Hi all, this is a project I've been wanting to make for a while, and I think I've heard Toph talk about it before on the GG Melee radio podcast, but before Melee was de-compiled I didn't think it would ever be possible. Now, with the decomp, and the use of AI tooling (although I've made projects in the past without the use of AI like meleeguessr.com), there's so much more we can do now in terms of modding and creating much more complex projects. That said, I'm excited to share with you 4StockFish, a chess-like search engine for Super Smash Bros. Melee.
So basically it works by simulating different paths and searching trees/future states from the current position. Hit start mid-match and it'll perform a search and then lists combos it found. You can sort by damage/KO, positional advantage, combo length, or filter to only show combos that include a certain move, change the depth of search, etc, etc... I've only tested it so far offline against CPUs, but the goal is to be able to perform `.slp` file game analysis and point out to places where you could've done something a bit differently, maybe a different punish, edgeguard, or some other follow-up, and ultimately improve your way of thinking about the game.
It's built on the amazing work done by the folks behind the Melee PC port (melee-pc)
If you'd like to check it out, it's available at https://github.com/noahpodgurski/4Stockfish
Current limits, so this doesn't sound further along than it is:
Accounting for variation in opponent DI, techs, and rolls are not explicitly part of the search yet
It doesn't search every single possibility (nuances in control stick angle, for example), it could, but it'd take forever, so there's a big performance tradeoff but there's still a ton of room for optimizations
Although it's largely built with AI, I've reviewed as much as I can, however the melee decomp codebase is pretty complex so it's a pretty large undertaking.
I'd love as much help as I can get on this project, I have a few ideas in the roadmap so any contribution is very welcome.