AI training and misc stuff.

I've been trying to train my AI character, and I was wondering how other people are coming with this.

First, I tried to teach it all the commands and some basic flowcharts/combos in Sparring, which was straightforward enough. Seems that if you're doing things, it'll wait until you stop for a moment and then repeat what you've just done. If you do nothing for several moments, it'll start trying to attack etc.

When learning new commands, the window says "Learn" and you hear a good sound.
When learning combos etc it will say "Tech +".

My Akira seems to have trouble with some FC commands, and with buffering certain things. While it learned SE- Standing Palm- Fujin with no problem, it couldn't seem to understand ST- Single Palm, even though I tried to input the palm several ways.

Then I had it watch some replays, which was again pretty simple. Have it watch replays that feature that character, use the O button to teach it stuff, and the X button to have it "Forget". I was thinking of saving replays where both characters are the same character as my AI character, to see if it would learn from both. I also noticed here that you can load AI files off the CD, I guess these are the CPU AI files, which you can teach as well?

Then I tried Arcade mode on Normal, where I was the AI's "second". Here I got a little confused at times. There's the oval window, and a camera above my AI's head with a green light. If I press the O button, it'll say "Play OK", and the camera's lights turn Red (like the O button), and the little propeller on the bottom of the camera spins for a moment. Then the light goes back to green. If I press X, the light goes blue and the window says "Play NG" which I guess means play no good. At times if you press the button the AI will look at you. I think this happens if you press it too soon again (while the propeller is still spinning).

Sometimes it will seem to update itself with messags like "Attack+", "Guard+", or "Attack-". It also says "Kassi" or "Kashi" for reversals and getting out of Vanessa's Hand Holds.

My AI seems to alternate between attacking frantically and just standing there getting nailed, at which I usually push the "Play NG" button, but I'm not sure what it will/won't listen to. It had a lot of trouble with Jacky, since it couldn't punch too much, and after that I figured I should train it some more in sparring etc.

How's everyone else coming? The manual is really brief on this subject.

Other Random stuff: I notice you get a trophy for finishing the Trial with a saved character. It appears above the life bar. You also unlock a kind of Term Dictionary. So far I've collected several non-wearable things, like the trophy, VF1 costume, 2 "Old Win Poses" (hold P+K+G or P+K), and Training Stage 1 and 2. You can see this stuff at the Status window in Character Files.

So far I'm 7th Dan in Kumite, but I might start another file for playing against Humans... I was hoping the Kumite AI would be a little better, as it's basically just the Arcade AI in varying degrees of strength. Guess I have to train that too...

Trial confirms that you can do at least P+G, plus 2 command Throw Escapes at once. Really useful info in trial if you can understand it. Be nice to see it in english.

I'm wondering if some items are available only by fighting people, if any at all. Anyone gotten items in VS mode?

That's all I can think of right now...

Spotlite

 

A very interesting article from a Gamers.com newsletter:

<blockquote><font class="small">In reply to:</font><hr>

WEEKLY VF4 UPDATE
I know it's still a month before Virtua Fighter 4 hits on PS2, but
my weekly updates of our obsession in the office seems to be quite
popular with the fighting fans amongst you.

Over the last week, the habit as taken on a new and interesting
form. While the past couple of weeks have been entirely personal
one-on-one bouts fueled by abuse of the basest nature, this week
has been different. Rather than playing each other, we've been
spending every available moment training the artificial
intelligence of our fighter so that they "learn" to fight like we
do.

How does this work? Think Tamagotchi with attitude. First, you take
your pugnacious friend into an arena and start to fight. By paying
attention to the types of moves you favor, the AI gradually
develops a limited repertoire. Next, you allow the little chap to
fend for himself in a fight while you watch. If he does something
good, you hit a button and tell him so. This is where it starts to
get really spooky. Any indirect interaction like this causes
the on-screen character to turn his head and look out of the screen
at you. Although a very simple animation, it gives the eerie feel
of the game being somewhat self-aware.

It doesn't end here though. After hours of training, the most
rewarding thing you can do is throw your fighter into a "real"
fight. EGM editor Che Chou has been sitting back and watching his
personally trained Akira fight his way through one of the main game
modes with some considerable success. So much success in fact that
the next level of Virtua Fighting has been exposed...it's the
"cockfight". (Stop sniggering at the back.)

Bouts between characters no longer require any actual human
interaction. Two memory cards are popped into the PS2, the fighters
are loaded and dumped in a ring - and then we let them go at it.
The stirring verbal abuse continues, only now we have nothing to do
with our hands. The game has reduced us to observers - and yet we
still seem to be having an enormous amount of fun. The cockfight
approach has exposed the need to imaginatively name your chosen
fighter. Thus far my buddy JohnnyUK (a development of Lau) doesn't
stand a chance against James Mielke's PieHole (guess who? Pai)
unless I get some serious training time with him over the weekend.

When you sit down and really think about this whole thing, the
scary revelation is that you can eventually train a character
who is designed to mimic your own style. So much so, in fact, that
it eventually overtakes your abilities and takes on a personality
all of its own.

<hr></blockquote>

 

I dunno, man, I'm trying to train my A.I. Lei Fei (I named him "Ponzu" after the Japanese sauce the chefs use on Katsuo (Bonito sushi)). Ponzu is stupid. Bleh. He can never get Lei's low kick combo because he can't change stance fast enough. Nor does he do the Lei dance very well. I'm gonna keep trying, but the prognosis isn't good.

 

Yeah! Come to think of it. It is some kind of cockfight like in the Phillipines or Afghanistan. People put money into these fights.

VF gambling? Why not? You train your fighter, bring him to the gathering of other "shifus". Before the fight starts, place your bets and go!

A bit more humane than cockfighting I must say. The losing chicken get cooked and eaten /versus/images/icons/smile.gif. Now you can't cook your VF character so you just bring him back for further training or erase /versus/images/icons/crazy.gif.

 

Of course the prognosis isn't good. These VF Ai characters are on their way to replace chickens in fights. Can't say much about the intelligence of a chicken /versus/images/icons/smile.gif.

 

can Ponzu beat the CPU on normal? can he Ukemi? WIll he fight against you in sparring, or does he just kind of copy you?

did you try him in Kumite yet?

Spotlite

 

Ponzu is roughly 2:1 in Kumite mode at the early stages. Got a little bored watching him play though, so I don't know how he does at the dan levels. He will fight me in sparring, but not very well. Possibly because Lei is one of those characters that can combo you to death if you don't know how to react (and the AI definitely doesn't know how to react). I might try a Kage A.I. to see if I get better results, but I need a better joystick to train the AI on TFT combos.

 

You also unlock a kind of Term Dictionary. So far I've collected several non-wearable things, like the trophy, VF1 costume, 2 "Old Win Poses" (hold P+K+G or P+K), and Training Stage 1 and 2. You can see this stuff at the Status window in Character Files.

You probably already know this, but for the benefit of those who don't... once you collect the VF1 costume, you can enable it by pressing P+K after selecting your character through the VF.net card (memory card in this case).

 

I had a Vanessa called err... alantan... sorry no imagination. not really interested in that yet. Just played for a while but the AI not very good.

Anyway I CANNOT complete the MTE training... sigh... I cannot even input 2 throw escape with consistency???? Is it because of Vanessa f,f+p recovers too fast or something. maybe it is the joystick /versus/images/icons/smile.gif

sigh... I want my trophy!!!!
update: I got my trophy /versus/images/icons/smile.gif I chose the wrong move to do DTE. it is much easier with pkk as you can buffer you TE into the recovery phase.


I am only shodan in kumite. do I have to beat shodan CPU to rise level? so few of them...

 

Yeah, you have to beat five of the same dan in a row to advance to the next level. "In a row" meaning that any matches with levels higher or lower than the one you're at doesn't matter from a ranking perspective (although you might get other awards or curse items based on winning streaks).

 

Saw some new ranks last night, like "Wind Spirit" same kanji as "Dargon Spirit".

I'm up to HaoOh, tried to get the 100 game streak last night to get the 100 win item, but I lost at 65 to a TeiOh Pai... fuck!

My AI finally started getting smarter. I figured this much out: when you're "seconding" in Arcade Kumite etc, he'll fight, and when the windoe says "Play" in white letters, it's playinf back things it's learned from you. At this moment, you can hit 0 or X to tell it it's doing good or bad by using that series of moves at that time. At other times, you can't comment.

I found that if the AI is getting mauled by a certain character in arcade endlessly, it's probably better to quit and start over from the beginning, because you're discouraging it more than encouraging it, so it's not gonna know what's good to do. Against the easier characters, they'll attack pretty liberally, so you can tell it it's a good boy. My AI now shreds Lion, Lei, Pai etc. Still gets stuck a little on Jacky, but got to Akira! After about 30 mins of trying to beat Akira, I stopped.

I think MAYBE they use different tactics against different characters...

also got "Training Stage 3".

Spotlite

 

there is a 100 win streak item??? maybe I should try when my dan is lower so easy to win. Never saw any emperors yet, only got 9 dan opponents. but you not tired?? I mean I got a like 30 win streak and it took 1-2 hours. how long did you play for 65 win streak??? can we pause in Kumite?

It seems that after getting 8 items, I cannot get any more. Is there a limit? no right.

 

I think there's about 30-35 items per character. I was tired, but I figured I wouldn't get so many wins again easy, so I just kept going. It took about 2 1/2 hours I think.

The 100 win item exists in the arcade, so I assume it's in the PS2 Kumite. But when I played ver B in Japan, the first and only item I got was the Bunny, which comes with 3 wins in a row. I've fought Akiras in Kumite with the Bunny and the Squirrel and won, but I didn't get their items. You can pause and exit Kumite (or just pause), and it will save your result, but I'm not sure it will continue your win streak, I think not.

I think you have to beat real players in vs. mode.

Spotlite

 

The 100 win item exists in the arcade, so I assume it's in the PS2 Kumite. But when I played ver B in Japan, the first and only item I got was the Bunny, which comes with 3 wins in a row. I've fought Akiras in Kumite with the Bunny and the Squirrel and won, but I didn't get their items. You can pause and exit Kumite (or just pause), and it will save your result, but I'm not sure it will continue your win streak, I think not.

Tried getting the 100 win item with Lei Fei... no dice. I quit at around 114 wins, and there wasn't any extra item. Bleh. Can't get the bunny or squirrel either. I do have a golden crown for Lei, though; don't know where that came from.

If you pause and exit Kumite, your streak doesn't continue, but you will save all your results up to the match before the current one.

In terms of new ranks in ver.C, so far I've seen:

God(?) Emperor
Dragon God
Wind God
Thunder God

The ranking is a little weird from 10th dan upwards...

(a) as 10th dan, I beat a lot of other 10th dan characters, but didn't get promoted until I beat a Little Emperor, at which point in time we swapped ranks. Thereafter, every time a 10th dan challenged me, it was a ranking match. (Could it be that if I lost, I'd go back to 10th dan and the 10th dan player would be promoted?)

(b) From Little Emperor, I got promoted to Emperor by beating a 10th dan character. Um, this is weird.

(c) From Emperor, I got promoted to God(?) Emperor by beating 5 Emperors. (This is normal.)

P.S. Thunder Gods have really strange masks... Lion is dressed in black and has a miniature Eiffel Tower strapped on his head; Akira has a golden sphinx mask. Most peculiar...

 

Just collected the 7 Vision Spheres by defeating 7 Supreme Emperors that held different colored crystal balls. When you collect all 7 colors, at the end of the round, you see the 7 spheres merge into one treasure chest. (Some of you may remember the genkyuu.mpg movie clip with an Aoi player, maybe Gerira, collecting all 7.)

BUT, I have absolutely no idea what to do with this; the new item doesn't appear on my character edit screen...? spotlite, any ideas?

 

For what it's worth, I created an A.I. (Pai) and set to work on her. First I just tried beating away at her in the hopes she'd pick moves and stuff up. So I brought her into Kumite mode to see how she did. At first she sucked, playing like a tentative newbie with little to no skill. So then I brought her back into sparring mode. This second time around I'd pull a move on her and wait for her to repeat it. Then I would do the move, and as she repeated the move, I'd reverse her and follow-up with combos. Then I'd pounce as she tried to get up. It seems she learns pretty quick.

Then I took her back into Kumite mode. The difference was noticeable. When I first brought her into Kumite she dropped 3 in a row. This second return trip she proceeded to win the next ten matches before I got bored and quit out of Kumite mode. I notice that if you wail on the circle-button, your A.I. increases the aggressiveness, but his/her confidence ranking drops. I think more carefully considered encouragement and disapproval works best based on my little experiment.

After I felt confident enough in my A.I. Pai, one of my co-workers wanted to try out his Akira on her. I fretted. I thought for sure his low-to-the-ground shoulder-checking tactics would be her undoing. But it seems my consistent reversal training paid off. My Pai kicked his Akira ass five in a row and went undefeated. She reversed the hell out of him, low swept and pounced like a mofo. She also whipped out a lot of fancy combos that I could not do for the life of me. While she still doesn't have the most human-like flow, she still wins because the other A.I. lacks just as much "humanity" as she does. I felt like a proud daddy. Now she can tear clean through arcade mode, and wins 90% of her Kumite matches, although she has only unlocked a few things so far.

My only question is how many things you can possibly unlock. Also, do the different little treasure chests indicate that you've unlocked different things? My theory is that a certain treasure chest icon indicates you've unlocked an accessory, while the other lets you know you've unlocked a new outfit color combination.

 

Also, do the different little treasure chests indicate that you've unlocked different things? My theory is that a certain treasure chest icon indicates you've unlocked an accessory, while the other lets you know you've unlocked a new outfit color combination.

Treasure chests unlock accessories. New color schemes are unlocked by leveling up in the rankings, either in vs or kumite mode.

 

One of my friends pointed out that it appears as if you unlock a new color after you've beaten every other ranking mode. Do you think this is true?

 

As in being able to pit a U.S. Ai against a JP A.I.? For that matter, using JP custom characters against U.S. ones would also be nice. Then again, it would be nice, as it was in the ol' Saturn days, if JP save files simply "worked" with the U.S. counterparts of the game. I'll try and find out this week.