simply because it's not different enough from vBrawl.

 

[Tesh]

Yea, I liked BBrawl, but their pledge to not screw with frame data or animations or hitboxes means they simple can't fix all the problems or be excitingly fresh as a mod.

 

[Rainierman]

Well, I'd join

 

[ぱみゅ]

I wanted to revive BBrawl locally.... then we stopped playing.
I'll focus on reviving community as a whole for a while, and then try to implement BBrawl.

Anyway, if you make any sort of group, count me in.

 

[G.D.]

Balanced Brawl isn't the far and away best mod for Brawl, because it still fails to address several fundamental flaws in the design of the game itself.

Yea, I liked BBrawl, but their pledge to not screw with frame data or animations or hitboxes means they simple can't fix all the problems or be excitingly fresh as a mod.

Yeah, I'm well aware of this. For me, Balanced is still a much better option for competitive play than the other mods, and no matter how often I try my hand at other mods or hear others disagree with me, that opinion of mine has yet to change...

Regardless, you'll probably find it extremely hard to form a community for Balanced Brawl, simply because it's not different enough from vBrawl.

Of course. That's why I'm here hoping to find others like myself who would be interested.

Well, I'd join

Anyway, if you make any sort of group, count me in.

Good! Even this is honestly more than I expected. I'll try to ask around to see if I can't find anyone else who would be interested... In the meantime, would you advocate any particular form of group? I was thinking, if the BB site doesn't get its chat box back, we could just use an IRC channel.

 

[ぱみゅ]

Well, for starters, here's THIS.
It has just been transformed into the new facebook group layout, and almost every member (except me, as admin) was lost in the migration.

 

[Supreme Dirt]

I guess I'll join. Balanced Brawl might be a little too close to vBrawl for my liking, but there's nothing wrong with supporting a fellow mod community.

 

[Sleek Media]

BBrawl is hands-down the best Brawl mod. If I wanted all the hitstun and buffering crap, I'd go play Melee. BBrawl is just regular Brawl but without the frustration. Awesome.

 

[ぱみゅ]

I swear, after there terrible pre-finals/finals season ends, I'll keep up my game and invite people to try BBrawl

 

[Supreme Dirt]

BBrawl is hands-down the best Brawl mod. If I wanted all the hitstun and buffering crap, I'd go play Melee. BBrawl is just regular Brawl but without the frustration. Awesome.

Melee doesn't have 0.54 hitstun and brawl physics, just saying.

 

[Sleek Media]

^ does not fit into conversation

 

[King Luigi 128]

If I wanted all the hitstun and buffering crap, I'd go play Melee.

Fun Fact: Melee & Brawl actually have the same amount of hitstun!
The only difference is that, in Brawl, you're able to cancel it with an air-dodge or an aerial.

Also, that "buffering crap" you mentioned.. is actually more prominent in Brawl than Melee.
Buffer was non-existent in Melee.. thus you had to be exact on all your movements/attacks.
(It may have had a small window on a couple specific actions.. but don't quote me on that.)

Brawl on the other hand, made it a universal thing & gave it a bigger 'window' of time for use.
This made things a bit more lenient, since you could 'prepare' an action slightly ahead of time.
(Though it does have the downside of doing things you may not have intended, in certain situations.)

 

[Sleek Media]

All I hear is technical excuses for why Melee isn't as laggy as Brawl, even though it's obviously much, much more laggy. Melee fanboys gonna be melee fanboys.

 

[ぱみゅ]

All I hear is something we do not need here.
I'll probably get some feedback by next month.