Fight World Model: Customizable Combat through Visual Interaction Proxies
Authors: Jiahua Li, Zixu John, Tom Zhong, Fuping Wu, Tianhao Xu, Ruicheng Zhang, Jun Zhou, Zunnan Xu
Organizations: University of Oxford, UK · Independent Researcher · Imperial College London, UK · Tsinghua University, China · Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
A playable, programmable game world must maintain persistent state, enforce executable rules, and support extensible gameplay mechanics. Existing video world models can generate plausible combat, yet struggle to keep hit reactions and health updates consistent with game rules. We introduce Fight World Model (FWM), which separates rule-governed combat execution from video rendering. An executable engine maintains state and resolves interactions. A deterministic compiler encodes these outcomes and attempted actions in a spatially and temporally aligned interaction proxy. The proxy aligns action and skill windows, brief hit reactions, and persistent health by fighter identity and timing. These cues can be controlled separately to render interactions under modified rules. Identity-bound references preserve character appearance across side switches. We train FWM on FightWorld Corpus, spanning 52 skill effects, 187 character-appearance variants, and 15 arenas. Without retraining the renderer, FWM supports damage scaling, limited-hit immunity, lifesteal, and multi-stage skill mechanisms beyond the native game. It also allows character and arena customization. Experiments demonstrate the effectiveness of FWM, which outperforms existing game world models in action fidelity, hit reactions, health-state consistency, and character appearance preservation. Our project is available at https://fight-world-model.github.io.
Figures & tables
Figure 2: Overview of FWM. The Proxy Engine executes gameplay rules, and the resulting state trajectories, action windows, and events are compiled into a visual interaction proxy. The proxy and appearance references are encoded with a shared VAE and concatenated with video tokens. Matching spatiotemporal rotary positions align the proxy with the video, while shared identity embeddings bind character references to the corresponding regions in the first video latent and proxy sequence. The DiT processes the combined sequence, and only video tokens are decoded to generate the continuation.
Figure 3: FightWorld Corpus. Native gameplay is expanded with skill effects, character-appearance edits, and scene edits, yielding 112,618 training samples.
Figure 4: Scene Editing in FightWorld Corpus. Each scene pairs a clean reference with an edited training frame. References exclude fighters and HUD elements and may differ in background details.
Figure 5: Character and Scene Reference Conditioning. Interaction rollouts across four character appearances (under default and side-switched stances) and two arena references.
Figure 6: Complete-Information Encodings on the Same Interaction. Held-out rollout under matched executed records ( Table 2 ). Green brackets mark HUD state errors: ↓ ! unexpected health loss, ↓× missing health loss, delayed update, ↓= incomplete update, and ↑ ! unexpected recovery.
Figure 7: Dual-Character Actions and Responses. Top rails show visible action summaries for both fighters. Per-frame badges indicate realized ( ) or unrealized ( ) fighter actions and responses; ? denotes strategy-level NPC text in ReactiveGWM v1; HUD state icons follow Fig. 6 .
Figure 8: Skill Timing and Event Consequences. Comparison on a projectile skill commanded at f=20 ; HUD state icons follow Fig. 6 .
Test Subset
Binding
Adherence ↑
DINO Similarity ↑
Non-Switch
Off
78.43
0.47
Non-Switch
On
99.16
0.61
Side-Switch
Off
53.68
0.35
Side-Switch
On
98.27
0.60
Table 1: Effect of Identity Binding. Variants share reference inputs and training budgets, differing only in identity binding. Adherence is a percentage. Values are ranked within each test subset.
Conditioning
Action ↑ Move / Attack / Skill
Reaction ↑
Health MAE ↓
J↑
Actions Only
70.27 / 56.22 / 58.64
74.43
3.42
34.18
Actions + Rule Text
71.71 / 68.40 / 57.35
80.16
3.07
46.37
Spatial Proxy Only
99.19 / 92.27 / 46.58
78.28
2.31
33.46
Spatial Proxy + State Tokens
94.48 / 91.23 / 82.42
87.17
1.23
63.28
Spatial Proxy + Text
96.72 / 93.63 / 92.43
92.24
2.78
76.35
FWM Interaction Proxy
99.78 / 99.24 / 99.06
99.79
0.15
98.48
Table 2: Interaction Fidelity across Control Representations. We compare variants with different conditioning signals to assess the effects of interaction information and its encoding. Rates are percentages, and Health MAE is in percentage points of maximum health. Across tables, bold and underlined values mark the best and second-best results.
Method
Action ↑ Move / Attack / Skill
Reaction ↑
Health MAE ↓
Adherence ↑ Character / Scene
Character DINO ↑
Scene DINO ↑
Without Reference-Image Conditioning
H3-WORLD
43.85 / 62.61 / 47.58
48.25
8.75
—
—
—
ReactiveGWM v1
70.15 / 78.98 / 48.55
35.56
4.59
—
—
—
ReactiveGWM v2
50.24 / 59.70 / 16.67
49.21
4.65
—
—
—
With Reference-Image Conditioning
H3-WORLD + Ref.
36.91 / 62.70 / 42.03
42.22
7.57
88.10 / 100.00
0.47
0.68
Table 3: Comparison with Adapted Game World Models. Baselines are adapted to FightWorld Corpus. +Ref denotes the addition of our reference-conditioning branch. Rates are percentages, and Health MAE is in percentage points of maximum health. DINO measures cosine similarity. A dash indicates an inapplicable metric.
Variant
Action ↑ Move / Attack / Skill
Reaction ↑
Health MAE ↓
J↑
FWM
99.78 / 99.24 / 99.06
99.79
0.15
98.48
w/o Command Marks
99.07 / 86.42 / 87.87
97.93
0.28
85.26
w/o Damage-Event Cues
99.16 / 98.92 / 98.91
80.42
0.27
78.38
w/o Health Bars
99.84 / 99.08 / 99.12
98.31
2.18
57.24
w/o Skill Event Trigger
99.21 / 99.03 / 79.28
98.07
0.26
78.81
Table 4: Contributions of Proxy Cues. Each ablated variant omits one cue family and is retrained under the same training setting. Rates are percentages, and Health MAE is in percentage points of maximum health.
Encoding
Health MAE ↓
Jrule↑
Default Rules
Spatial Proxy + State Tokens
1.87
89.26
Spatial Proxy + Text
2.42
76.38
FWM
0.16
100.00
Damage Magnitude
Spatial Proxy + State Tokens
1.63 / 2.48
74.62 / 65.37
Table 5: Interaction Fidelity under Rule Changes. Within each rule setting, encodings share executed records and are ranked separately. Default rules use original damage without immunity or lifesteal. Paired values denote reduced / amplified damage. Health MAE is in percentage points of maximum health, and Jrule is a percentage.
Figure 9: Skill-Level Rule Mechanisms Beyond Native Combat. Five combat mechanisms absent from native Street Fighter II/III , spanning lingering ground damage, per-projectile hits, staggered area hits, action locks, and spatial confinement (boundary locked).
Appendix figures & tables3 assets
Supplementary material from the paper’s appendix.
Appendix
Figure 10: Interaction-Proxy Vocabulary. Transient cues and persistent state share fighter identities.
Figure 11: Reference-Augmented Comparison (Saitama, Player, No Side Switch). Matched frames corresponding to row 1 of Fig. 5 ; HUD state icons follow Fig. 6 .
Figure 13: Reference-Augmented Comparison (Lava Humanoid, NPC, No Side Switch). Matched frames corresponding to row 3 of Fig. 5 ; HUD state icons follow Fig. 6 .
Recent video world models generate increasingly realistic and interactive visual experiences, yet lack reliable mechanisms for maintaining persistent world state and enforcing programmable rules over extended interactions. We introduce Programmable World Model, a framework that decouples world-state evolution from visual observation generation. An agent translates natural-language instructions into executable programs that specify entity states and state-transition rules, enabling direct control over individual entities and their interactions. A lightweight engine executes these programs to update and maintain an explicit, persistent global world state, including off-screen entities and non-visual attributes. To connect world state with visual generation, we introduce state-augmented 3D oriented bounding boxes (OBBs) as an intermediate representation. This representation, together with the target camera trajectory, is deterministically compiled into pixel-aligned spatiotemporal conditioning signals for a pretrained video model serving as the generative renderer. This design allows users to create playable games with predefined mechanics, direct control over individual entities, and persistent world state throughout gameplay. We further introduce CombatStateBench, a benchmark for evaluating programmable world models. On CombatStateBench, our method achieves 94% Count Accuracy and 98% State Accuracy, substantially outperforming existing interactive video world models while supporting coherent long-horizon generation. These results demonstrate the effectiveness of separating explicit state evolution from generative rendering for building persistent, programmable worlds.
Existing game world models typically adopt role-specific interactions, where player and NPC roles are bound to fixed characters. This limits their flexibility in multi-character games, where different characters may receive external control while NPCs must react to interactions triggered by players. This setting raises two key challenges: how to flexibly assign control roles to individual characters, and how to support direct player control and reactive NPC behavior within a unified model. These challenges are particularly pronounced in shared-view 2D games, where multiple, potentially visually identical characters share the same viewpoint, making camera cues insufficient to distinguish their roles. To address these challenges, we introduce ReactiveGWM, a reactive game world model that flexibly assigns control modes at initialization and jointly simulates externally controlled players and reactive NPCs. Specifically, ReactiveGWM introduces Spatial Role Binding, which grounds learned character handles to their corresponding regions in the initial frame using instance masks. Building on these handles, Unified Agency Conditioning unifies heterogeneous control signals across characters by encoding player actions and conditional NPC rules into character-specific control-token groups. Each group is then bound to its corresponding character handle, enabling the model to apply each control signal to its designated character. Meanwhile, causal self-attention restricts temporal context to the current and preceding latent frames when generating player actions and NPC responses. Experiments on two multi-character 2D games demonstrate that ReactiveGWM supports flexible character control across different player/NPC role assignments while jointly generating accurate player-controlled behaviors and reactive NPC responses, enabling more configurable and richer multi-character interactions.
Zeqing Wang, Danze Chen, Zhaohu Xing +4
Tencent · National University of Singapore · The Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (Guangzhou) +3
Recent game world models can generate visually realistic and interactive environments conditioned on player actions. However, games are not defined by pixels alone; they are governed by explicit mechanics, namely state-dependent rules that control health reduction, skill activation, and game termination. These mechanics depend on precise internal states, such as health points, skill meters, and timers, which are tightly coupled with visual observations and determine how gameplay evolves. Without modeling these state dynamics, existing game world models may generate visually plausible rollouts but violate the underlying game rules. In this paper, we propose StatePlay, a novel state-aware game world model that jointly predicts visual content and game states to promote mechanics-consistent generation. StatePlay adopts a mixture-of-transformers (MoT)-style architecture that preserves specialized visual and state representations while enabling cross-modal interaction, allowing predicted states to guide frame generation. Each branch is further optimized with a distinct objective suited to its modality. Experiments show that StatePlay achieves an average normalized L1 distance below 0.06 for state prediction. Furthermore, compared with models without explicit state modeling, our method improves mechanics fidelity in generated game rollouts by 18.6%. Overall, our work highlights the importance of state-aware game world modeling and advances beyond pixel-level realism toward complete and mechanically faithful game generation.
Zijun Lin, Zeqing Wang, Cheston Tan +2
Tencent · Nanyang Technological University · Centre for Frontier AI Research, A*STAR +1