Quick update: hitstop is back in the engine. Here’s how you currently set it:

Set(Attack.Stop, 6)

In fact, at the moment that’s how you set all attack parameters. I’ll be adding functions over time for easier use, but this is the generic way. Some parameters that used to have different names depending on hit / block, namely hitstun / blockstun and hitstop / blockstop now are unified under their single banner of Stun and Stop respectively.

Fighting games have a lot of names for stuff that is player facing, and players also give it their own name, so I’m making up less ambiguous, less overlapping, technical terminology as I go. That’s why the default button names are LMHU, as it doesn’t overlap any common button name on controllers, that’s why “teching” out of a combo is “recovery” and “teching” out of a throw is “breaking” the throw. I try to link concepts that are conceptually similar. There’s no unified fighting game lexicon that all games use, so players tend to come with different names, and some names reappear like “high” attacks meaning different things for 2D and 3D fighters for example, or “stun” which could also refer to the “dizzy” mechanics of some games. I need to give names to concepts in the engine that speak both to the technical reality and face the user, so it’s a big matter of taste. I’m making the engine so we’re using my taste, which is also the correct one (obviously).

Anyway, Freeze phase and Halt phase work just as they worked previously, mostly. I have yet to implement collider coherence over several frames, so for now I took the shortcut of just removing frozen entities from the physics computation. I worry a bit about the more state I keep outside of the CASP memory stack as its additional rollback headaches. There’s a bit of play with the Before and After events: Frozen or Halted entities only execute their respective phase without the Before and After events, and they are executed at the same point as the Main phase, meaning you can use active entities’ After event to access data from the frozen / halted entities.

Cool bonus of the compiler being an actual compiler instead of a spaghetti parser is that phases / events are properly handled now, and hit animation now plays as expected without needing fancy tricks.

Summer heat is starting here and it’s frying me so I’ll probably be less efficient. I should probably either figure out blocking or physics enveloppes next, hopefully I’m out of those big core features by the end of the week.