The thing is, you’re basically saying that any fighting game with proper fighting game netcode is exposing your IP because proper fighting game netcode is P2P.
But that’s exactly how rollback netcode works. The games don’t look alike because they don’t actually wait to sync to each other like the variable delay netcode used in SFIV. If one player gets a rollback, while the other doesn’t, that’s simply because the system has judged that one is closer to the actual fair state of the game.
From mauve’s write up.
The bolded part is important, to keep delay from changing throughout the match, the game runs ahead without waiting for the other peer. A rollback happens because the game realizes that it’s desynced and not playing the fair state.
I often felt during the beta like they were testing how the netcode performed depending on geographical location.
Sometimes I would get really great matches with people from all over Europe and then all of a sudden I would get match after match vs americans, canadians, even south africa.
Could be a very strange coincidence but you never know.
Setting the connection preference to 5 bars clearly didn’t do anything in the beta since I got matched up against people on the other side of the planet °_°
I don’t get it.
Stress test was good, first day of beta it was kind of ass, second evening it was good, last day it was best for me.
Kinda hard to tell how solid this netcode is if you get varying results like this.
I only know that even a crappy rollback netcode seems to be much better than delay based netcode during matches that are actually solid.
I don’t feel like I have to adjust combo timings at all and hit-confirming is easier as well.
You don’t have to adjust timing at all and you can actually react to moves real time instead of reacting and the move not coming out because you got hit before the input was registered.
The overall experience in the beta was positive for sure. IMO they were clearly testing out scenarios because there were very obvious periods of time where everyone was having bad connections, and periods of times where everyone (for the most part) were having good connections. You can just read the threads when beta’s were up and could tell this.
But the good connections I experienced on beta 4 were VERY close to Killer Instinct online, which to me feels like it’s virtually offline. I play KI with people in AZ and I’m in MD (probably like 2k+ miles apart), and SF4 we would have yellow connections and it was the type of matches you couldn’t take serious. In KI we could play like we were in the same room. I’m hoping SF5 will be like this when we play too.
The consistency in SF5 wasn’t as good as KI for sure, because KI I have good matches like 99% of the time. SF5 I’d say it was more like 80-90% or so that felt “offline” like KI does. But considering this is a beta, I’m going into the final release pretty confident.
As others have mentioned, a large problem was the match making. They were matching us with people who weren’t in optimal conditions.
@purbeast once they get a benchmark going for PC and an option to filter people with bad benchmark results out I feel things will improve on that front.
@Smashbro29 I will say I was only playing on PS4 and won’t be on PC at all so I can’t really comment on that. I did not have any issues with crossplay though.
As much as I’m still craving for improvements, the game is being released in 12 days and we’ve seen a beta only this weekend. There’s no way they’d let out features/improvements that could improve overall experience and make the hype bigger.
Mostly, from what I saw in the last beta and my general experiences with rollback in other games, it makes good connections better and bad connections worse. I had a couple matches where it was completely impossible to do anything, teleporting all over the place, and this has happened to me in other rollback-based netcode setups too. With SF4’s setup I probably could’ve done something but it still would have sucked pretty bad, often I have to dumb down my Dudley play because I know the frames in my half circles will get dropped. That said, I only got bad connections really early on, by Friday afternoon even with the bars set to “Any” I was doing great all the way through Saturday night.
It’s definitely gonna make the experience of people with bad connections a lot worse (so people in South America, esp. people with terrible landline infrastructure like in Venezuela) and probably turn those people off the game, but maybe being able to have legitimate high level online play will be worth it in the end for Capcom?
It’s kind of hard to make perfect netcode for the US market when distances between players are on the order of 2+ frames (>~32ms), but this is about as close as you can get to lagless if you live close enough.
Yeah, definitely. Lag fights are just a fact of online life, they’re gonna suck regardless of what kind of netcode you use, may as well make the game better for the people who can actually play it. Maybe it’ll stop the lag switchers finally since it’s a lot harder to take advantage of rollback code.
So is it just me or does the online kind of suck? I got 2 good matches when I started the game the other 3 were bleh, the 3rd literally going into slwo-mo frame skip hell at the end against a pc user (im on ps4). My connection is wired I set the connection criteria to 4-5.