BB’s netcode feels better than SFIV’s because the game is not as link heavy and normals get buffered for 5f so you don’t drop combos that often due to lag. I can still feel the input lag when I try to react to things though. In that regard it feels the same as SFIV.
I don’t think you can compare other genre’s in most cases to fighters because there is a higher standard for a netcode to be considered “playable” in fighters. I haven’t played Arcana so you might be right about its netcode. ST doesn’t count.
That’s one game out of many. Everything else besides BB has been worse. I don’t know why you call it “bare minimum”. If you were playing 4-5 bar 9 times out of 10 the connection was great. I’m not just saying SF4’s netcode was good enough because I could use it either. Hundreds of people including a few that are top players now started online.
I’m sorry my post was vague. I meant that capcom games are the only ones that have a strong competitive scene in the U.S. If you don’t live in cali or georgia then there’s no real scene to speak of. I know because I’ve tried to get into the tekken scene on many occasions just to be reminded no one plays even here on the east coast. As I said in my opening post Tekken is my 1st love so I’ve been following it for awhile.
The amount of technical ignorance in this thread is annoying. Servers have nothing to do with rollback being possible. Textures and polygons have nothing to do with it. Rollback is absolutely possible with 3D fighting games.
The only tricky part at all is how you deal with particle effects, and maybe to a smaller degree background character stuff. But those can absolutely be dealt with, it just takes a bit of extra thinking and work. The main characters and their animations are just as easy to deal with as sprites are.
The real reason why the netcode sucks in SF4 (The OP is wrong, it’s not good) and other AAA games lately is due to laziness on the part of the developers and the fact that in Japan the most naive netcode will still work fine because they live on a small island. So, as far as they’re concerned it seems to work fine.
You did read the part where a number of people said that it wasn’t textures and polygons, but was rather system resources used right? You can’t really call people ignorant after you misrepresent what’s being said 
Before SF4 came out, Tekken’s competitive community was just as strong as 3S’s or ST’s, probably stronger. Soulcaliburs too, but that scene spectacularly imploded after the whole HIlde/Algol thing. I know its OT, but seriuosly guys
Umehara: .* I tried playing online in America before, and the lag is really horrible there.**** So the top players in the US don?t have a choice but to get together ** and play in person. So in that respect, I think Japan has an advantage. There may be a large gap now, but I have confidence that we can catch up eventually.*
http://gouki.com/Story/Details/daigo-umehara-interview-about-ssf4-arcade-edition
and no, sf4 is just plain awful in America and most of the world, I really don’t know how people can call it good when its utter dog shit and I’ve tried for 2000+ matches which is more than xesaie can say about his ggpo experience.
we don’t use TV’s with input delay on them for tournaments because it fucks everything up. Why is it when that input delay is applied to net code, everyone shits their pants and calls it almost lagless. Its hypocritical in every way possible and it makes 0 sense.
wtf… first and foremost, have you even tried GGPO to a great length? pretty hard to talk about ggpo when you don’t play the damn thing right? and I’m not talking 10-15 games, I’m talking thousands which I have on sf4\mvc3 online a good solid test of the netcode will take that long. I actually give all games a shot online, quite long too just to honestly make sure if its bad or not. I’ve actually had experience playing these games online for well over a decade too so i’m not constantly using GGPO examples because I’m a super fan boy and I only drop it because ponder made it. I could careless who fucking made it, the point is that its the best net code of ANYTHING that is out there right now* and its leagues ahead of sf4\mvc3 in terms of just net code. In fact its so far ahead, they’re not even in the same decade!*
after reading the front page and actually seeing a developer apologize for bad net code has been the best thing to happen so far for the community. I wish capcom would admit the same ignorance and @ least reassure people about their online development process. 100% positive txsf is going to use the sf4\mvc3 style net code, again, and call it the speed of light. Then thousands of fan boys will say its god like online and capcom won’t have to admit its shitty work EVEN THOUGH kof13 and sf4 share the exact same method for net code which are both input delay based.
to this day I have yet to hear anything from capcom about how bad their online play is, what they plan to do about it, why its taking so long when online should be staple, nothing that actually pertains to net play except dodging and lying to its consumers. Oh, our shitty net code is better than kof’s or tekken’s shitty net code so ours is “better” and it makes ours good! No, more like you’re comparing turds and @ the end of the day, they’re both still pieces of shit.
I have used GGPO some, and I’ve certainly played a large number of games using rollback (a TON of HDR, some 3SOE, the latter is kind of annoying online).
Here’s the thing. **I agree that if it works rollback code is substantially better for fighting games. **(it gets ugly at really really high lag, but so does Variable input delay, so its probably a wash) Timing and absolutely accurate positioning are so important in fighting games that input delay is an ugly solution at best. At this we agree.
The place we disagree is that you believe believe that rollback (and ggpo specifically) will work for every game, and that the developers are both intentionally making their games worse and lying about their motivation for a reason that still isn’t entirely clear to me. GGPO aside, the concepts behind the technique are plenty old and are used in a vast majority of games. Beyond that, Capcom used rollback for their first modern generation fighter (HDR) and were entirely willing to use it for 3S online.
My personal research, along with experts in development I asked, people who have posted here who obviously know their shit, and the developers of these games all go to the same conclusion, that rollback netcode has some serious problems that make it unworkable on these modern 2.5/3d games on current consoles. The counter-argument seems to be ‘but it works so well with GGPO PC emulators!’ but that seems to me to be not understanding the nature of the problems the modern games have with it.
***I should add, yes absolutely developers lie to hype their products. Seth Killian is brutal for lying about various things in games, every game developer always lies and says their games will have lightning fast netcode, etc etc. I’m not disagreeing with you on that at all. I would say that the developers of GGPO are in the same situation though, they want to promote and sell their product, they’re going to say ‘oh yeah it’ll work!’ for the same reason Niitsuma says ‘Netcode will be lightning fast!’
PS: I will say I don’t know why SNK and Arksys don’t use rollback though, that’s kind of a question mark. To my understanding those games wouldn’t have the system resources issues that SF4 or Marvel or Tekken would have.
PS2: I also think that the discussion should be separated from GGPO and focused on methods not specific products. This isn’t about brand loyalty its about making the most playable product possible.
I think it would be interesting to see a breakdown of exactly how each game uses system resources.
I’m not saying anyone in particular is wrong about something, but it seems like loading 2 character models, animation data, and a 3D background would take substantially less memory than loading 2 sprite sheets and a 3D background. As I recall the PS1 always had more trouble with 2D games than 3D because of memory issues.
That (presumably) would have more to do with how much needs to be pulled into memory at the beginning of a match, rather than managing what’s being juggled around during the match itself. Although I’m not going to pretend like I know what the issue was with the PS1.
There’s always a solution to these problems, but the time and cost involved with finding the right one, along with the potential drawbacks that may come bundled with them is what tends to kill answers everyone thinks are obvious.
As I remember it, there was a specific issue with the PSX that it wasn’t designed to do classic sprites at all, but had to fake them with flat polys (basically).
***actually I just looked it up on wiki, and we didn’t have it quite right back in the day. The 3D processor was part of the main processor, and there was a seperate, substantially worse processor (if I’m reading the specs right) with half the ram for 2D graphics.
Either way, it was system dependent. The saturn handled 2D stuff infinitely better than the PSX, but the PSX did much better with 3D stuff.
I remember when MK9 came out, and Tom Brady was telling anyone who would listen that the netcode didn’t matter, because people just needed to man up and play the game offline. That didn’t turn out so well for TB or MK9.
I’m not saying that bad netcode is the only reason MK9 had struggled in popularity, but it didn’t help, and top players in the community saying that netcode doesn’t matter didn’t help, either.
Sad that a netcode almost defines the success of a Fighting Game no matter how good it is now and days. But that’s how it seems / what its coming too.
The problem with using rollback in a game like MvC3 is that the they are already using all the hardware power to run one instance of the game, leaving even the relatively minimal overhead for GGPO nowhere to go.
The stupid thing about that is that MvC3 isn’t even that pretty of a game that it should be doing so and netcode is a hell of a lot more important than some stupid minor background details no one pays attention to (or are even downright annoying) or having the most uncompromised flame effects ever hogging system resources.
KoF and BB are probably using more hardware than you’d think. BB is a largely 3D game despite the sprites-and those sprites are both huge and in enormous numbers by the way-and the 3D not being that impressive, but Arc System Works also doesn’t have a hell of a lot of budget either, so it could be pretty terribly optimized (trying to run the arcade rip suggests as much). It’s a bit of a similar story for KoF except it has huge sprite based backgrounds. Both those and SFIV all run on a Taito X2 though, so there certainly should be room on consoles if they can work around the PS3’s architecture differences-which is once again expensive in terms of time.
Capcom should have the resources to really optimize their shit, but you can tell they just did not give enough of a damn to give the MvC3 team any more than the bare minimum time and budget, and SFIV is a frighteningly crude high profile 3D game for being made in the latter half of the '00s.
just a reminder that anyone who thinks there will ever be a new capcom fighter with even passable netcode is out of their mind
MK9 is doing great from what I’ve heard. The scene is growing if anything. People just think it’s dying because they judge success according to how much the game is on the major streams.
Best games online mvc2, sf3, and HDR. <-- the standard for online play…at least it should be.
Every other game is subpar.
I don’t know if ‘defining’ is really the best term; it’s more integral, in that it is a core component of the modern fighting game that can’t just be glossed over. Marvel 3 had a fairly barebones and uninspired online mode and marginal netcode, and still was pretty successful. That said, it caused a lot of outcry, and got a big upgrade in Ultimate, so hopefully developers are starting to get it.
MK9 actually has had a pretty good representation on major streams, so I’m not sure that is the problem. I’d recommend you listen to the Avoiding the Puddle podcast with Sabin and LI Joe; it paints a picture of the scene, which while subjective, is pretty bleak. I’m sure the core community for that game is still strong, but I don’t know if it is expanding, or bringing in many new players; I’d be more than happy to be wrong on this, but it seems like the PDP tournament is going to be the high point of MK9.
That podcast is like 6 months old. MK9 had over 500 attendants at Evo and has has 100+ people at most majors since. Relative to the attendances of other games at the same majors, attendance has been growing, as far as I know.
Consider it has those numbers at majors because players from other games are double-dipping it; so what you have are MK numbers that get boosted by the large number of Marvel and Street Fighter players at a tournament, but the question is still how many players are showing up for MK exclusively? Is MK9 going to see a boost in players now that Ultimate Marvel 3 and KOF13 are out, and Street Figher X Tekken is right around the corner? I don’t really think so, but a strong online scene would have helped give it more of a fighting chance.
MK seems like it’s not doing well because SRK is in essence a capcom centered community, which is in general actively hostile to MK.