I graduated from college and moved out of the country several years ago now. I almost never play Melee with good players, and when I do, they usually beat me, because they have had a lot more practice playing people than I have in the last several years. I only recently got the Phillip AI bot working, and while I think I finally have a semi-decent Captain Falcon from playing it, I still don't think playing this bot will make me good enough to hop on a plane and attend a tournament in Japan/Europe/America/etc and expect to do well. Even though the Phillip AI has inhuman reactions (the coolest thing it does is dodge your attempt to throw it with a side-B), it still can be easily read. It will predictably do the get-up attack, even in a bad situation, thus allowing for easier combo chains than would be possible with a very skilled human player.
There is another popular AI, called the Smashbot, but unlike Phillip, which learned to play via a AI learning algorithm, this thing essentially works like a flow-chart. I was able to beat it in about 20 minutes with Jiggly Puff, because it's flowchart didn't know how to handle Sing landing on them from above. Sing----> Rest -----> Repeat will quite easily let someone 4-stock the Smashbot.
I guess I really just made this thread to say, I'm taking some online Python AI class, specifically to get me motivated to continuing work on Phillip. You need a specially compiled version of Dolphin to turn the learning on, and I hope to eventually train the bot to fight on any legal stage, versus all the characters (or just the good ones, and it will probably still be able to beat the low-tiers with no special AI training). The people in the Phillip discord told me awhile back, that due to how the bot is coded, it can't really differentiate between characters. If you try to train the CF bot versus, say, Mario, it basically just acts like it is playing another CF, and will still attempt to do things that could only work in a Falcon ditto. Surely there is a way to 'reset' this aspect of it, so you don't have to do another month of 'training' to get the bot to fight reasonably well. I hope to one day make AIs for nearly all the characters that are nearly impossible to beat for human opponent of any skill level, and no just AIs that can shine-blind you to death with frame perfect accuracy, but bots that beat you in style.
From here, the vision I have is to open up new ways to play Melee. Imagine is a Phillip AI is so good at playing Fox, that it is impossible for a human opponent to ever beat it. Does that mean it could beat humans in a 2 v 1? My guess is that, no matter how well the bot played, it simply wouldn't be possible for it to defeat, say, Leffen and Mango in a 2 v 1 match. But what if it is? Could the AI be so amazing at the game, that it could defeat 3 of the so-called Gods in a 3 v 1? Surely not...
Anyway, I like to make posts like this every few years, talking about stuff I will probably never do. This time, however, I do have an online class related to it, and I plan to use the class as a springboard into figuring out how the Phillip AI works in greater detail, and creating more interesting and tougher bots. I personally can beat the Phillip AI about 1 out of every 4 times in a normal match, but if I 'fixed' the issues it has being too predictable, that would probably drop to 1 out of 20 easily. If it could read me the way I read it, then I probably would never beat it again.
Anyway, to do some more ranting, the fact that someone recently was able to reconstruct the source code for Super Mario 64 and to compile an N64 rom that is identical to the real one with it tells me this should also be possible with Melee. I know about the FRAY project, and while I don't know if that will go anywhere, I certainly hope it does. This means we can finally free Melee from Dolphin, from CRTs, from the Gamecube and Wii, and start importing code into the game to make it better.
One idea that has occurred to me, which could breath some fresh life into Melee, is if someone was able to make a sort of "Super Smash Bros Melee Maker" aspect of the game. Smash is a fighting game, but it is a platform fighter that plays not too different from any normal 2d platforming game. Imagine, instead of a crappy Adventure mode, or even a crappy Sub Space Emissary mode, we had something closer to Super Mario Maker 2. Levels that could not only challenge the skills of people to fight AIs, but could challenge them in the traditional ways that platformers challenge people. Imagine going through a Mario Maker style level, except you can also wavedash, hit enemies and L-cancel the landing lag, etc, and the levels were setup to make you do these things in some kind of Speedrun! Of course, a cease-and-desist letter would be coming from Nintendo, but as long as the code was there, and anyone could simply add it to their own game somehow, I'm sure there is very little Nintendo could do to stop it.
Anyway, back to AIs, I think eventually the AIs will be so good, that no human opponent will ever be able to beat them. It's kinda already there, but not 100% yet. But I think there are a couple of interesting things here. This is probably only true for the top-tiers. An awesome AI Bowser is still a terrible character, and I doubt even an AI playing Bowser perfectly, or nearly perfectly, could consistently beat a top-level human opponent. This would give us a new perspective on what characters: how much do you have to handicap a character before the AI can't defeat the human opponent? I dunno, but I'm guessing probably somewhere around Link it would get impossible for humans to compete. This would also lead to an AI vs AI tier list. Would the same AI, playing different characters, result in a tier-list similar to the one we humans already have? My guess is that yes, it would, with a few exceptions here and there.
A reconstructed source-code for Melee would also allow us to implement some easy method play online, along with doing an easy ranking system. But I also wonder, from my own experience fighting the Phillip bot for hours on end, would there be a big difference between the top ranked human vs human matches, and from those who are top ranked in human vs AI matches? Does beating a human player require different sets of Melee skills than beating AI bots? Right now, I think that is the case, but if the AI learning gets better, eventually your skill against the bot should reflect your skill against a human. As in, based on how well you perform against a bot, the bot should be able to assign you a ranking, which could reliable predict how well you will do against other human opponents.
All this could be implemented, of course, with the Slippi stuff already available for recording matches. You could 'train' the AIs continuously against human opponents, saving data from off-line and online matches (though I guess if the AIs were integrated into the game, there would be no point to play an AI online). And if it was, I would hope all this could be done the next time Nintendo releases an inferior Smash game, so everyone will flock back to Melee to see all the cool new features that aren't Smashballs.
There is another popular AI, called the Smashbot, but unlike Phillip, which learned to play via a AI learning algorithm, this thing essentially works like a flow-chart. I was able to beat it in about 20 minutes with Jiggly Puff, because it's flowchart didn't know how to handle Sing landing on them from above. Sing----> Rest -----> Repeat will quite easily let someone 4-stock the Smashbot.
I guess I really just made this thread to say, I'm taking some online Python AI class, specifically to get me motivated to continuing work on Phillip. You need a specially compiled version of Dolphin to turn the learning on, and I hope to eventually train the bot to fight on any legal stage, versus all the characters (or just the good ones, and it will probably still be able to beat the low-tiers with no special AI training). The people in the Phillip discord told me awhile back, that due to how the bot is coded, it can't really differentiate between characters. If you try to train the CF bot versus, say, Mario, it basically just acts like it is playing another CF, and will still attempt to do things that could only work in a Falcon ditto. Surely there is a way to 'reset' this aspect of it, so you don't have to do another month of 'training' to get the bot to fight reasonably well. I hope to one day make AIs for nearly all the characters that are nearly impossible to beat for human opponent of any skill level, and no just AIs that can shine-blind you to death with frame perfect accuracy, but bots that beat you in style.
From here, the vision I have is to open up new ways to play Melee. Imagine is a Phillip AI is so good at playing Fox, that it is impossible for a human opponent to ever beat it. Does that mean it could beat humans in a 2 v 1? My guess is that, no matter how well the bot played, it simply wouldn't be possible for it to defeat, say, Leffen and Mango in a 2 v 1 match. But what if it is? Could the AI be so amazing at the game, that it could defeat 3 of the so-called Gods in a 3 v 1? Surely not...
Anyway, I like to make posts like this every few years, talking about stuff I will probably never do. This time, however, I do have an online class related to it, and I plan to use the class as a springboard into figuring out how the Phillip AI works in greater detail, and creating more interesting and tougher bots. I personally can beat the Phillip AI about 1 out of every 4 times in a normal match, but if I 'fixed' the issues it has being too predictable, that would probably drop to 1 out of 20 easily. If it could read me the way I read it, then I probably would never beat it again.
Anyway, to do some more ranting, the fact that someone recently was able to reconstruct the source code for Super Mario 64 and to compile an N64 rom that is identical to the real one with it tells me this should also be possible with Melee. I know about the FRAY project, and while I don't know if that will go anywhere, I certainly hope it does. This means we can finally free Melee from Dolphin, from CRTs, from the Gamecube and Wii, and start importing code into the game to make it better.
One idea that has occurred to me, which could breath some fresh life into Melee, is if someone was able to make a sort of "Super Smash Bros Melee Maker" aspect of the game. Smash is a fighting game, but it is a platform fighter that plays not too different from any normal 2d platforming game. Imagine, instead of a crappy Adventure mode, or even a crappy Sub Space Emissary mode, we had something closer to Super Mario Maker 2. Levels that could not only challenge the skills of people to fight AIs, but could challenge them in the traditional ways that platformers challenge people. Imagine going through a Mario Maker style level, except you can also wavedash, hit enemies and L-cancel the landing lag, etc, and the levels were setup to make you do these things in some kind of Speedrun! Of course, a cease-and-desist letter would be coming from Nintendo, but as long as the code was there, and anyone could simply add it to their own game somehow, I'm sure there is very little Nintendo could do to stop it.
Anyway, back to AIs, I think eventually the AIs will be so good, that no human opponent will ever be able to beat them. It's kinda already there, but not 100% yet. But I think there are a couple of interesting things here. This is probably only true for the top-tiers. An awesome AI Bowser is still a terrible character, and I doubt even an AI playing Bowser perfectly, or nearly perfectly, could consistently beat a top-level human opponent. This would give us a new perspective on what characters: how much do you have to handicap a character before the AI can't defeat the human opponent? I dunno, but I'm guessing probably somewhere around Link it would get impossible for humans to compete. This would also lead to an AI vs AI tier list. Would the same AI, playing different characters, result in a tier-list similar to the one we humans already have? My guess is that yes, it would, with a few exceptions here and there.
A reconstructed source-code for Melee would also allow us to implement some easy method play online, along with doing an easy ranking system. But I also wonder, from my own experience fighting the Phillip bot for hours on end, would there be a big difference between the top ranked human vs human matches, and from those who are top ranked in human vs AI matches? Does beating a human player require different sets of Melee skills than beating AI bots? Right now, I think that is the case, but if the AI learning gets better, eventually your skill against the bot should reflect your skill against a human. As in, based on how well you perform against a bot, the bot should be able to assign you a ranking, which could reliable predict how well you will do against other human opponents.
All this could be implemented, of course, with the Slippi stuff already available for recording matches. You could 'train' the AIs continuously against human opponents, saving data from off-line and online matches (though I guess if the AIs were integrated into the game, there would be no point to play an AI online). And if it was, I would hope all this could be done the next time Nintendo releases an inferior Smash game, so everyone will flock back to Melee to see all the cool new features that aren't Smashballs.
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