Well, theres a lot of anecdotal complaints, but I think anyone commenting on online performance needs to do the following:
Rather than randoms, test the game with a range of specific friends. I guess SRK is a good place to find people.
If possible, check the performance with that friend before and after patch.
Test a different fighting game with the same friend. SF4, BB, GGPO or whatever.
Also state if you are both on wired connections or not,
and whether you have full blue bars or less.
Even better, use a PC to ping your friends PC to see what your ping is normally.
NAT type and port forwarding info might be good too, but i dont know if they affect performance. (afaik these things merely affect whether you can connect to people at all.)
Face it, fighting games are very timing sensitive. I’ll bet some people who are complaining would NEVER get a decent match even if the netcode was good, because their network condition is poor. Just because an FPS runs well doesnt mean a fighting game will.
Just because network conditions are poor doesn’t mean a game will be unplayable, GGPO works fine at pings as high as 100ms if the connection is stable (I dont even play FPSes at pings this high). Of course if we want to get extreme then really regardless of game genre FPS or Fighting, nothing will run well.
Not all people who are complaining are people with poor network conditions so yeah, face it, KOF12s netcode isn’t great, being able to play friends who live nearby is all fine and dandy but after experiencing GGPO which allows play against people further away or with people who you ping to fairly highly with no/consistant input delay anything less is unacceptable for me personally (and for the record SF4 netcode isn’t good enough either).
Heres a link to a thread on the Ignition forums supporting the idea of ggpo style netcode for future SNK titles, it’s probably futile but you never know, go support the thread!
Its a great game though, so far I’m liking it offline atleast.
Tried playing with a friend that only live 5miles away from me input was horrible. Just remember same exact thing happened to Blazblue so i am not going to worry much untill the patch is out. SNKP would not release a game with netcode this bad. When the game was ment for online play.
GGPO uses a rollback style netcode. (apparently BB does too?)
Since people say KOF slows down the framerate on bad connections, it sounds like it uses a netcode similar to caster (used in the fanmade netplay hacks for Melty Blood and many other games) which force an input delay to give the network time to send the data, and additionally pauses the frame to wait for data if it takes longer than expected.
There will be no way in hell KOF will ever be as good as GGPO since its netplay algorithm is designed in a different (and inferior) way.
I don’t think its likely they will attempt to patch in a rollback style netplay, but we can pray for their next games I guess.
However, playing MBAC on caster with someone across the country worked fine for me (but experts would detect the input delay, it was like 5 frames or something), so if KOF12 patches its netplay to the maximum of its limits, it should be fine for matches in your own country with a solid wired internet connection and good isp.
I don’t need all that elaborate process. I play my friend in the same state in KoF XII and it lags terribly in input and runs notably slow. Play the same friend in Blaz and it runs great. Its the netcode.
Since high amounts of latency is occuring in 90% or more of most matches from most players, I assume the issue is due to more than just the net code alone. I do think the net code plays a factor in this, but I have a feeling that it’s also due to their servers, load balancing, and network.
It could be the servers they are using aren’t very good. It could be that their ISP sucks. It could be their internal network and routing equipment and configurations being retarded as well. Oh yeah the net code too! =P I wish I knew where they were hosting this stuff so I can run some tests.
Edit: I do know that this does not have to do with my personal connection. It detects my connection as NAT2 which does not require port forwarding. Also I run blazblue just fine even with mid level connections and its fairly smooth in most of my matches online.
Exactly. I’ve been trying to play friends that I have a great connection with on BB and SF4 and it’s unplayable on KOF12 with those same people. This game doesn’t magically have much (MUCH) higher proportion of people with bad connections. Occam’s razor man.
I’m disappointed by the reports of laggy online, especially with BlazBlue’s network offering being so solid. A fighting game’s online segement is made or broken on its lag. If BlazBlue can offer ‘laglessness’ so often, other fighters should be able to as well.
