Official SSF2T: HD Remix General Discussion Thread

Classic Fighting Games SSF2T: HD Remix
1381

Thanks for your report MogKnight. I’m really disappointed by Derek’s view of GGPO. I realize this information is coming 4th or 5th hand, but everything being reported about GGPO just isn’t true.

The XBox360 is very PC-like and people are playing GGPO on laptops and 10 year old PCs with much much less horsepower than a 360. There are differences between a 360 and a PC, but I don’t believe they’re relevant to STHD (e.g. a PC will always have a mass storage device where an XBox360 may not, but you’re not going to need one to fix the networking problems).

Maybe he’s talking about bandwidth usage and Microsoft’s guidelines for certification. To my knowledge, Microsoft requires that your game use no more than 4 KB/s of bandwidth. GGPO uses much less than that. shrug

I don’t understand this argument either. If you can’t send UDP packets through your router, you can’t play at all. If you can, then GGPO works fine. There is no “make networking less laggy” button on routers that only GGPO users are pushing (*).

It actually doesn’t. GGPO gives the user the option of delaying their own input, but it plays no games with how the sprites are drawn.

This is true for STHD as well. It’s true for everything that uses rollbacks.

That’s really disappointing. One of the most important things in Street Fighter is the predictability of the timing of your moves. That, IMO, was the biggest failing on HF: the timing everything (combos, jumping over fireballs, like reversing ticks, timing meaties, etc.) changed every single match. I don’t exactly know what they mean by “smoothing”, but if it changes the timing on any of your moves there needs to be a way to turn it off permanently.

Adding a (configurable) fixed delay to the front end of your own moves has also worked out great for GGPO. I have gotten 0 complains from it, ever, and lots of praise. I wish they would do that instead.

Thanks again for the report. I wish I could have been there.

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(*) One or two people may be setting up traffic shaping and QoS, but I’d wager a majority of them are not. there are lots of people using both GGPO and STHD who report STHD is not as good, so the “defaults in the router” argument doesn’t really hold water, IMO.

1382

Yeah, I really don’t know the details about this so I didn’t try to argue it or anything. We know that GGPO is doing this all on emulator and there’s no actual coding that affects the game itself, unlike STHD. I can’t say I understand the logic behind this (did I also mention I’m not a programming guru either?) but I figure there are a lot of coding stuff that isn’t possible due to Microsoft standards. But yeah, I have no clue >.>;

Edit: np Ponder~ Though we were trying to get you into this today for your input. Figured you’d be the best person to give any input on this.

Edit Again: And I want to point out that some of this information might be incorrect due to the fact that:

  1. I was trying to survive against Derek/Cigar/Sabre so stuff I’m hearing might have not gone through in my head.

  2. Sometimes the mics were going all haywire, so my ear was getting raped.

  3. I also didn’t take notes and stuff.

1383

Ponder, pleeeeaase post a thread in Capcom’s SFHD beta subforum and tell them everything you have on your mind. Only good can come of it!

1384

I just went back and checked with wireshark. GGPO uses 4 KB/s, so “much less” is greatly exaggerated. I could get it down to much less, though (wink).

1385

Oops my filter was wrong. It turns out GGPO uses 3.4 KB/s of bandwidth at a 120 ms ping. So it is under 4.

So if this is what Derek is talking about, yes, GGPO gets away with using a large percentage of the budget Microsoft gives you to work with. That being said, I can drop it by quiet a bit fairly easily. For example, there’s 6 bytes per frame that I can remove (that’s 0.35 KB/s right there), and I can stop sending redundant packets 1/2 the time, which would drop it by another 30 to 40%. FWIW.

1386

Holy shit Ponder is straight-up beasting netcode in this thread. :lovin:

1387

Please?

1388

Yeah come on backbone, I know some of you guys read this. GET ON THIS ASAP.

1389

…they need to pay him 4 quadrillion dollars for GGPO’s netcode.:wink:

ego, politics, and money are probably the biggest obstacles. :sad:

1390

I got invited to this thing too, but I was on vacation all week until like an hour ago, so I missed it. Doesn’t sound like I would have been too helpful, I don’t know anything about what they were looking for and I probably would have gotten embarrassed in gameplay 'cause I don’t know crap about how to use Ryu and Ken either. Ah well.

1391

Ah so GGPO sends packets multiple times. Maybe this is secret ingredient that the SF2HDR devs are missing…

1392

…I’m sure they’re missing more than that.

1393

Maybe…They could, I don’t know…ask the guy who created GGPO in the first place! It’s clear Capcom/Backbone doesn’t have a clear understanding of the very thing they’re trying to copy.

1394

It’s like bad cosplay.

1395

I think it’s mostly ego, which is the saddest part of it. =/

1396

goddamnit, who’s hardcore enough to set up a paypal donation for Backbone to pay Ponder to get GGPO in SFHD?!!>!?

who’s with me!!! :mad:

1397

^Me!!! But yea, I’d seriously love for them to implement GGPO’s code, but from the comments being made from that talk, and Ponder’s own statements, it seems that their ego wouldn’t allow it even if Ponder was offering it for free.

1398

I was thinking about that, but I doubt it would do anything. For one, the amount the Paypal donation account for SBO wasn’t a whole lot, and I doubt it would generate enough donations to matter. Two, I doubt if we even somehow got a massive amount of cash it would make Capcom/Backbone change their mind.

If someone proves me wrong, I would be happy to donate. I really want this to be playable from out here in Hawaii.

1399

You’d be surprised. The littlest thing can cause software to go haywire. A tetris clone I made a while back started randomly crashing. After searching for an afternoon to isolate the bug it turns out it was because I forgot to initialize an variable, which literally constitutes adding " = 4;" to a line.

It’s not that easy. SF2HD was supposed to be another milking of the SF2 cow’s saggy teats. Since then the project has evolved from low cost cash in, to a new game worthy of being called a sequel, but in the process they went over budget.

The people that can green light ponder’s involvement aren’t from the dev team, they’re the higher up suits. There’s exactly one thing the suit cares about: return on investment.

Assuming all you care about is RoI, why would you pay money for a consultant is it’s not going to help on your return? How are you going to explain to your big wig bosses that you spent even more on an project that’s already over budget.

Think about this: is anybody here not going to buy HDR is they don’t bring Ponder on as consultant? Even if everybody on SRK boycotted the project, the game is going to make almost all of its money from casual gamers wanting a retro gaming fix.

Capcom makes games not to make good games, but to make money. It’s sad but true.

It’s not as simple as cutting a check. There’s issues of royalties, software patents and other things that a suit doesn’t want to deal with.

Actually, they’ve shown got the fundamentals of the GGPO algorithm down. The game is very much playable at 100ms ping, which still makes SF2HDR the best commercial online game. If Halo/CoD4/TF2/CS player caught us bitching about latency compensation that good, they’d hang us by our nuts. It’s just that we’ve been spoiled by GGPO.

There’s really not much we can do at this point. Ponder could make a general spec and make it an open standard like OpenGL. Understandingly, Ponder doesn’t want to let go of his brain child, although he does want to help as we seen with the mention of redundant packets.

But one thing we can do is tell capcom that the self adjusting packet interval is an utterly fucking retarded idea. As Ponder already mentioned, it brings us back to square one. If they’re going to have adjustable syncs, they should allow the user to set it once at the beginning of the match, not have it fluctuate in the middle of match. It absolutely needs to be constant during the match.

1400

Sure, I’d trade dollars for a better game experience. I just don’t think it’ll happen.