FightCade 3S (GGPO killer)

Classic Fighting Games Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike
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http://www.fightcade.com/

Mentioned this to a couple of you guys. It’s basically an open source GGPO and so far it’s better than GGPO. For one it features a far wider variety of games (Capcom’s Beat 'em Up Masterpieces for example), gives you more customization, and personally I think the netcode is better. It’s still in Beta but so far it’s been a smoother experience. I’ve had fewer dropped inputs, I’ve been able to react to shit much more, and it’s just less buggy. The classic lines on the screen glitch doesn’t happen nearly as much.

Just the fact that I played a typical Yun and I knew he was going to do midscreen jump-punch or Shoulder and I buffer-parried and holy shit I actually parried the thing and got a BNB. That would NEVER happen on GGPO. You just cannot buffer-parry on GGPO.

So, check this shit out. It’s only going to get better from here.

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Will begin testing tomorrow.

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Why is there no CvS2 online yet =[

They have SvC Chaos FFS

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I can confirm, this is better than GGPO so far.

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I tested it and it felt no different. They’re still using the same emulator as GGPO, so in terms of emulation accuracy, it’s no better. What this means is that the game is still too fast, and black bars still are a problem (black bars are, IIRC, a problem with the implementation of both GGPO’s savestates and how the emulator handles them).

I can’t say that I can comment too much on netcode, as GGPO netcode was rather good. When I tested Fightcade, it was against a French guy, so lag wouldn’t have been that bad anyway (FYI: I live in London). Also, a word about Mac and Linux support (to the 1 or 2 other guys that might care on this forum): although the client itself is ported to Mac and Linux, since Fightcade still uses FBA you need Wine to actually run it. I think that this is a case of false advertising, but whatever.

@duckcanoe‌ The reason CvS2 isn’t supported is because Fightcade uses FBA. Until someone comes up with a GGPO client that uses DEMUL or NullDC, you’re probably not going to see GGPO enabled CvS2, MvC2, Virtua Fighter or (most depressingly) Hokuto no Ken. MAME could potentially be a solution, but it runs like shit for a lot of post-90s systems.

The client itself is preferable to the one offered by GGPO, however. I like the fact that you have a bunch of emotes that you can select, especially since they include ASCII quarter-circles and stuff. The amount of games that are supported out of the box is great too - you’re less likely to have to co-ordinate with your friends to try and play something in the Unsupported room, although the Unsupported room is still there, thankfully.

Replays are planned but currently unimplemented. That was one of the upsides to using Supercade, so it’s good that it’s going to be in this client.

Also, according to one Reddit comment I saw, “updating [the version of FBA used] or potentially using MAME in the future is one of the development goals.” I don’t know if the guy is part of the project but that bodes well for the future of Fightcade, especially 3S. Hopefully we might get a Fightcade based on GroovyMAME or ShmupMAME.

It’s a shame that Ponder doesn’t support GGPO anymore, but I think that’s fair considering the lack of donations he got for his fantastic project. The biggest advantage Fightcade has over GGPO is that it will be under active development. Unlike GGPO, it has a future.

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I’ve been playing GGPO more lately. I know this is beating a dead horse but I cannot play functionally on that emulator (fba). I don’t know how any ggpo player manages to anti air anything (or maybe they don’t which is why a lot of the players jump in all day?).

I think abandoning FBA in favor of shmupmame would be the best possible option for online 3s. If they could combine ggpo netcode with Shmupmame it would be a best case scenario - clearly better than FBA and OE both.

So while I’m not too interested in fightcade at the moment, if they switched to Shmupmame they would have my immediate attention.

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GGPO God signing in! Hello!

Haven’t tested fightcade, but I was under the impression that it uses the same exact emulator. Given such, I’m inclined to believe that any positive experiences may just be placebo effects. After all, you can have good GGPO connections and bad ones. It’s dependent on so many factors. The same goes for running GGPO on Mac. For what you do for fightcade, you could also use boot camp. It does use pyqt’s GUI though, and that’s much better than stock GGPO (minus the ping refresh).

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All I’m saying is, I’ve had it happen too many times where I’m just doing a Flash Chop or EX Flash Chop and it doesn’t come out. It felt like every other match that would happen or I jump in and throw and I don’t get my tech. In FightCade, that hasn’t happened nearly as much.

At the very least you can say it has a lot of potential just because it’s open source and being actively developed.

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it immediately has the potential to be better if its just on a new server because it’s on a new server.

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A new server doesn’t mean shit though. I’m pretty sure all the server does is act as a chat channel and allow people to challenge each other, but the actual connections are P2P. The only upside is that this new server might not go down as much as the one Ponder maintains.

I agree with exodus on the placebo effect thing. I wanted to mention it on my original post but I guess I forgot about it.

Two other things I wanted to mention:

  • There’s no port forwarding! This caused a lot of issues with GGPO before, so it’s nice that you don’t have to do this anymore.
  • Although I don’t actually know if I’m right or not, I believe that Wine might introduce input lag. I haven’t done any tests but as Wine is a compatibility layer I get the feeling that there may be some lag as it converts DirectInput system calls to whatever Mac/Linux uses. I’m not a programmer though, so take this theory with a pinch of salt.
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Why the fuck would you need a whole server just for chat?

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Mac and Linux support is not “false advertising.” The client itself works cross platform, and considering FBA works perfectly fine in Wine as long as you use the correct settings, that is fine for now.

Eventually I’d love to see them move everything over to a cross-platform emulator so that it could be cross-platform without the assistance of Wine, but for right now, this is fine.

They basically have to reverse engineer the netcode, so maybe at some point they can implement it into another emulator once they have that done.

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Someone has tested on GNU/Linux version to know if lag is less than Windows version?

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Wasn’t there a killaria CvS2 online that really sucked? Why did nobody ever try and refine that?

I’m so “home sick” for some decent CvS2 action… It’s been years.

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It would be around the same. If there were any advantage to running it on Linux, it would be negated by the fact that it is having to be ran under Wine.

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fightcade/pyqtggpo are open source, but not the ggpo library (the actual netcode part). fba is open source but the same version is being used. so yes, any improvements u may notice are placebo.

does the server coordinate the connection of clients to each other on demand? or are IPs registered once a client connects to the chat, with coordination being peer to peer afterwards? i’m just guessing. i think it might be the former, because it would explain why it’s hard to connect to people during peak hours, like friday evenings. in that case, it’s better to have a server that can service more requests.

also, i highly doubt that performance under wine is better than just native windows.

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fightcade isn’t bad at all. It’s much more responsive than ggpo but after consistent play gets bogged down too. Still, more consistent than ggpo and no roll backs to speak of. Instead you get missingnos, which is fine by me, because it provides a lot of insight into how they do their animation. Instead of redrawing on the spot, it scrolls under a mask. Fucking cool.

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Still can’t do quick multiparries though.

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rofl
i’m really glad you said this. because i have the same problem, i wonder if maybe our sticks are just slow as balls with windows/fba? slow stick + latency = frustration.

i tend to crouch until late against jumpins (especially as remy). if I go for a late parry it almost never works on ggpo. eating a jump in while crouched is just embarrassing.
i don’t doubt that some people can do it just fine, so i think my own setup must be responsible to a large degree.
it doesn’t happen to me anywhere near as often on offline oe (360) or cps3.

dander i wonder what you mean. it def does redraw. i think what you’re seeing is the result of it being emulated, not outputting directly to a crt. even if its outputting to a crt, it’s still emulating it, then that emulated image is being displayed by the crt. so in no situation is it actually doing the process ‘correctly’ under emulation. i think the emulator can ‘draw’ faster than it can be displayed basically. cps3 can’t do that since the visual output and the running of the game are matched speed wise, always, exactly (both sharing the same value).

cps3 which has to display on a crt is going to draw each frame line by line. so it’s always going to redo the animations line by line. is that what you mean? it doesn’t ‘dump’ what’s on screen first or something, it draws over line by line.

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Remember to disable aero (can right click > properties > compatibility > disable desktop composition - for it to be automatic) if you’re on Windows 7, otherwise you’ll have some input delay.