Title Match Pro Wrestling and programming

[+atari2600land]

In an attempt to try and program the code for my Virtual Boy fighting game Insecticide, I first need to understand how a simple fighting game works. What could be more simpler than an Atari 2600 game? So I download TMPW. At the title screen if you don't press anything, the wrestlers go at it by themselves. I guess this is what I try to understand is how the game programs what moves the wrestlers makes. I'm pretty sure I need to write some C pseudo-random number generator code for my game. But if you start a fight, the guy just stands there and does nothing if you do nothing. Why is it like that? In my fighting game, I would like the computer controlled opponent to try to come after you if you are idle. In VB coding, I use C, and since there's no random-number-generator in VB, I have to try to decide which attack the opponent chooses if you are idle, since there would be no button pressing to base the code on in the game. Also, I'd need to figure out how the computer counters my moves with moves of its own or block it. So I guess what I'm needing out of all this is an explanation of how the game works, machine-wise.

[Jan Hermanns]

Turns out, it's quite easy to implement a decent fighting logic...

 

Here is an excerpt from the article "The Making Of: IK+"

 

The development of IK+’s AI was, though prosaic by comparison, no less efficient. “It was easy, basically,” Maclean boasts. “In those days, it wasn’t even called AI – we would have called it ‘fighting logic’, or something. The whole thing was based on look-up tables of what moves to use based on how far away the opponent was. The game obviously knows which move, if it were used, would lead to a direct hit at that point in time. For the easy difficulty level, right at the start, the computer fighters would, 90 per cent of the time, look at what the best move would be and then ignore it. As the level of difficulty increased that percentage would drop, until level 25 or thereabouts where it would be 95 per cent accurate. It worked beautifully.”