Good job Bradley.
Not everyone who buys a game is trying to be A-number-one awesome tournament player. Most people, including most people who post on this site, are playing to have fun, and sound is most definitely part of that experience.
As far as the false choice Capcom gave us, it should’ve never gotten to that point, and fixing the sound problem could’ve been done with some competent engineering. I don’t even buy the whole, “you guys get to choose” thing. Releasing a game where the SOUND DOESN’T WORK is far more damaging to Capcom, as a company, than releasing a game with less-than-stellar network performance. There is no excuse, and I’m sure an executive producer hearing about a post release bug that stripped minimum functionality would have more input than a million screaming fans on the internet. The state they released that game in was shameful, and then making excuses and offering a ridiculous forced choice for their customers was even more shameful. You need to stop holding water for incompetent, hacky engineers and helping them shovel their blame onto their customers.
Also, sound is not a small part of the game. It may not be the most important thing for the most hardcore awesome tournament players who wake up every morning with a cup of victory (like YOU, of course), but it is a very important element in your presentation. Even those who only care about winning and only see hitboxes and frame data when they play a game (around 0% of the population) enjoy sound, and they are more likely to continue playing a game that they actually enjoy.
LOL…
where am I? Oh yea, srk.com. Now your comment makes 100% sense.
who gives a shit if you’re playing a game online where the sound is AWESOME but the game is so bad no one can stand to play it. Kind of like umvc3 online… a game no one really plays online because its fucking terrible, but hey the sound is good so that makes the presentation good!!! they didn’t fuck that up @ all!!!
@ least with sfxt, I could actually play online where as umvc3 is just 100% awful but it does have good sound. Capcom crew really knew what they were doing with that game. The sound is so good online that they didn’t spend time on the important part. You know the part where you actually PLAY the game?
man this four loko mixed with common sense is one hell of a drink. I think I’m getting smarter!!
there is no difference between casual\pro really, we both want to play the game. Its just that I understand what allows people to play the game and have fun and casuals don’t.
Not having proper sound can fuck up a couple of players. The ones that reply on sound cues for hit confirming, reacting to what other characters do, and stuff like that. I know that the sound glitches fuck me up when I play 3SOE online. Hearing the KO sound effect when the dude didn’t die or parry sound effect during a block throws me off my game.
very true but these cues are usually less than 10% of a fighter
go play with a blind fold on and see how well you do
now play with the sound off and see how well you do
(yes, I have played like this in the past just to see how much of my senses were being used) fighters are 90%+ visual.
chances are you will do exponentially better with the sound off rather than no graphics. Therefore, graphics are the majority of the game. You need to visually see in order to play fighters successfully. Its by far the biggest thing you need. Even Daigo has mentioned how he plays with 0 sound in pretty much all his tournaments. You really don’t need sound cues but they do help.
games are meant to be played, thats how you have fun. When things like sound affect how fighters online are played, that means the fun factor is also dialed down. Its really easy logic. Its why even though umvc3 online has perfect sound, its so fucking laggy that it prevents me from playing properly. And if I can’t play properly, I can’t have fun.
however according to some of the people on srk, all you need is the sound to be in working order to have fun. Fuck playing the game, dat sound baby!!! its all you need…
Again with the defense of the false forced choice. Having sound function properly in a game != game is total trash with 5 second input delay and scrubtastic comebacks and everything else you hate. They are not related. There is no slider with “minimum acceptable feature set” on one side and “super ultra gosu mad-skillz netplay for pros” on the other. People said that they wanted the sound fixed, not “fix the sound and please also make the game not perform online because we are all super scrubs who don’t know what makes a game AWESOME and PRO.” They wanted the sound to work properly because the sound should fucking work properly in a game developed by professionals.
Blazblue has an awesome network experience and the sound works. Holy crap, they must be geniuses over there! Sound also works properly in every other game with netplay. Craziness!
I’m also very doubtful that you “…understand what allows people to play the game and have fun and casuals don’t.” Your understanding of user expectations appears to be little more than projection mixed with anger and cynicism. It’s a very good thing that your perspective isn’t common in the game industry.
yea I know my perspective isn’t common in the game industry. Thats why we kept getting bad online games
/zinger
how can someone who’s casual about something understand the entire realm of that specific thing? If I’m casual about fixing car engines, do I understand the entire realm of car engines? no, I can’t because I’m casual about it.
If you’re casual about fighters, how can you possibly understand the entire realm of fighting games? I can admit being somewhat ignorant to parts of car because I’m casual about it. Why can’t you admit there are parts of fighters that you are also completely ignorant too because you’re a casual player?
Capcom literally said “you want the sound problems fixed or you want no input lag”. Even though I’m paraphrasing Chris. Bad net code can mess with sound.
If only I could teach myself to use my internet solely for logging onto SRK and playing fighting games instead of brainlessly mashing facebook and [S]red[/S]youtube everyday.
If only…
As I read it, he’s criticizing cap on for that too.
Honestly, having spent a good part of the last month doing the sound on a game, its kind of boggling that Capcom missed the bug, and even crazier that they copped out so hard in fixing it.
Sent from my Radar 4G using Board Express
Sigh…
Okay, I’m going to try to write this in your language so you have a better chance of understanding it.
Capcom sound engineers are casuals who went to a big tournament called, “The Game Development Industry”. They attended and got bodied in the first round by other engineers because they couldn’t link from the “remote procedure call” move into the “sound playback” move with any consistency. Like a common scrub, they cried, “it’s impossible to link these together, so I can either hit with the RPC or the playback!” and you responded, “that’s okay, you only need to hit with one anyway.” When stream monsters put them on blast, you defended them, saying that hitting with the RPC is the important one, and even though *every other engineer at the tournament *could connect the link, they shouldn’t be expected to.
Got it?
I don’t understand how you could be missing this. Sound engineering doesn’t rely on awesome knowledge of the game and mad crazy combos. No amount of tournament experience or top-8 placements will make you a better network engineer. You could find the sickest tech in the world and the most fierce mixup, but if you don’t know the difference between *frameTrap and &frameTrap, then you don’t know dick about network engineering.
This.
Now I don’t know the exact way it’s done in the code, but from what I understand (at least from reading mauve’s notes), sound cues are tied to certain frames. In other words, to fix the sound, you have to add bits of code that keep checking if the current state of the game is fair, which adds a bit of processor and network overhead (you have to make the system check if a) it’s rolling back from a frame where sound is played, therefore the sound must be stopped and b) it’s skipping a frame where sound is played, therefore is must be played despite the skip). This is probably why Capcom, a team that’s doing rollback netcode for the first time ever, couldn’t fix the sound without adding a bit of delay (at least in the time given). IMO, they probably made a choice before game came out between fixing the sound, or making it play better. They obviously chose the latter, however thanks to a bunch of whingers, they had to do the latter.
We’re not talking about occasionally playing the wrong sound because a move was queued and then rendered obsolete by a rollback, the sound was constantly stuttering and would sometimes completely stop.
You would think that hundreds of other games which contain both sound playback and network multiplayer would be enough to convince the doubters that this is not the most difficult feature list to ever be included in a game. You don’t often see Valve putting out a press release stating, “hey guys, coding Dota2 is super-hard, so you all have to choose between sound and gameplay. It’s literally impossible to have both.” I played some Counter-Strike earlier today, and it manages to have both a smooth network experience AND sound when I shoot a gun.
I gotta give it to Capcom’s PR. They somehow managed to convince their hardcore fans that C-grade hacks are the fault of the customer.
I think it would be best if they could focus more on getting rid of the background stuff and maybe some other unnecessary visuals when it lags. I preferred the sound glitches over the input delay, tbh… =/
Now has anyone tried playing with the sound and music off to see if that helps any?
And again, with other Rollback type netcode, where you can choose between as low as 0 or a whole buncha input delay, your choice in the matter, would’ve really helped everyone get along. Although there is of course 2 players connecting with different delay numbers on which can affect the performance of the match under that connection. Capcom gave no choice, really. They weren’t going to be sufficiently detailed about the problem and told us what they did, to appease the Capcom Unity fanbase. A very volatile and vocal majority.
It doesn’t bolster the argument at all, but I’m remembering that blind kid who was really good at a Mortal Kombat game, a 3D one well before 9, taking out like KSK, Nuki and some other guys on a Japanese game show that made its way onto youtube after the fact.
That shouldn’t matter at all, unless you’re syncing the entire gamestate (which would be insane). In most games, sound is queued in the main game thread and then processed in a different thread. Poor sound engines can tank framerate, but they won’t add lag.
I’m reminded at this juncture, randomly, that the ‘rollback’ in ggpo was before the skg patch, and still is now, substantially linked to gameplay slowdowns in high lag situations
Doesn’t have anything to do with the sfxt sub-discussion, if course
Sent from my Radar 4G using Board Express
GGPO style rollback doesn’t fix bad connections but it does expand the playable connections quite a bit. For example, my terrible connection can’t play anyone with 150 ping well on a delay based connection, but with rollbacks, it’s like playing offline.
remind me again how any form of net code fix a high lag situation? last time I checked not even magical powers can fix that.
when you use a waffle maker as a computer, it doesn’t work very well. You can expect high performance when you go above the recommended use. It doesn’t work for ANYTHING in this world so its really unfair to put it in that light.
as the situation currently is, I can’t even play umvc3 with people in my own city its that bad online. Even when used properly under ideal conditions, umvc3 just doesn’t work online. However when GGPO is used properly in my own city, its 95% accurate and I’m not joking about that percentage.
Which was kind of my point all along. no magic fixes.
Network engineering is only part of the solution, especially if you want to fight people further away (or if you just live in a small town and have no choice).
We need to take a holistic approach to the problem
edit: D3v, doesn’t it bother you in your ‘right on!’ reaction that he scoffed at the idea of ‘no magic fixes’ and then 12 hours later says there are no magic fixes? Seems a touch… inconsistent.