I have quite a few thoughts, suggestions, or questions about how fighting works in the 94 hack by Chaos.

Here's what I'm noticing. Checks are counted up, once a number of checks are reached, a fight may happen. In fact, a fight will almost certainly happen, soon after. Only a player with 71, 85, or 100 fight rating (handedness) can 'start' the fight, but the other combatant can be anyone above a 0. And, if I understand it, it's very likely that that fight will happen even if it's a 14 rated fighter (who should only be fighting very rarely.)

Here are some of the issues I have with this....it becomes pretty predictable. I played a couple games with the same 2 teams, and about the same point in the game, fights started breaking out. Once one happens, another 1 or 2 follow pretty quickly in succession. Also, lots of mismatches, because only 71+ can start a fight, so a 14-57 can never have a 'fair' fight, where they aren't completely outmatched.

So here's what I'd love to see, in my ideal world.

*Fights can happen at any time. You don't need to wait for things to heat up. More hits may increase the chances of a fight, but that's not super important.

*fights are triggered by a single hit, not a cumulative amount of hits. The bigger the hit, the more likely a fight. I believe in the code, a .1 impact is needed to trigger a check for a fight. Maybe this impact can factor into the likelihood, where a bigger hit significantly increases the chance of a fight.

*big fighters should look for fights with other big fighters, low rated fighters are more likely to fight other low rated, HOWEVER, those fights should be much more rare! I do not know what the math of this would look like, but for now I'll just suggest pretend numbers. So a 14 fight guy (low fight rating) gets hit. There's only a base 1% chance he considers fighting. If the player who hit him has a rating similar to his, this number may go up a bit, but if it's an 85 or 100, he's almost certainly not going to 'issue the challenge'. But if the player who gets hit is say an 85 (this would make him an 11-12 depending on handedness) so maybe that's his base percentage chance of looking for a fight after getting hit. And again, if it's a 71-100 who hit him, a fight is pretty likely to break out between the two, whereas if the hitter was a 14 or 28, he's probably not going to agree to fight. Again, I don't know the math of all of this but it seems plausible.

Given the above system, fights could happen at any time, but are still more likely in a rougher game. And maybe there are certain things that can factor into the likelihood like the number of checks, injuries, a wide margin in the score, etc.

Is something like this possible? Or is it way too far from the way the code is written right now, and the number of checks cumulative is really the only way fights can happen?

Here are some longshot brainstorm questions:

*is it possible to make it so goalies can fight?

*is it possible to make bumping the goalies factor into the likelihood of a fight?

*is it possible to have multiple fights at the same time? (assfwatch becomes assfight?)

*when a big hit happens, is it possible to check someone near to the hit for their likelihood to fight? I'll give you a scenario. Scott Stevens crushes Adam Oates and makes him bleed. Cam Neely, with a higher fight rating, sees this and skates over to challenge Stevens to a fight. Can something like this happen?

*is it possible to make fights more likely in the 3rd period in a blowout, and less likely in a game with a tight score? Throughout the 90's fighting became very dependent on this. A tie game or 1 goal game in the final 5 minutes or so almost NEVER had a fight. If one team was up by 3 or more, a fight almost became a certainty, and sometimes several.

*can 'knockout' or 'knockdown' punches be implemented? I'm talking about where a check is made on each successful punch, and a higher rated fighter is more likely to drop his opponent with a punch even before the usual number of punches needed based on his energy level and fight rating.

Again, most of this is just wild brainstorms, but as I look at the code (even though I'm not a programmer) I can make out some things and feel like some of these ideas may be possible? For instance, I see where I could change the number of hits needed to check for a fight. As well as where I could set the minimum fight rating needed to start a fight or join a fight. I think anyone with a fight rating should be able to start or join a fight, BUT I fear that if I switch that part of the code, we'd see way too many fights between the low rated fighters because once that target number of checks is reached, a fight is inevitable on one of the next few checks.

Would love to hear some thoughts on this! I know I'm not the only one who would love to see some more cool realism aspects in the fighting.

to follow up on my own post, I've made most of this happen...

*fights CAN happen at any time, triggered by a single hit/bump. Includes after whistles, after goals.

*fights are generally evenly matched, but not ALWAYS.

*goalies CAN fight. It switches to the regular player animation once the fight starts. Goalies tend to fight skaters that bump into them. It's currently buggy in that I haven't figured out how to get goalies to either not serve their own penalty, or to be replaced by a backup. After they fight they are usually replaced by a dman in net, or not replaced at all, leaving a wide open net. But they definitely can fight.

*multiple fights CAN happen. The way it works is that once a fight starts, players keep colliding, each of these new collisions causes a new check to see if they want to fight. So you get an initial fight, and then any number of fights can start after that as players continue bumping. However, only the first fight resolves...once the first fight is over, the screen cuts to the penalty box. So most of the secondary fights don't have a winner and are often very short.

Most of the rest of the stuff I haven't figured out yet. I was very close to figuring out a system where a big hit was likely to lead to a near immediate fight. I have an idea for it, but couldn't get it to actually work yet.