Those .gif animations were built by hacking a Gamecube emulator to display the hitboxes and hurtboxes of animations. Then playing those animations in the hacked emulator with the circles (red for hitbox, blue for hurtbox) overlaid with the characters and their animations.
At a minimum, the smash community members who built that data have an expert-level understanding of Gamecube graphics programming, Gamecube assembly language, and Super Smash Bros's internal scripting language to create those posts.
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Yes. This is a very technically adept community. I'm not very much a part of them, but I can see the expert-level reverse engineering work needed to get this working.
And the knowledge won't be forever lost if it is lost. The importance of hitbox / hurtbox reverse-engineering is common in all fighting games (Blazblue, Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, Super Smash Bros). The various communities always work on reverse-engineering all the frame-data and hitbox/hurtbox information ASAP whenever new fighting games come out, so that expert-level fighting game players know what their training routines should be.
> At a minimum, the smash community members who built that data have an expert-level understanding of Gamecube graphics programming, Gamecube assembly language, and Super Smash Bros's internal scripting language to create those posts.
Actually this was possible before Dolphin existed. They did it on raw hardware. The devs left an extensive debug mode in with various displays like hitboxes. So a little Action Replay cheat was enough.
At a minimum, the smash community members who built that data have an expert-level understanding of Gamecube graphics programming, Gamecube assembly language, and Super Smash Bros's internal scripting language to create those posts.
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Yes. This is a very technically adept community. I'm not very much a part of them, but I can see the expert-level reverse engineering work needed to get this working.
And the knowledge won't be forever lost if it is lost. The importance of hitbox / hurtbox reverse-engineering is common in all fighting games (Blazblue, Guilty Gear, Street Fighter, Marvel vs Capcom, Super Smash Bros). The various communities always work on reverse-engineering all the frame-data and hitbox/hurtbox information ASAP whenever new fighting games come out, so that expert-level fighting game players know what their training routines should be.