Falling is when a fighter loses consciousness and falls to the ground. It happens when they get hit a lot and accumulate too many "falling points".
Mechanism[]
Overview[]
Each fighter has some number of falling points (FP) keeping track of how close they are to falling down. When their FP goes over 40, the fighter goes into the Dance of Pain (DoP) for 28 frames (about a second), immobile and clutching their stomach in pain. When it goes over 60, the fighter falls over and it gets reset to 0. Once they hit the ground, they lie down for 31 frames. A fighter's FP is always at least 0, increasing when they get hit and decaying by 1 each frame.
Every attack has an attribute called its fall, which is how much it increases its victim's FP. All attacks found in the game have fall 1, 10, 20, 25, 40, 60, or 70. A fall value of merely 1 is mostly found in light repetitive attacks, like Louis' Thunder Kick. These have negligible effect on the target's FP, but they are not quite useless from this standpoint, for if the target's FP is already at least 40, getting hit will send them into DoP all over again. A typical punch has fall 20, so it takes three punches to send someone into DoP. Attacks having fall greater than 40 can hit fighters who are unconscious but haven't hit the ground yet. Most dash attacks have fall 70, so they knock the target out right away.
Algorithm[]
Let Bob be some fighter. Each frame, Bob's FP is set by the following algorithm (which was inferred from experiments, rather than read from the disassembled executable, and so may be slightly incorrect):
- If Bob is being hit by any attacks at all, discounting grab punches from someone grabbing him:
- For each such attack a (starting with the attack coming from the player with the lowest player number, then the one with the second lowest player number, and so on):
- Increment FP by a's fall.
- If FP > 60 (or FP > 20 and Bob is above the ground), set FP to 0.
- Round FP up to the next multiple of 20, i.e. 20×⌈FP/20⌉.
- If FP > 40, Bob goes into DoP (unless he's being grabbed).
- Else, if FP > 20 and Bob is above the ground, set FP to 0, and Bob falls down.
- Sometimes, under unknown conditions, if Bob is being grabbed and FP > 20, FP gets set to 0 and Bob falls down.
- Else, if FP = 0, Bob falls down.
- Else, if Bob is being grabbed and is dead, Bob falls down.
- For each such attack a (starting with the attack coming from the player with the lowest player number, then the one with the second lowest player number, and so on):
- Else, if someone is trying to grab (or Throw) Bob, set FP to 0, and they grab Bob.
- Else, if FP is positive, unless Bob is being grabbed or was hit in either of the previous two frames, decrement FP.
Consequences of the mechanism[]
Extending the DoP[]
If one allows an opponent who is in DoP a little time to lose some FP (but not enough time to leave DoP) and then punches them (taking care to not do a super punch by standing almost out of range), the punch will cause them to reenter DoP without ever having left DoP. Davis' or Dennis' energy blasts work nicely in place of the punch, since there's no risk of accidentally doing a super punch. The DoP can be extended like this indefinitely, all the while lowering the victim's health without giving them a chance to fight back, so it is heavily frowned upon in 1v1 fights.
FP accumulation[]
Due to the continual decay of FP, even during the DoP itself, a hit from something that would normally make someone merely flinch can send them into DoP. For instance, the fall from getting punched by a baseball bat is 40: too little to send someone into DoP right away, but too much to do send them into DoP in two hits. However, if one hits once then waits 10 frames or so, the victim's FP will decay to less than 30, causing the second hit to send them into DoP as desired.
Simultaneous hits[]
The algorithm above makes for some odd behaviour when two or more things hit Bob in exactly the same frame. If the first (ordered according to the player number) thing has fall >60, normally it would knock him down. However, what happens with the second thing is that the first thing sends his FP over 60, then his FP is set to 0, then the other thing hits setting his FP to something non-zero (say less than 60), and since then his FP is non-zero, he stays upright. Rudolf, Henry and Bat can exploit this all on their own with their multishot moves.
Since the clause allowing opponents to grab Bob is only checked if nothing is hitting Bob, fighters cannot be grabbed at the exact moment that they are being hit.