Explaining untechable situations
Ruben - May 28, 2017After spending 5 days trying to research these I think I have everything needed to explain almost all of them (except the last one which is weird af)
Before I start I want to make sure you understand that there are 3 types of teching:
- Ground teching
- Wall teching
- Ceiling teching
These depend on the angle of the wall you collide with, on some cases they can vary between techable and untechable on a situation.
I will provide all the data I have obtained during testing this untechable situations and some videos and images to explain everything, let's get started.
Electric grounded meteor
This one is well known, you can't tech when getting spiked with an electric move if you are in the ground like Ganon's Dair. This is caused by the additional hitlag electric effect gives, modding a spike move with the electric effect will make it untechable. Falco's dair was untechable due to this before patch 1.0.8 however it had it's hitboxes separated so it's only a spike on the air, it has another hitbox for grounded opponents that isn't a spike. This only affects ground teching, after getting meteor grounded you can tech walls or ceilings.
Spikes when laying on the ground
You cannot tech when hit by a spike if you are laying on the ground (landing without teching or after getting footstooled), easy as that.
Reeling animation
Another well known untechable situation due to BSD's video, this one is based on the reeling animation which can happen 30% on an attack that causes tumble when launching the opponent at an angle that is not between 70-110 and opponent's % reaches or is higher than 100%. In this case only ground teching is impossible, wall and ceiling teching can be done
Climhazzard
This move was coded intentionally so that you cannot tech during certain frames with this little bit flag “Bit_Variable_Set(Variable=0x21000018)”, this flag is active until the move's animation ends and is on both normal and Limit variants of the move
Frames you cannot tech if hit by a move
- Normal version: 16-53
- Limit version: 19-67
However there are some details about this flag mechanic, you can tech in some cases like:
- When hit by a multi-hit move or grabbed and throw
- When getting the reeling animation (note: reeling animation takes priority over Climhazzard untechable mechanic, getting spiked and trying to tech on the ground with reeling animation is still untechable)
- When cancelling the animation (ledge snapping or initiating descent hit)
Hitlag syncing with wall collision animation
Simply if you are in hitlag and you collide with a wall or ceiling during it you cannot tech, you cannot start teching in hitlag and if you collide with the wall/ceiling during hitlag it will synchronize and be untechable.
However there is one crazy way to prevent it and that is using SDI
If you can move away from the wall or ceiling with SDI so you get launched then you can tech, but it is extremely difficult to do due to the timing, also take note that SDI can also make it untechable if you SDI towards the wall.
The following situations vary from the previous ones, they are wall/ceiling teching related but they have a special condition: They can be teched if you do it before colliding with the wall, once the wall/ceiling collision animation starts it will become untechable
Colliding with a wall that has wall jump disabled
At first I was like really Sakurai? then after seeing the next two situations I believed that it was not a crazy one, simply if you hit a wall that is coded with no wall jumping then you cannot tech, this can be tested easily on omega Pacland but there is another stage which is legal that has walls with this property: Battlefield
Purple lines = No wall jump walls
Colliding with a wall that has a length of less than 7 units
Probably thought I was crazy about this one or at least I had a broken R button on all of my controllers but after testing it multiple times I had to come up with something for this situation, checking stage data and calculating distance between the vertex of the walls make me come with the 7 units of distance since it's not possible to do on FD and DL's ledges (FD ledges length is 7.5 and all walls tested are less than 7)
Someone: but hey I could tech that wall here...
Take into account that collisions with walls might be weird since some characters might collide with another wall but be randomly teleported to another wall
Hey look Fox is getting launched near the bottom part of SV but on the untechable wall, next frame it teleports to the vertex of the small untechable wall and cannot tech
Now that you know this take a look at an example with different characters
Fox collides with wall and cannot tech
Greninja collides with the same wall but can tech
Now look at the collision effect... They have different angles! Greninja has the angle of the wall below instead of the untechable one so watch out for that (untechable wall is the small green line near the red line in the next visual)
[Still under research] Colliding with specific vertex (?)
Seriously I have no idea how this happens, all I have to say it’s dependent on character, launch angle and stage vertex data.
Same as the previous one, collisions with walls are weird so it might move the character so it makes testing and determining the cause of this case more difficult, so I’m just leaving this as it can happen rarely
There is still stuff to do regarding these mechanics such as getting the exact data and determining the parameters used in-game that determine this for the last 3 situations but it's still a good way to know that these situations can happen
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Falco's dair was never untechable and never had hitboxes with electric damage. Falco's dair being untechable is a myth that came around from confusion after the 1.0.8 patch changed it so its hitboxes on grounded opponents no longer meteor smashed. The only other meteors with electric hitboxes in the game besides Ganon dair (and are thus untechable on grounded opponents) is Pikachu's Thunder spike and Meteor Quick Attack.