Loop Prevention System Technical Info

===DUELS OF FORTUNE LOOP PREVENTION SYSTEM OVERVIEW===

As of Early Access version 0.6.0, we are introducing a new loop prevention system, designed to prevent all current and future instances of easy loops that seem to pop up very often with this game, and can sometimes lead to high damage for little effort. This text will go over the technical details of how the loop prevention system works.

Every time you land an attack in a combo, the IDs of both the attack you landed, AND the previous attack you landed in that combo will be stored together as a single "sequence." For example, if you perform the string 5L > 5M > 5H, the system will store three sequences: [0,5L], [5L,5M], and [5M,5H]. The "0" just means that no attack was landed before the 5L, as it was the first in the combo.

The system keeps track of the number of times each sequence has been used in the current combo, and if the number of any single sequence ever reaches 3, a "loop escape" will occur. When a loop escape occurs, the player being comboed will immediately become invincible and recover in an up-back direction (or an up-forward direction if they hold forward). They will be invincible until the flipping animation ends, but after that will be unable to attack until they touch the ground shortly after. They will, however, be able to block. Conversely, the player who performed the loop will be unable to cancel their current attack. In most cases, this is intended to cause a reset to neutral, though it can allow the recovering player to punish their attacker if the attack they're stuck in has especially high ending lag.

Landing a Blast Burst resets the list of sequences, effectively acting as a fresh combo in the eyes of the system.

This system is mainly intended to stop one-move or two-move loops from going on for too long. As an example, a combo of 5H > 5H > 5H > 5H would cause a loop escape, as the system detects three instances of the [5H,5H] sequence. In our testing, this has not impacted any character's regular combo structure to a notable degree, but please do let us know if there are any major issues we didn't find.



===EDGE CASES===

Moves that can hit multiple times in a spaced-out fashion, such as Rattlebone's Skull Toss (5S) will only count the first hit. Any hits beyond that will not be registered by the system at all. Similarly, moves that fire multiple projectiles at once, such as Sylvan's Pick a Card (j.5S) will also only count the first hit.

Moves with no hitbox, such as Lumina's Mending Soul (4L) will not be tracked by the system at all, nor will any moves that happen to whiff during the combo. A move must connect with the opponent for the system to track it.

Supers are unaffected by the system entirely, though it is extremely improbable to land 3 Supers in a combo anyway, especially without Blast Burst.