you would think after being wrong for the millionth time, kalyx would take a back seat but I guess not. Guess some things never change.
The no spectator mode is really annoying as its an incredible tool to learn how to play. You can always watch someone deal with something you might have a problem with and then you can copy them to adapt it to your game. It definitely takes some fun out the game.
I don’t know WTF they were doing when they were making this game. It certainly wasn’t creating that “lightning” fast netcode they promised about a month back. Someone just needs to start punching capcom employees in the face. Especially the guy who runs the online
et code department. That guy has been fucking it up for years.
Everyone i know here in Sweden that play MvC3 have reported lag-free matches, mostly that is. But we’re all on 100/100 mbit connections though. That’s against nordic opponents. I did play 10 matches against some brittish dude though, and all rounds except one or two were lag-free, so to speak.
Kalyx, I remember when you said GGPO could not work in games that used 3d. Then I and a lot of others said GGPO could work in 3d games. Then Namco came along and proved you know nothing on how netcode works.
That’s not a problem, the game renders that stuff client side. No amount of netcode could save you if the game was trying to send you all of that data constantly.
I wouldn’t. Spectator mode is a huge deal… at least for me I really like being able to watch better players, also improves sense of community when you can be engaged in the matches you aren’t playing, even if it’s only passively.
Well yeah, if you’re on a low ping, stable connection the game is fine. But that’s not what trying to make good netcode is about.
Based on talking with PC guys recently, the primary claim I see about rollback code being hard on 3D fighting games is due to the rollback itself - resetting position of sprites is one thing. There’s very little visual asset to redraw and move around the screen, or revert to a previous state.
As for 3D games, let’s say rollback netcode was used in a first person shooter… aside from the fact that such a game has a different set of predictive problems and advantages (where characters are going to be, etc), in the typical FPS scenario there isn’t much in the way of detailed character interactions. THe character models for other players can “teleport” around or jitter without much effect on gameplay aside from the moment of the jump - and this is something that’s been accepted in FPS games online for years, when there is lag.
A complex 3D fighting game though, presents a different challenge. Rolling back to a previous state involves recalculating where the characters are and what state of animation they’re in. It’s not that it can’t be done, so the coding guys say - it’s that it’s expensive. It requires a lot more clock cycles than rolling back the sprites in a game like Blazblue. In addition to processing power, it requires more /time/ which may defeat the purpose of the lag-hiding rollback in the first place.
Now consider Marvel 3, and the /sheer volume of crap/ that can be on the screen and in the process of executing. Care to stop and consider what happens if you need to roll back to a frame where a triple character team hyper combo is going off and the screen was/is filled with six characters and over a dozen discreet animated objects, beams, and entities from the fireworks? Again, these aren’t sprite effects… they’re 3D models and animation processes that don’t exist in single, predefined frames you can just instantly call up and draw on the screen when requested.
The upshot is that yes, you could execute rollback techniques for that, but it would require a lot of processing overhead, and burned clock cycles calculating and setting it up.
Eventually, someone is going to force-f**k rollback netcode to work in a 3D fighting game. But it’s just not as simple as “UR STUPID NET MAKING GUY PUSH TEH GGPO BOOTON MAKE IT WORK!”
And this, again, goes back to what people have been saying for a long time: Design the game for this type of state shifting from the ground up. All of that extra processing is on the developers’ coding algorithms. I mean, if a FPS shooter dev stored every single thing about a scene and made the game redraw that scene exactly with all the particles and debris and smoke, it would be extra processing time as well and they could also use the “It’s tooo hard :-(” excuse too. But they don’t. Because that’s dumb. They store as much as they need to, code the game that it can efficiently draw a scene from that info with as little overhead as possible, and everyone’s happy.
If anything, the projectiles are the least important thing. Projectiles don’t need complex animation or information about it. It’s just a projectile, maybe with some additional with particle effects being drawn in real-time from its position. And that is no different than a grenade, beam, or an explosion with particle effects in any given FPS. Notice how any grenade trails FPS games, when the game rolls back, kinda go weird? It’s because the only thing the game is just calculating/drawing the new particle effects from the new position of the grenade. And it only looks weird in very extreme/rare cases.
As for actual model animation, this is up to the developer and, again, there are ways. Conceptually feasible way is to give moves certain animation “hook-ins,” a few per move. Instead of a move’s entire animation being immutably set from the initial button press; you give it hook-in so that it can start after, say, the 5th, 10th, and/or 15th frame of the move. When a rollback happens and things to need to be redrawn, approximate to the closest frame (10th) and redraw. It wouldn’t be single frame, and it wouldn’t be perfect, but it would be “state-based” and it would certainly be better than the over-15-year old mindset that Capcom still have regarding netcode and global markets in general.
Yes, it would take more coding on their part, but that’s why everyone is saying that they’re lazy. Because they didn’t. They didn’t care enough to think of that. Instead of realizing that the game is gonna be played online and actually taking their US clientele seriously, they put in this lazy netcode that’s good enough for Japan and don’t give a shit about anywhere else. Hell, I think it’s funny that people defend Capcom for this. Hooray for Capcom thinking we’re all dumb scrubs that won’t notice/care about input delay?
A) that very “teleporting” actually is a huge problem in FPSes and very heavily affects gameplay.
B) it’s only accepted in the sense that PC gamers have long since given up on the notion of PC game devs fixing anything that needs to be fixed.
C) I have no idea where you came up with “detailed character interactions” being a reason for anything. The only reason rollback in FPSes wouldn’t work is purely because FPSes involving more than 2 players would have to enact rollbacks for every single player, ultimately resulting in the gamestate having to enact so many rollbacks that the only way to properly resolve them would be to roll everything back to the very beginning of the match.
Except everyone already concedes it can’t be added ad-hoc. The argument is that it’s been such a known issue for such a long time that it should be planned for in the fundamental design of the networking architecture. The only argument after that is “Derp, that’s hard”, to which the answer is “Yeah, that’s why you get paid to do it”.
In other words:
“Whoops, we didn’t plan for it so we can’t add it now”
“No shit retards. Why didn’t you plan for it at the beginning instead, like you should’ve?”
“Huh? Wut?”
I just hope they do a better job in the patch. the way things are now is just horrible. half the time you can’t get in a match. the other half you go in not being able to know the other person’s ping leading it to a guessing game of how much lag will there be. and of course lag switchers but that’s another topic again.
All Capcom has to to is bring over the match-making from SSFIV and add spectator mode.
This, SSF4’s online mode was pretty bare bones but god damn, somehow they made it look godlike with MvC3s horrible online interface, the people in charge of the user interface should be replaced, clearly no thought went into this part of the game clearly, besides super cool ID cards!
Astounding really.
there’s a lot of things that make this game unattractive online. I’d say my biggest peeve is the input lag. there is ALWAYS at least 1/2 second input where in SSF4 it was barely noticeable. It’s extremely frustrating to hit the lab, commit combo’s to muscle memory and then go online and have my timing be completely off on even the most simple BnB combos. Now, i could practice with the lag simulator on but why would i wanna ruin my offline timing? I have a small scene here where i live and we all play offline, but that’s only a couple days a week. I would rather have my game be sharp for offline than ruin my timing with the lag simulator.
Another thing that’s really bad is no spectator mode. Now i cant even watch other people fight it out and look to learn no methods of approach/retreat/combos or whatever the case is. Spectator mode is so huge, the only thing i got is just to go watch a stream. But still, i have to say i’m very dissapointed in this games performance and it’s options online. Without the online problems this game woulda been even better than i think it is now. But it just means i spend my time in the lab till it’s time to go to the offline parties and play
the matches i do lose are because the other player is better than i am, it’s because of the terrible netcode. i’ve had so many dropped inputs and combos it’s unbearable.
