Inspired Wrestling - Early Access Build 1.4.5 - "Match Pace Hack (Part 1), Misc Changes"

This build adds the first part of the match pace hack, meaning it makes characters stay down longer when selling moves. There will be part two with even bigger changes but those will be optional and I wanted to first thoroughly test all the changes I've made so far and let you guys test them as well. So try this build out and let me know your thoughts. The changes will not be very noticeable while characters still have all their limb HP above 0 but as soon any of the limb HP reach 0 and the character's fighting stance changes to the Tired one, you should now be able to really stack their selling times by successfully performing several high-impact moves in quick succession.

There are currently a couple of known issues with the hack.

First, if you do an Irish Whip, that will reset the animation duration timer for the defender. The issue here is that this timer is used to determine how long characters keep running after an Irish Whip, so it gets a hardcoded value. If I remove that and allow the value to stack like it normally does during all the other moves, then the defender will potentially keep running for a long time after an Irish Whip. I will see if I can decouple the Irish Whip duration from the general animation duration timer in the future. For now, if you want to make your opponent stay down longer, avoid Irish-whipping them.

Another side effect of my changes is that characters now get up immediately after being successfully pinned. This is unintended, and I'm planning to try and fix it for the next update.

As part of the hack, there is also a change to random selling animations. Those are the animations where the character randomly holds their head/stomach/knee/etc. after receiving a move. There are two changes.

First, there is a new random arm selling animation. It actually exists in vanilla SD2 but is unused. It looks a bit rough by default, which is probably why Yuke's chose not to use it. But I modified it a bit and I think it looks fine now. So it is now added to the random selling animation selection.

There is also a change to how long characters stay down after random selling animations. By default SD2 forces the character to stand up right away. I modified this behavior so now the character will potentially stay down longer after a random selling animation. It does not guarantee that they will stay down but makes it so there is a chance that they will, instead of forcing them to get up right away. Again, this change will be more noticeable once the character gets the Tired stance and as long as you avoid Irish-whipping them.

Another thing I'm experimenting with in this update is the reduced chance to pin without first performing a finisher. If you haven't hit your opponent with a finisher first, it is now 60% harder to pin them than in the vanilla SD2. This is probably way too much of a chance reduction so I'll likely reduce it to 50 or 40% but I decided to stick to 60% for this release to let you guys test it. Let me know if you have any thoughts on this feature and what your experience with it is.

Other changes in this build include custom lighting effects during entrances. This is something I really wanted to add and even though I couldn't quite get it to work exactly how I originally envisioned it due to the PS1 GPU being very limited when it comes to rendering semi-transparency, I'm still pretty happy with how it turned out.

Some characters will have a generic effect but some will have unique colored lighting like Goldust, Kane, The Undertaker and some others. These effects are tied to entrance themes so they also work for CAWs and stables if you select the right theme.

This feature completes the entrance rework for 1.5. There is one more entrance-related feature I want to add in the future but it will be complicated to do and used for one specific entrance theme only anyway (you can probably guess what it is based on that) so I'm saving it for 1.6.

This build also adds unique reversals to some moves. As you may know, SD2 has support for this feature by default but surprisingly Suplex 1 is the only move in the game that makes use of it.

This is not something that I'll be able to add to many moves because these reversals take up memory, which can be used for other moves, but I figured I can afford to add up to about 10 unique reversals in total to spice up the gameplay a bit. So far I have converted reversals for Backdrop 1 (Backflip, JBI), DDT 1 (Russian Legsweep, SVR11), Snap Suplex (Counter Suplex, SVR11) and Hurricanrana 2 (Powerbomb, HCTP). I'll add a few more in the future.

For now these reversals do the same amount of damage as the original moves, which can be quite a lot, especially if there is a significant stat difference between the characters. So I'll probably do a hack to limit their damage in the future but we'll see.

I think I also want to make it so unique reversal animations trigger 50% of the time just for more animation variety and randomness during matches. But again we'll see how that goes.

There is also a minor change to the default SD2 reversal animations for ground grapples. Previously if your ground grapple was reversed, you exposed yourself to being attacked without being able to reverse any moves. This has now been fixed so you should be able to reverse moves while still being in the ground grapple reversal animation yourself.

Finally, the update adds several new moves. The list is below, and I also wanted to once again give a big shout-out to the SD2 modder LawZ and the AKI modder krayzie2k99 whose work makes all kinds of awesome animation-related stuff possible in SD2!

Fighting stances: Gangrel, Matt Hardy, X-Pac

Taunts: Taunt Meat 1, Taunt Meat 2, Taunt Stevie Richards

Standing strike: 3-Point Stance Tackle

Running strikes: Clothesline 4, Jumping Body Splash

Standing front grapple: Reverse Piledriver

Turnbuckle upper front grapple: Yakuza Kick

As a final note, I am now approaching the critical mass of animation data in the third main animation archive in the mod. This means that there might potentially be crashes during matches with four characters for certain character combinations based on their movesets. If you want to help me with testing this and ensuring I can fix any possible crashes in the future, try playing a bunch of Royal Rumble matches. If the game crashes for you during a new character's entry, take note of which characters were in the ring at the time of the crash and let me know who they were.