Jump to content

SpriteClub Newsletter #3 - The day of upgradening


Recommended Posts

Posted

It's the big day!

 

Originally I said I wanted to talk tagging next, but I really need to talk about the roster first. We'll do tagging next, for sure.

Anyway, there's a few major things changing for the roster. The biggest one is the thing everyone knows, which is the addition of 0th Division. But a lot of details about that have been a mystery up until now. Today that will all change, and many more things.

 

Division ranges
So first off, lets establish the new rating ranges:

Division Minimum rating Maximum rating
6th N/A 1149
5th 1150 1399
4th 1400 1549
3rd 1550 1699
2nd 1700 1799
1st 1800 1949
0th 1950 N/A

 

For the most part, nothing changed except the two new ones being tagged on, but one meaningful change here is that this means a character can now go straight from New (or rather, Placement, New is now the holding area) to 6th Division.

 

Promotions & demotions

This may change at a later date, but for the time being we'll be using the following rules:

  • Promoting into 1st-5th requires a winstreak of 5 and winning a boss fight
  • Demoting into 1st-5th requires a winstreak of -5 and losing a boss fight
  • Promoting into 0th requires a winstreak of 10
  • Demoting into 6th requires a winstreak of -10

Also, on a fun note, I put a lot of effort into making sure the new site has a backlog of all promotions/demotions that have happened. It's not 100% accurate, but it should be damn close.

 

Reshuffling

With this rather unique event in SpriteClub history, some extra changes become appealing.
You see, for the longest time, 3rd Division has had a bit of a bias in terms of appearance rates. Upon doing some data analysis, it became clear that 3rd Division has been shrinking as a result, since the system essentially means that a "favoured" Division will bleed itself dry as characters move out of it but aren't able to get back in due to not receiving enough matches.
There's a limit to this of course, but going purely by the numbers, it seemed unhealthy.

So I decided to take this opportunity to just fix that, along with balancing out the appearance rate biases. What this means is that every character will be re-assigned to their respective division according to their rating, along with a reset of their winstreak if they were moved. This results in a total of around 5542 characters being moved. The result of this is the following shift:

Division New size Change from v1
6th 787 +574
5th 4894 -929
4th 4626 -611
3rd 4126 +1414
2nd 2030 -422
1st 1540 -763
0th 737 +737

 

For specifics, please check the log on the site itself.

 

Character maintenance

So this is a big topic that probably few saw coming. What I'm talking about when I mean character maintenance is handling character updates, as well as ensuring a characters files is in the proper state when added the roster.
In the past, this was a very dislocated venture. There were a bunch of disjoint applications that did some stuff like ensuring the display name was right, but things weren't always reliable since a lot of it relied on me running the application responsible.

 

This is an issue I've really been wanting to address for v2, and it's one of the reasons why debuts will take a bit longer to add. I need finalize a system for ensuring that both new and updated characters automatically get the proper treatment. This set of modifications currently includes:

  1. Configuring the displayname of the character.
  2. Configuring the keymap of the character -- Needed for selecting the correct palette in turns.
  3. Fixing the .air bleed bug -- This is a crash unique to 1.0+ caused by defining a Clsn1/2 and Clsn1/2Default on the same frame. I previously mass fixed this on the roster, but due to aforementioned issues, the fix would sometimes be lost or not applied.
  4. Adding AI activation -- This is a new one that I only added recently, but this part of the tool has managed to identify about 8000 characters to add instant AI activation to. Some of these will be false positives (meaning, cases where the tool couldn't identify the AI was already always activating), but that's still a lot! Fun fact, there were also about 125 characters with faulty AI activation triggers that would cause their AI to activate slower than intended.

 

I expect more fixes to be added to this list in due time, but it is important to note that any fixes are required to be universally applicable and extremely unlikely to cause problems, so the requirements are pretty high.

Also, if you're particularly interested in the characters affected by the AI activation stuff, this isn't listed on the site as it's just considered "standard" for every character now, but regardless, you can have your fun checking it out here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1gLPGyUN3CJXGtFNEtkT9vytI2_UZ5MTzGhunweGhAKE/edit?usp=sharing.

 

Mugen fixes
So finally there's another fix that warrants mentioning. Courtesy of Warunoyari, SC v2 will be using a modified exe that should fix the infamous "target bug", which can result in crashes when certain characters hit multiple enemy characters at once. Because of the number of characters that do weird stuff with the engine's memory, there's a pretty strict requirement on not modifying the executable in a way that could cause problems for such characters, which this particular modification should not do.
Along with the more consistent application of the .air bleed fix, it should hopefully result in notably fewer crashes in SpriteClub v2.

 

Final words before launch
I'm excited for these coming weeks/months. I've put a lot of effort into making something new and awesome, and I hope you all will enjoy it. I've got more planned as well, but first will be a bout of fixing bugs and addressing other issues that as a one-man developer I just didn't have the insight to think of. I'm confident that with the new system any problems can be addressed in due time and that I'll have time for new stuff before long.

 

At least initially, I'll try to keep note of known issues in a different thread, so please keep an eye out on the known issues thread.

 

×
×
  • Create New...