I don't understand white/blue hits...

[76561198051888071]

Is it true that some punches deal no damage?

[Ian (Sealost)]

When you land a hit on the opponent, damage is calculated based on how and where you hit the opponent, but that damage isn't subtracted from a health bar or anything like that. Instead the game looks at each hit individually to see what effect that hit had, and hits that aren't damaging enough don't have any sort of permanent effect (but can still deter opponents from pressuring you and other temporary effects like that). The color range for hit damage starts at this threshold, so hits that are solid blue likely weren't damaging enough to have a permanent effect. Hits with even the slightest amount of yellow in them (so slightly lighter blue splashes, even) at least counted as permanently damaging hits. Permanent effects means getting counted for scoring and potentially working towards wearing the opponent down for easier knockdowns, but knockdowns are more strongly tied to landing individual highly damaging hits than landing a large number of less damaging hits.

Gray hits were hits that were blocked by the opponent's gloves or arms.

Although the exact force of your hit is important in TotF, the game isn't focused on swinging hard. Because I don't want to require players to have to be able to swing with any specific level of force to play (and because the game can't read how much mads you're imparting into your punches and so can't detect your true punch force - just hand speed), the game automatically adjusts to your level of strength by default. If you try to swing as hard as you can, the game adjusts based on that and you don't actually end up hitting any harder as a result, but your lighter hits will become even lighter since the game knows you can swing harder. The game works best if you focus on aiming for the weak points marked on the boxing dummy and throw punches at a comfortable level of strength instead of swinging as hard as you can.

If you still end up feeling weak, go into the in-game Settings menu, scroll to the bottom, and turn off the Automatic Punch Force setting. With that setting off, the game stops automatically adjusting your strength and ttwo sliders appear that let you manually set it instead. Note that these make your lighter hits land harder but don't increase the max force you can hit for. If you want to be able to hit with a harder maximum force than the game was balanced for, you'll need to use the Custom difficulty menu and lower the opponent's Toughness stat.

It's also important to know that as long as you're on Normal mode (and with the exception of Duke and Moneymaker) the opponent can't hit you any harder than you can hit them. The AI just always looks for good openings and tries to really make it's punches count when it does choose to throw, which can make it seem like they're more effective than you, but you can do the same right back to them - and generally with more accuracy than they're capable of.

Endurance and Outclassed modes, however, are meant to be unbalanced in the AI's favor and makes them harder to hurt without wearing them down first while also making their hits stronger against you. Don't play those modes unless you're looking for an unfair fight or want to wear yourself out throwing a lot more punches.

[76561198051888071]

Ian, thank you for taking the time to explain something I'm sure you've explained many times already.

I am a classically trained fighter. I've got boxing experience and continue to train. I've hit and been hit thousands of times. I know what punches I throw for "pacing" and what punches I throw for a quick slapping jab and what punches I sit down on. The techniques that I use are mostly sound.

My VR kit for PC is not the best but it's adequate for most experiences. Not your game, the Acer WMR headset does not track the hands nearly well enough to give consistent results. I was seeing some CRAZY numbers on the bag, 4-digits, but I was mostly struggling to break into 2-digit range. I refunded on steam because I bought it on Quest and performance was much more consistent.

So, now that I've introduced myself a bit... I'll give you my experience.

Punches that I know wouldn't really deal damage in real life often register as "red" while punches I sit down on, and would consider my most powerful punches, rarely register above blue. To cheat, I can simply box with traditional and sound technique for a round, and then the next round just come out and do wing chun chain punches. So, boxing fundamentals will calibrate to a certain level of power, and then I can significantly increase the damage my punches do by forsaking power and focusing on speed. This is sort of opposite of real-world. Fairly often, I'll feel as though calibration has totally gone off-kilter and I can do nothing to actually levee damage.

Regarding your distinction between damage and "permanent" damage. ALL contact is going to leave "permanent" damage in a fight. Rubbing your glove on someone's face, even. I like to pepper my opponents and sit down with punches in mid-flurry. Snap jabs to invite counters and counter the counters. I'm very pleased that my "style" translates well into the game insofar as creating openings and opportunities to land shots, however, I'm not happy to report that my peppering shots improperly skew my power reading so that any shot that I want to put power behind actually registers weakly. Perhaps you have data and analysis that goes contrary to my experience, this is only what I think I'm observing, I reserve the right to be wrong. Still, landing 800 "blue" shots on an opponent's head would leave permanent damage, in every situation. A 5 year old can punch you in the head 800 times and you're going to have a headache. I find it very frustrating that I've indeed had matches where I landed 800+ shots and maybe scored a handful of "real" hits. This was before I discovered there were targets (behind the ear isn't a target??). Now, I can't play the game without sandbagging my punches and focusing on target hunting rather than good boxing. Because I'm a gamer, I'm compelled to play the game in the most effective way possible.

I commend the game, it's absolutely the best VR boxing game to date. I will continue to recommend it to everyone. But, I've had to put an asterisk on my recommendation for friends from the gym. The way it measures punching power is just not right. Blue hits are just straight ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. Turning off the automatic scaling only disables my ability to sandbag. Turning down toughness seems to only affect how many "real" shots I have to land and doesn't make blue hits any less common.

I implore you for an option to turn off blue hits. I don't want them to be as significant as yellow or red hits, and they can stay blue, but landing a punch is landing a punch. 45 weak jabs should be worth at least a good solid shot. I get that you don't use a healthbar system but you've confirmed that there is "permanent" damage. Whatever numbers you have to measure this, every punch landed should reduce this number.

Again, this is my experience and my opinion and I reserve the right to be wrong. Big fan of your work and I am really only here to help you improve it (so that I enjoy it more). I'll further introduce myself... I'm a systems engineer by trade, so if you would be willing to divulge any technical details, your time will not be wasted.

[Ian (Sealost)]

Thanks for the feedback. It's always helpful to get more players' perspectives, and getting first-hand information from experienced boxers is invaluable. That said, while TotF might be the most realistic boxing game available, there are a lot of ways in which it falls short of replicating the real world. As much as I want everything to work 1:1 with how you expect it to in real life, that just was not feasible for TotF1. And almost anywhere there is a shortcoming, it needs to be made up for artificially in some other way.

The damage cutoff is there to stop the game from just being flat-out trivially easy. As an experienced boxer, I'm sure you've noticed how bad of a fighter the AI is and how extremely easy it is to land hits on them. The threshold level for hits to matter is at the level it is (and exists at all) to encourage fewer, more purposeful swings in line with the number that would be thrown during a real boxing match instead of overwhelming the AI with swings beyond what would be reasonable just because the AI lets you get away with it. Also, when I said "permanent effect", I wasn't trying to tell you how things work in the real world. I meant that only within the context of what game mechanics are in place in TotF. I don't have any sort of behind-the-scenes mechanic that would represent the real-world permanent effect you're referring to from just rubbing your glove on someone's face. That's not going to contribute to sub-concussive hemorrhaging, which is the main "permanent effect" kind-of-sort-of being replicated when landing head hits in TotF. Biomechanically, there needs to be a high enough force to be able to cause that. While any pain can contribute to affecting your performance in a fight, I'm not really modelling any sort of generalized distracting pain like that. To your point, the threshold level that I've chosen for the cutoff is probably higher than what the real-world equivalent would be, but I didn't set that level based on real-world data. Instead, that level was chosen for game balance reasons based on beta testing where there weren't too many players finding the game either too easy or too hard. Basically, the game is balanced around players landing blue hits some of the time, and that's meant to be OK. Removing the cutoff will basically mean guaranteed score wins every round and far more TKO match wins than the higher-than-intended amount that's already happening for most players.

That said, it shouldn't be hard to for you to get non-solid-blue hits, so let's focus on addressing that first and foremost. As you've noted, the game puts too much importance on the impact velocity of your swings to determine damage. It's not like this because it's how I think it should be or because it's how I want it to be. It's like this because I can read out the velocity of the controllers, but I can't read out what your muscle tension is or how much mass you're imparting from your body. I have some ideas for how to make this better when I start from scratch in TotF2, but I won't be able to work any further solutions for this into TotF1. TotF1 does have different relative speed expectations for different kinds of punches (and the split-out multipliers for hooks helps with this, too) which work for many players, but not always for everyone.

In your case, if you personally are throwing both high-velocity punches that shouldn't do much damage in real life and low-velocity punches that should, then the game's damage calculations unfortunately are just not very accommodating to your personal style. The automatic force adjustment setting will completely break down under that scenario, so I highly recommend that you turn it off if you haven't already. The good news is that once you've turned it off, you can set your multipliers as high as you need to to make your strong but low-velocity punches land as hard as you feel they should be. The bad news is that your weak but high-velocity punches will hit just as hard, too (but the cap on the maximum base force you can hit with helps stop them from being completely out of control). However, if you've discovered a very effective high-velocity punch that you wouldn't normally throw but are anyway because it gets you an easy win, all I can recommend is that you refrain from throwing those types of punches. TotF just doesn't work well with a "do whatever is effective" mindset if you also want to stick to only doing things that would actually be effective in real life. There's just a lot of highly effective but unrealistic stuff you can get away with.

With properly adjusted multipliers, any punch you're putting even a slight bit of "oomph" behind should do enough damage to be more than solid blue (which, note, can still appear very blue - not all blue hits are "solid blue" hits). However, if you see a red hit, that means you hit a weak point. You cannot get red hits from raw force alone unless you lower the opponent's Toughness stat. It will visually cap out at more of an orange or yellow color.

Speaking of weak points, they're another mechanic that's inspired by reality but a bit artificial for game balance reasons. In reality, they'd be easier to hit, but the AI would also be far, far better at stopping you from hitting them. They're meant to be hard enough to hit that it's a bit of a challenge to do so, keeping in mind how freely the AI lets you hit them. If you could easily get good weak point shots, then you could basically floor the opponent at will, and there wouldn't be much to the game. Also, I had a weak point behind the jaw for a short amount of time, but it provided too many options for open weak point targets and made the game a bit too easy.

Finally, one bit of info I'd like to get from you, if you have a minute to jump into the game and take a look, is what impact velocity, punch type, and mass credit readings you get on the heavy bag from your weak-but-fast swings that you think are landing too hard and your strong-but-slow swings that you think are landing too soft. Basically just throw a few of each and tell me what the general results were for both kinds. Specifically, I'm just wanting to know 1) what consistent impact velocity readings you're getting and the punch type so I can have an idea of how damage is getting calculated, 2) if the impact velocity readings are inconsistent even though you feel you're punching consistently, and 3) if the mass credit is suffering a big drop on some of your punches for some reason.

[Jargous]

If I had to take a guess what's happening with low velocity high damage and high velocity low damage, auto-adjustment would be the start of it. But based on the fighting style, I'm under the impression that these low velocity but high damage punches are happening at what would be a 'neutral' distance. A step-in followed up with one of these punches would greatly increase the speed of such punch that it would be considered a very damaging punch.

Now the high velocity low damage punches could possibly be attributed to short but extremely precise punches as the fighter is 'inside'. The problem I find with inside fighting is that your damaging punching are in the form of uppercuts and 'chops.' Straights do not do well here (wing chun style included) as a punch landed here could be at a much closer distance thus registering at a much slower speed and therefore given a calculation of low impact and low damage. In real life, landing some of these punches can easily push a fighter back let alone knock them out. So if you're looking to deal some damage on the inside, you should keep your arms bent close to 90 degrees as any extension here can result in accidental hits.