3s isn’t dead, there are quite a few people playing. I get good games anytime I sign on, and I’m logged in at all sorts of random hours. I have had problems with matchmaking but there seems to be a pretty good player base.
Karnov room has like 30-40 players on every night… if you have a pc and want a better experience than 3SOE, play the game on GGPO.
There’s just no telling who are actual Karnov players and who are 3s players, but it’s safe to assume that the majority play 3s. But still, why couldn’t folks pick a game nobody actually plays, like that D&D beat em up or something.
For some reason since the beginning of time GGPO has been hit or miss for me. I enjoyed 3s better on Kaillera client with mame.
Nobody plays karnov, maybe 1-2 people actually go in there to play karnov. You can change the rom you’re playing mid-game, doesn’t matter what room you’re in.
That has to do with either your connection or your opponents. Also make sure you’re smoothing filter is set to the appropriate number based on your challenges ping.
1-2 smoothing for 15-75
3 smoothing for 75-105
Anything over 115 ping is considered unplayable, even with consistent internet and the above settings.
Wait, really? 115 is about the best I ever see. You people should live for a couple weeks in Alaska, I bet your whole outlook on online play will change. It’s not the same as playing offline but it’s not unplayable. Red connections on OE are my threshold for unplayable.
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I play Karnov 
<3
For anybody doubting GGPO stability compared to 3soe, here’s a set I ran with a guy in the east coast.
[media=youtube]7nXx7skyogo[/media]
Check the video description for instructions for setting up GGPO in the Karnov room. Remember that the reason why my game was playable is because my smoothing was set correctly. Oh btw, duno why the sound gets shitty randomly, happens when I fraps… >.<
Indeed, anything over 115 is considered unplayable. Also, setting smoothing higher than 1, adds singificant input delay.
You don’t need to change the settings according to their ping. Keep smoothing to 1 (Default).
If you play with ping 15-110, the input delay will stay minimum as long as both players are on good/stable connections (wireless is crap) and fast processors.
The slower connection/computer always slows down the game regardless the settings. I have seen unplayable 75 ms and very playable 100+ms games on default settings.
This is where 3SOE is supposed to shine. Both players use the same medium (console) to play.
I guess its just general preference, I’ve been on ggpo for 3 years now and this is what has worked for me.
I played a buddy recently on Karnov with a ping around 115. We had some stability issues early (crashed every 5 minutes) but after that it ran pretty well. We tried playing a few times on OE before and the results were far worse. Same connection, same conditions, GGPO just worked a lot better.
Only downside is every few matches you get black bars covering your whole screen but it seems like everyone is already aware that that happens.
Black bars only appear if you or the opponent are hitting buttons while the game and rounds start. No mashing inbetween rounds = no black bars.
Ah, good to know. I’m probably guilty of that! Thanks for the heads up.
What a surprize! IglooBob, did you really test ggpo 3s? I thought you said FBA’s emulation is bad, not a great medium to play arcade games due to input delay even offline…But, PC GGPO feels better than 3SOE on psn/xbl, right? I did not expect you actually try this.
The best online experience with ggpo can only match the offline version of emulated 3s in FBA , nothing more or less. If you happen to enjoy a game with low/high ping online, it is only because your inputs and the game emulation are closer to offline.
The crashing could happen because one of you is on wireless, GGPO is pretty anal when it comes to packets, and wireless being what it is, it drops packets every once in a while, so you get a crash.
Eh, it’s still pretty fun. I was just commenting at the time that we have some barriers on PC emulation before it can approach arcade perfect. The audio and video buffers are big, and emulation still has a ways to go on CPS-3. But I’m pretty optimistic on even that in the long run - you can already bring input latency and audio latency really low on real time kernels of Linux, and once video cards use real triple buffering across the board (and not the weird render queue they call triple buffering now) we should be able to have full screen without extra lag or screen tearing which will be sweet. There’s still some hurdles that have to be overcome (video buffer size, emulation accuracy) but I suspect we’re going to have arcade perfect 3S on PC before Capcom ever fixes OE or releases a real arcade perfect version.
As far as FBA/GGPO specifically goes, I’m a fan. FBA is faster of course and right now I drop some stuff there, presumably because I’m not doing the inputs fast enough? But FBA has about as low lag as you can get on PC and GGPO is so much better than OE’s online play it’s ridiculous. I live in Alaska and am pretty much doomed to bad connections no matter who I play, but playing with my buddy from California was actually possible and mostly good on GGPO, where it’s a rollback whacky adventure mess on OE. Honestly I dunno how OE can be so much worse on the exact same connection and they say that it’s the same netcode.
Ah I see, thanks. I’m on wireless and I’m not sure if he is. I know wireless is not fighting game-friendly so I might mention that to him and see if fixing that helps us. Once we got past the crashes, we played a couple hours with no real issues so I know it’s possible at least. To this point we had mostly just played a ton of Warcraft III online together, so playing fighting games is uncharted territory and we’re figuring stuff out as we go.
The ggpo netcode in 3SOE in not the same with PC ggpo. The original netcode was made for the PC hardware, so some modifications were necessary at least.
The fact that you drop stuff online is a common problem among the ggpo users (happens in any game online, more or less). Noone can erradicate that issue, but you can minimize the input delay & frameskips by playing lower pings and better connections/PCs. You need to adjust your timing on combos online, though. Depends on the character you play in 3s, how much complicated his combos and his set ups are.
A wireless connection really downgrades the netplay. If you fix this problem (find a wired connection), the netplay experience should be improved significantly.
Btw, consoles are trying to follow the pc technology, not vice versa.
EDIT: Maybe you should practice some combos on the original-unmodified FBA emulator offline (not ggpofba). It feels faster, indeed.
It should not be much of a problem, though.
I don’t think the CPS3 code in FBA, or any other emulator really, has been changed since like 2007, so there shouldn’t be any differance in GGPO FBA and the regular FBA when it comes to gameplay speeds and that. Besides, I think people should train with GGPO FBA since that’s what they’re going to be playing on anyway, unless they’re mostly into offline. Only problem is that you can’t get any sort of pseudo training mode like with MAME via cheats, but at least it doesn’t lag, right?
i’m still playing