# WanToFight: Real-Time Generative Game Engine for Multi-Player Combat Interaction

arXiv: https://arxiv.org/abs/2607.12592 · HTML: https://mlsanity.com/paper/2607.12592/

## Key facts

- Cited by 3 papers in the map (data through 14 Oct 2026).
- Builds on 23 of its 28 references that are in the map.
- First posted on arXiv 14 Jul 2026.

## Builds on (most cited first, 23 of 23)

- [Learning Transferable Visual Models From Natural Language Supervision](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2103.00020/) (2021)
- [Denoising Diffusion Probabilistic Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2006.11239/) (2020)
- [Scalable Diffusion Models with Transformers](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2212.09748/) (2022)
- [Wan: Open and Advanced Large-Scale Video Generative Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.20314/) (2025)
- [One-step Diffusion with Distribution Matching Distillation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2311.18828/) (2023)
- [WorldSimBench: Towards Video Generation Models as World Simulators](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2410.18072/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Forcing: Next-token Prediction Meets Full-Sequence Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2407.01392/) (2024)
- [Self Forcing: Bridging the Train-Test Gap in Autoregressive Video Diffusion](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.08009/) (2025)
- [From Slow Bidirectional to Fast Autoregressive Video Diffusion Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.07772/) (2024)
- [Diffusion Models Are Real-Time Game Engines](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2408.14837/) (2024)
- [Seedance 1.0: Exploring the Boundaries of Video Generation Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2506.09113/) (2025)
- [Matrix-game 2.0: An open-source real-time and streaming interactive world model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.13009/) (2025)
- [WorldMem: Long-term Consistent World Simulation with Memory](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2504.12369/) (2025)
- [Advancing Open-source World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2601.20540/) (2026)
- [GameFactory: Creating New Games with Generative Interactive Videos](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2501.08325/) (2025)
- [HunyuanWorld 1.0: Generating Immersive, Explorable, and Interactive 3D Worlds from Words or Pixels](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2507.21809/) (2025)
- [Yume-1.5: A Text-Controlled Interactive World Generation Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2512.22096/) (2025)
- [The Matrix: Infinite-Horizon World Generation with Real-Time Moving Control](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2412.03568/) (2024)
- [Hunyuan-GameCraft-2: Instruction-following Interactive Game World Model](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2511.23429/) (2025)
- [Solaris: Building a Multiplayer Video World Model in Minecraft](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2602.22208/) (2026)
- [MultiWorld: Scalable Multi-Agent Multi-View Video World Models](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2604.18564/) (2026)
- [Yan: Foundational Interactive Video Generation](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2508.08601/) (2025)
- [Position: Interactive Generative Video as Next-Generation Game Engine](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2503.17359/) (2025)

## Built on by (most cited first, 3 of 3)

- [MASS: Multiplayer World Models with Authoritative Shared State](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.06257/) (2026)
- [Magpie: Real-Time World Renderer for Interactive Games](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2608.27168/) (2026)
- [Multics: Generative Multi-Player World Model with Hierarchical Communication](https://mlsanity.com/paper/2610.17201/) (2026)

## Abstract (arXiv)

We present WanToFight, a generative game engine that simulates real-time, two-player The King of Fighters '97 (KOF~'97) gameplay from keyboard input. Prior generative game engines target either single-player first-person settings or non-real-time cooperative scenarios; multi-player control, real-time inference, complex physical interaction, and adversarial gameplay have not been jointly addressed. WanToFight closes this gap with three components built on the Wan-1.3B video diffusion transformer: a streaming autoregressive generator with block-causal attention and a rolling KV cache; a visually grounded Player Association module that binds each player's keyboard signal to a character identity; and a gated, locally causal keyboard injection module trained with a single-player-to-full-gameplay curriculum. A four-step DMD-distilled student paired with a pruned VAE decoder sustains 30FPS at 512x384 on a single NVIDIA RTX 5090 over the duration of a complete match. To our knowledge, WanToFight is the first generative game engine to combine multi-player control, real-time inference, complex physical interaction, and adversarial gameplay in one system.