Question about the state of melee hacking

[el Gusto]

I'm a programmer with no prior hacking experience. I want to create a mod which makes it easy to practice frame specific timings by displaying the amount of milliseconds between significant button presses.
I don't know if this is presently possible, and would like some kind of indication as to whether this will be possible at all.

 

[Ripple]

its not possible to display anything.

but you could just play in debug mode and record it. then when you want to see how fast youre doing something you can just watch the recording and see when the displayed action changes and for how many frames.

 

[el Gusto]

its not possible to display anything.

but you could just play in debug mode and record it. then when you want to see how fast you're doing something you can just watch the recording and see when the displayed action changes and for how many frames.

All I need is to be able to set the percentage of player 1 to display numbers. That should be possible.

I am not interested in frames, if I was I would just look at the screen.

Please allow me to explain why I am interested in milliseconds.

When you press a button, you don't know if you pressed it early in the frame, or late. Lets say I want to multishine with fox. I press X to jump, but unbeknownst to me, I pressed it just before the frame would change (late). This changes the timing slightly. If I shine with perfect timing, I'll succeed. If I shine just an instant later, the frame where you can shine whilst on the ground will pass before the input registers. However, if I am almost a frame early compared to the perfect timing, I will still succeed.

This phenomenon gives rise to perverse feedback. A successful multishine doesn't necessarily have better timing than a failed one!

To be able to practice timings to a sub-frame level of precision, we need to have sub-frame feedback.

 

[Todd Bonney]

If you could find the OSInitStopwatch, OSStartStopwatch, and OSStopStopwatch functions in memory, that would do what you want. or OSGetTick and OSDiffTick. My Symbol Map doesn't identify them by default.

But if it really is sub-frame level timing, would it even help? In the example you gave, with truly perfect timing, you could still have no control over whether you pressed jump early or late in the frame.

Also, I don't know how often the gamecube polls inputs. I'm under the impression that it's 3 times per frame, meaning any more precision than that is meaningless.

I wouldn't say it's impossible to display anything. We just don't know how yet.

 

[el Gusto]

If you could find the OSInitStopwatch, OSStartStopwatch, and OSStopStopwatch functions in memory, that would do what you want. or OSGetTick and OSDiffTick. My Symbol Map doesn't identify them by default.

Thank you very much.

But if it really is sub-frame level timing, would it even help? In the example you gave, with truly perfect timing, you could still have no control over whether you pressed jump early or late in the frame.

While this wasn't completely obvious in my previous post, the point of the mod would be to see exactly how many milliseconds had passed since you jumped. If you know how many milliseconds the ideal timing consists of, you could simply look at the percentage display to get precise feedback on your timing, without ever having to look at your character.

Also, I don't know how often the gamecube polls inputs. I'm under the impression that it's 3 times per frame, meaning any more precision than that is meaningless.

That's kind of sad, but I should have expected it. I guess it might still be worth a try, though I'm not sure...

I wouldn't say it's impossible to display anything. We just don't know how yet.

Does this mean that we can't set player percentage whenever we want?

Thanks.

 

[Todd Bonney]

Does this mean that we can't set player percentage whenever we want?

You can do that.