The two betas are absolutely commendable. It’s great that they’re doing that. And frankly, I’m surprised they’re doing it. But, at the same time, I think it’s perfectly acceptable to bitch up a storm about the net-code for these two facts:
SF2:HF’s net-code was complete ass. It was obvious it was ass on release, and the one patch they put out mostly made it worse. Never fixing that, when it has been the most profitable game on XBLA, is kind of ridiculous.
GGPO was readily available and should’ve been licensed for SF:HD IMHO. So, there’s zero excuse for not having something that plays at least as good as it.
Luckily, it looks like the beta has been worthwhile so far. Those videos show great improvement in the net-code. But seriously, if they don’t mostly meet the standard that GGPO has set, I’m gonna be kinda pissed. Because, for zero effort, they could’ve had that level of quality to begin with.
Did Backbone make SFII Turbo for live? It’s not listed as one of their games on their website (or digital eclipses). If they didn’t it’s kind of hard to blame them for that.
As for licensing GGPO, people really need to get a reality check as to how major corporations do business. There’s a whole host of potential issues when you’re using a contractor or outside code.
Does he even have an interest in helping?
What’s the payment going to be? Will this fit within our budget?
Will he want royalties/IP rights?
Can he commit to deliver the work in the timeframe needed?
Can he work with the current programmers? Will email/telephone work, or will he have to be at our location?
Will he have to be trained on our development platforms/languages/xbox TC standards?
If we just bought the rights, will the code still have to be rewritten for use in this environment/future products?
If we just bought the rights, will our staff actually understand what’s being done inside the code (do we have anybody that truly understands the reasons and methodology behind the algorithms)?
Do we want to give a contractor access to our software?
Do we want to stake a critical portion of our game on an outside party?
All of these are valid, serious questions that could have prevented the collaboration from happening. It’s not just hand check -> get ggpo -> hooray. Corporate managers have to look at more than “ggpo is awesome” when making decisions.
(Also, please don’t take any of those questions as a swipe at Ponder. He’s obviously good at what he does.)
VF5 deserves a very honorable mention here, I think it has very good netcode. Though being 3D instead of sprite-based does allow it to be smoother more easily.
Kind of a page late here, but IEEE 802.11 (Wi-Fi) has required positive acknowledgment on every data packet at the MAC layer. In other words, if a packet (even carrying UDP header, intended to go through Internet to opponent) is dropped on the wireless link between your Xbox 360/PS3 and your wireless router, the drop will be detected in less than 1 ms, and the packet will be promptly retransmitted. The transmission time for an average-length packet with the current technology is in the order of tens or hundreds of microseconds. In other words, any dropped packets on your home network side will be accounted for and retransmitted quickly enough you won’t notice. A few consecutive extra retransmissions for the same data at worst would be like 5-10 ms difference. Retransmissions occur, and quickly, because they are part of the wireless standard, under the transport layer (UDP).
Of course, there are extreme cases where the wireless performance would be significantly worse than usual. If you’re living right next to 20 hotspots where everybody is torrenting 24/7, your packets might have to wait a little while before the air is clear to send. Or if your Xbox is right next to the microwave when it turns on. Or strongly conflicting with another network device in the same band (cordless phone, Bluetooth, etc.), although everybody uses some sort of channel hopping and/or spread spectrum methods to mitigate such interference.
Once a UDP packet reaches your modem, it doesn’t matter if it got there through a wired or wireless connection. If it gets dropped en route, from buffer overflows, corruption, etc., that’s unavoidable and a problem shared by everyone no matter their home network setup.
Short story:
Wireless drops packets -> quick retransmission, your data will be sent from your home, just a few ms later than usual in most cases; data will get to your opponent unless…
Network drops packets – your ISP’s routers, repeaters, network equipment throughout the Internet can lose your packet; since it’s UDP, your opponent will never get it and you’ll never know about it
Speaking from experience, packet loss (or more frequently out-of-order packet arrival) is the biggest cause of large rollbacks in GGPO. GGPO, nFBA, and now Backbone are all using the same tricks for latency hiding, but that’s only part of the story. How each deals with packet loss makes a huge difference in the quality of the user experience (that’s not the whole story either, but I’ll save that post for another day). I don’t know what Backbone is doing, but there’s a least one thing in the recent posts by Capcom bloggers which makes me raise my eyebrows. I wonder if they’re focusing on the right things.
That being said, here’s to hoping that the next beta will be vastly improved.
GGPO is better because it’s been under development for 3 years and has over 6 months of extensive testing on the real internet. As Backbone’s code base gains more testing, it too will improve as the developers figure out more ways to make their algorithms better in real-world scenarios (for example, did you know that practically every home connection in South America has ~150 ms of latency built in? ouch!).
My biggest question is whether there will be enough betas before they release to get the code up to GGPO’s quality level.
Ponder, are you at any liberty to discuss any possible contact you’ve had with Capcom? It would certainly go a long way towards clearing the air around here.
And if that E3 vid is to be believed, Claw has a fake wall dive. The main reason I play ST is that relative to the other popular Capcom games, guessing is minimized and spacing is emphasized, and I like spacing and don’t like excessive guessing. Obviously you can’t get away from guessing and ST still has plenty of it, but I’d rather that level of guessing not go up. Unfortunately for me, the only thing fakes do is increase guessing. I understand that a lot of players, including Sirlin, are big fans of mind games, but in my opinion SF2 already had enough. I’d play a different series if I wanted more.
Not to mention I think fakes are a pretty inelegant way of balancing, and the characters who are getting fakes in my opinion didn’t need to be balanced up much anyway.
ST has enough elements to keep you on your toes. Why Claw needs something more added to his arsenal is beyond me. Sure, Ryu gains something but he makes use of it. Claw doesn’t need anymore shenanigans than he already has.
However, all will be forgiven if they remove Honda from the game.
Thanks for explaining. Claw having a fake wall dive seems pretty bizarre, since he really didn’t need anything new, and 'rog got nothing but nerfs. About Bison though, do high level players ever use Bison’s slide? I rarely see anybody good using it when I play on GGPO. Assuming that’s correct, a fake slide actually works well to increase his power level by giving him access to something that wasn’t very good before (with no new sprites).
I’m indifferent to Ryu’s fake fireball now, I guess mainly because I never plan on playing him seriously. I can see why people might not care for how it changes his playstyle.
It is useful in a select number of scenarios that would otherwise create unfair match-ups against Ryu. I believe the example Sirlin specifically cited was Dhalsim’s ability to jump over Ryu’s fireball and drill him on reaction. If Ryu can bait Dhalsim with the fake, then Dhalsim can no longer guarantee the hit every time.
You throw a fake fireball in a position that would normally make you eat a jump-in or special move to the face. It recovers fast enough you can counter the jump-in/special move.
It’s also pretty insane when you have somebody in the corner because you can do shit like low forward -> fake fireball -> throw. It increases Ryu’s mixups in the corner, lets him be more aggressive. Or so I’ve been told.
I don’t play Ryu (I don’t play ST!), but here are some ideas:
Fake fireball executes and recovers faster than some normals. For example l.rh (hit) xx fake.fb may be a better choice than l.rh (hit) if you’re trying to setup a crossup.
It gives you the option of canceling anything into fake fb into walk forward to increase pressure. In this case, the mind game isn’t “will he throw a fake fb”, but rather “will he throw a real fb”, since fake fb can be punished and a real fb will get you smacked in the face, but pushes Ryu out of pressure range.
It gives you another option to bait people who anticipate or are required to anticipate a FB to get around your pressure. For example, when knocked down in the corner you can do: jab.FB (meaty), fierce.FB (must block). Now what? People waiting for the FB animation to jump foward to get out of your trap can be tricked by a fake FB, which gives you the chance to DP and reset the trap.
Cr. HK x fake fireball, walk up throw. Plus you’ve gained an extra option in a corner trap, another element that the opponent has to deal with. Train him to expect meaty lp hadouken > hp hadouken, switch to lp. lp or lp, fake etc. etc. etc.
People have asked Capcom for calcification regarding the what’s going on with the networking code, but until very recently they’ve been slow to say anything other than that it will be really good. This strikes me as odd given the huge amount of transparency on other aspects of the project like the music, balance changes, etc. Even on the art, they were very up front about getting feedback on quality initially and explaining the reasoning behind the art reset they had to do.
I’m not going to comment on anything Capcom hasn’t already told you about the netcode. To their credit, they have gone beyond what many companies would do in even consulting with an independent developer, and it would not be in anyone’s interest for me to say anything beyond what they want you to know. That shouldn’t stop you from asking, just don’t ask me. :lovin: