MUGEN Room
All Areas Parent Change/Devil's Eye Killer for 1.0
heinous techniques
2020/10/2800:33 0 -
Not actually a heinous tech article, but tagging it as such because it applies to 1.0 nukes.

In WinMUGEN, some god characters are starting to adapt some uses of %n tech, I've mentioned this in some of my past articles. The most common use of it is for parentbug/parent change, which allows a crosstalk helper to change its parent to match its target (therefore allowing use of ParentVarSet to set variables in the target).

Parent change is a fundamental technology for god characters which is used for gametime penetration and other forms of variable tampering. However, traditional parent change uses stecon overflow, which is both very complicated (takes a lot of looping) and will either be incomplete or obscenely heavy (incomplete variant can only parent change to around half the possible ID values but takes around 20k lines; complete variant uses a statefile 30mb large). Therefore, some characters now use %n to set the parent ID value directly, rather than bloating load times and complexity with stecon overflow-based solutions.

Devil's eye killer is sort of similar. We can have what we call 'all areas Devil's Eye Killer' if we want, which is just a DEK file covering the full range of possible states. But, a setup like this requires a ridiculously large statefile (3GB+!) so it's just not practical. Therefore, using a solution with %n can also be smart to cut down on load times. For example, I only have a 1.5mb DEK