In my head, there’s a list of things the fighting game genre needs to be popular and put out more games more often.
1.) Very live Arcade/One-on-One Console scene.
2.) Online Mode.
3.) Extra content/training mode that actually encourages people to get good at the game without being tedious.
Since 1 and 3 are… well, away, how far are we from 2? I hear a lot of badmouthing about online because the good games (Tekken, SC, VF) are supposedly too much for it right now. What exactly are the problems?
As it’s been said many times, the internet as it stands right now can’t do instantaneous, 100% frame by frame linking of games. There’s lag inherent in every net game out there, the only thing that can be done is disguise it, or simplify the game so that lag can be ignored.
OR, we can wait for Internet Part 2: Son of Internet.
I agree that they all should feature online play. Especially now with the ‘next generation’ consoles like Xbox360 and PS3, since it’s pretty much a standard now, thanks to Xbox.
If my choices are netplay with slight lag (or near perfect conditions if you’re playing on a quiet night, a game with good netcode, against someone in the same country/continent :wgrin: ), and playing the CPU for meaningless action, I’d choose slightly laggy netplay.
Netplay is a better idea. I still haven’t unlocked Evil Ryu in A3. Even though I’d love to. But I’m not learning V-ism just to do that, but I might in a while, because people on Kaillera and their Akumas are getting on my nerves.
There is better internet technology. T1, T2, T3, etc. we also have internet through satellite. I believe it’s all much faster than a single cable. However I think T is used for businesses since its cost is somewhere in the thousands of dollars (?). But, yeah, making internet faster would improve online play tremendously. Unfortunately, the less companies can offer at higher prices, the less the chance we’ll ever see an improvement at all in online play. The reason PS2 is not online is because Sony doesn’t have dedicated universal servers ala MS with Xbox Live. And other companies don’t have the dough to maintain their own servers outside that, ie: Capcom.
The problem is if we all do jump up to the T-standards, we’ll be right back at square one. Our problem at the moment is that the paths used for “common” traffic are all practically saturated. Not only is it expensive to get a T1/T3 line, the other considerations in having one(who’s providing it, do they have enough bandwidth to supply enough people with it to make the overall experience better, are there enough backbones to be able to support multiple T1s, etc.) make it difficult to say that we have it, but aren’t using it. Right now we’re only capable of so much with the infrastructure we have. There needs to be an overhaul of the ENTIRE system, not just an upgrade.
possible console ,arcade not. evolution tourny for example is console only.
all next gen console should have online network/play. no brainer, its a must.
training modes especially in capcom games needs to be on a higher level like teaching noobs how to buffer or basic chains, links and etc. the 3d fighting games are already good about this.
In fact SK, it’s even more difficult than this : one doesn’t even need so much bandwith to play fighting games, one needs a close to zero ping, that’s it. So we’d need something like optical fiber from host to host and lightning fast servers in between (and anyway as few servers as possible). And even then I’m pretty sure we’d still have some lag from time to time, probably only a few frames, maybe only 1 or 2, but arcade-perfect online play technically borders on the impossible… though of course we are likely to have to correct results in the future
T-standards would be better than standard DSL only because they are generally less subject to lag because they are closer to the backbones which are the most lagless structures nowadays.
Of course, anything which has a hellish ping like satellite connections are out of the question since they are already out of the question technically.
The problem isn’t the internet. Currently much more complex games are run over the internet with relative easy. Lag hurts in all fast games just as much.
The issue is the netcode in the game, they are just poorly optimized.
The current approach companies seem to take is horrid. Take the basic game, then quickly throw together some half assed netcode just so they can say “hey it’s online” even though it’s bugged.
Granted netcode won’t fix east coast vs west coast issues, however proper netcode would allow say a person in DC to play a person in NYC with only an 8ms ping. And with bad netcode you are going to lag/have packetloss no matter what your connection is.
The issue is convincing the game developers/publishers that it’s worth the extra money to spend time working on this. If the genre’s sales really take off, and the number of online numbers skyrockets then it will be worth their time and money.
Not really dedicated servers doesn’t do much for either of those.
If you look at PC gaming it’s pretty much all dedicated servers, and depending on the game they lag like crazy. It depends on how good the netcode is for this, often times it takes tons of patches to get this correct.
In fact dedicated servers can make things worse. If I want play a person 1v1 and we both live close by it’s often better to just connect directly. Rather then say clicking into a server that’s located in dallas, and having to route through chicago to get there, only to play a person who lives in VA or NY when I’m in DC. Most internet hubs (which is where companies plant there servers) are in dallas and chicago, and due to americas internet routing, somebody will always get ping fucked.
It also doesn’t stop cheating, you can still cheat all you want by running the cheat on your client. The assumption is that a dedicated server can have cheat protection software loaded, but that really doesn’t do anything because it’s cracked days after it’s release anyways.
I had no idea, but thanks for the heads up. I figured it’s kinda of obvious though with signals bouncing back and fourth … the ping MUST suck some serious ass.
In the end it’s all money. If there was more money to be made in this, companies would all have dedicated online servers (not just M$) and as SilentDeath said, companies would actually invest in some nice netcode/competent programmers.
Internet 2 won’t do squat for the lag problem I have that at work (pentagon), it’s entirely netcode related. Simply put there isn’t enough cash in online fighters for capcom and co to spend the big bucks on good programers to fix it.
Either all of a sudden fighters reach the level of FPS/RTS games in competitive stature and they spend the cash, or it goes to the PC and community members fix it.
Short of that no amount of speed/bandwidth even fiber optic will fix the issue.
Silentdeath is right : without good code nothing is likely to be possible. Now you are wrong if you think hardware is not going to screw you : no code will ever change hardware limitations. Now I admit it : if the code, ALL the code, was better, we’d have faaar less problems. But please, don’t go and tell me hardware has nothing to do with it : transmission time isn’t null across hundreds if not thousands of kilometers (in class books it is, I know). Not to mention that poor quality cables and installations tend to lose packets, leading to some re-sending, etc etc
:wgrin: ), and playing the CPU for meaningless action, I’d choose slightly laggy netplay.