Why GGPO/Rollback code is important to you. NEW: Current (very strange) XBL network results

[IparryU]

Looks like I’m playing offline…

PS. I was using a wireless connection…

http://www.speedtest.net/result/1885521115.png
http://www.pingtest.net/result/60630067.png
dont worry… i play online all the time but have no issues

I did this on wireless… but my pc sucks compared to my PS3 connection. so my PS3 would be a bit better…

oh ya… i just want to say fuck softbank

[zeech]

Here’s a question. I hope someone knowledgeable can answer it. (As a software dev I often find myself correcting misinformation on GGPO so I’m more informed than a lot of people. But certain cases in GGPO are tough to get my mind around without actually having a testing setup to try different scenarios and see what the code is doing.) Anyways the question:

Usually descriptions of the algorithm usually focuses on what happens when I press the button.
eg. I activate a punch with 10 frame startup, but it takes until frame 18 before the packet comes back, so the game has to revise itself whether Bob blocked or not.

But what about the other part of the equation? What does Bob see in this scenario?
ie. My 10 frame punch arrives at Bob’s console on frame 9 (from my perspective). What does Bob see? Does the punch animation get rolled back, so that it started “in the past” so Bob actually only has 1 frame to see the punch and react to it? (ie. he can’t - he has to be predicting it.)
If this is true, then MY input delay setting will affect Bob’s experience (since my button input will get sent earlier to him than the state of the game.) But from discussion with mauve, author of RollCaster, my input delay in a rollback netcode only affects my own experience.

Ah, actually iirc mauve said something like, the input delay setting doesnt actually delay your inputs as such, it delays the visual state of the game so you are shown something a few frames from the past. So your opponents inputs are also “delayed” from your point of view. (ie. if he was sitting next to you with a latency faking device, you could see him press the button and then his punch would be delayed on your screen as well).

I guess that kinda makes sense. Anyone comment?

[Kef]

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60667783.png
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1886767526.png

Is this good enough guys? I play MVC2 and SSF4 without problems.

[DevilJin_01]

Obviously you’ll be fine with people in your local area. Your upload isn’t the highest but anything about 1mb should be good for playing around the country on GGPO. You may have to add some GGPO delay against west coast people but…better than nothing. People on the east coast you should be able to play with close to 0 GGPO delay and not have too much issue.

[Poltergust]

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60668541.png

I hereby claim to have the best connection here. MWAHAHAHAHA!

[Thinobuns]

Norcal player here
Local:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60671136.png

Socal:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60671450.png

= 2 frames

Denver, CO :

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60671658.png

= 3 frames

Chicago, IL :

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60671717.png

= 5 frames

Washington DC:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60671815.png

= 6 frames

Europe:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60672055.png

= more than 10 frames

[DevilJin_01]

bump

[Jamp]

West Coast:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60735277.png

East Coast:

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60735363.png

Not bad.

[DevilJin_01]

bump

[samurai_bebop]

http://www.pingtest.net/result/60813205.png
http://www.pingtest.net/result/60813431.png
http://www.speedtest.net/result/1891129359.png

[DevilJin_01]

VIDEO FOOTAGE >>>> http://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=CBlumrolOPA#t=8m05s (copy/paste and attach the space inbetween the link)

Alright…so after playing on XBL for about an hour or 2 this is the results I got.

Generally…the one thing I found very weird about the connections in this game is that I NEVER EVER got teleports. Whether I was playing a 100 ping guy with 0 GGPO delay or a 50 ping guy with 1 or 2 GGPO delay…never a teleport ever. Which is strange considering at least in 3S OE the teleports (that I remember getting from PC GGPO) were pretty consistent. Guy with laggy ping = hella ports. Guy with fast small ping = little to no ports.

With Skullgirls even when I set the GGPO delay to 0 on XBL I get 2 results that didn’t seem too dependent on the ping. I would either play some guy with 30 to 50 ping and there would be no ports and the game would play smooth like offline. Pretty much can just turn my brain off about being online and just play like the guy is next to me.

Then other times I would get a guy with the same ping and I would get heavy input delay. Still basically zero teleports but I would get old school netcode delay where shit looks slower on the screen and the inputs are slow and everything. Basically like I went back in time to 2003/4 all over again. One of my friends that I played with on GGPO that had 100 ping (enough for yellow grade connection) I also got a similar connect. No teleports but heavy input lag.

Which makes me think there’s some kind of glitch or forced GGPO delay set no matter what you set the GGPO delay to. Basically if I play someone with low ping it’s either going to be super smooth like offline or it’s going to inconsistently be sluggish like the old days, no teleports. No 3S OE stuff where you get fast inputs but teleporting. Just straight up old school lag. Luckily the majority of low ping people I ran into the connects were smooth but I still got some where it felt like there was forced input lag even though I had the game at 0 GGPO delay.

I really hope this is just some bug with the netcode where the game is purposely adding input lag cuz that’s the only thing I can come up with. I never experienced this specific type of issue in 3S OE. If the connection was bad the inputs were still fast at 0 GGPO delay I just got teleports all day. Which sucked but at least my inputs came out on exact frames and then would just get rewound sometimes which let me know the netcode was doing what it normally does. ** With Skullgirls I can have the GGPO set to 0 all day and WONT GET A TELEPORT EVER. No matter how high/low the ping no ports (which is not like the GGPO I remember at all). I either just get a smooth as butter connection or I get old school droopy lag that doesn’t seem to care what actual ping the opponent has. **

Long story short…my results don’t seem consistent with what type of ping the opponent has or what GGPO setting I have the game on. Never getting teleports ever and randomly getting hard input delay regardless of GGPO delay or ping is really really weird.

EDIT: Talked with another guy who said that he had an issue like mine but more extreme where everyone he played on XBL gave him heavy input lag regardless of the ping.

On the other hand one of my friends who has PS3 says that as long as he gets low pings he has no problem with the connection. Higher pings will cause input delay, but he also has never seen a teleport EVER. Which is very weird still.

If Mike Z could chime in on this that would be great.

[Dime]

snip.

use the recommended input delay… for everything under 100 ms use 2 frames input delay as a constant, over 100 ping switch to 3 or higher. under 50 ping you can probably use 0 or 1, but you should test things out and get a speed setting for certain opponents (ie friends)

i also noticed that there are NO rollbacks, and that oldschool slowdown is used… both mike and ponder chimed in and said that they basically didnt know what people were talking about and that maybe it was an infrastructure thing, to be fair, when the game was slowed down i wasnt getting severe input delay… just tons of dropped inputs and the extreme slowness making it seem like i had input delay, there is a difference between the 2:

slow ass shit is like oldschool virtua fighter and world warrior, they dont have input delay but they still feel like walking under water cause of the slowness of the game, input delay is where the first and subsequent frames of animation happen after you’ve completed whatever move you were doing, like you press jab and at 10 frames input delay, the jab starts 10 frames later…

though i know you know that… just bares repeating.

interesting that you got slow games even under 100 ping though it definitely sucks.

-dime

[keo-bas]

I’ve been having similar experience like deviljin says. While frustrating I’m confident these will be address and not get worst later on.

[Mr.X]

snip

Isnip

Sure. There is no ‘opted for slowdown’, I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about there. There’s no choice.
GGPO works like this: It stores up to 8 frames of input after the last input that came across the internet from your opponent. As long as it hears from them what they did on frame 10 by the time the game gets to frame 18, it’s all great. It will roll back to frame 10, process that input, simulate up to frame 18 again and continue. However, if it doesn’t hear from them about frame 10 by the time it gets to frame 18, it STOPS and waits until it gets frame 10’s inputs. That’s what causes the slowdown, the game occasionally gets more than 8 frames behind and waits. Getting that far behind is not just caused by super-high ping times, it is also caused by packet loss or connection speed variability regardless of ping, and packet loss/delay happens MUCH more frequently on wireless connections. Wireless suffers from interference (and other things too complicated to go into) that affect GGPO as much if not more than ping does. A lot of the worse connections in our testing came from people using the not-awesome console wireless, even if their ping is 40. (^.^)’’

I’d need an explanation from Ponder (or is it Inkblot?) if PC clients perform any differently under the same circumstances, but if they are different and it can be explained I’m sure we can do the same thing. If it does anything special, my bet is that when the PC GGPO client does delay to wait for a really old input, it simulates up to whichever frame it would reach AFTER the delay, not simply the next frame it would reach AT the delay…that would cause something that would look like frame skipping. But it maybe might drop your inputs in the intervening frames. I’d like an answer, but I’ll see if it’s simple to do that anyway, as a test to see if it is even a good idea. Who knows, maybe it’ll help.

This isn’t quite true. The “choppiness” of the experience is proportional to the sum of input the input delay chosen on both sides. Over a mediocore connection, 0 frames of latency chosen on both sides will probably not be great. If one player ups their latency to 2 frames, it will improve. If both players choose 2 frames, it will get even better. If both players chose 3 frames, it will get better still!

So if you’re choosing 0 frames of latency over high latency connections, you are impacting your opponents online experience (and your own)

AFAIK, it is no different. I have not had any console development experience, though. For example, security in the network stack on the XBox 360 could be doing strange (?) things with latency or burstiness of the packet stream that you naturally do not see on the PC. I’m just speculating. I really have no idea. The GGPO code is the same, though.

[Aquashark]

hate to break it to you: bandwidth is irrelevant, ping test to a random server is also irrelevant
what matters is connection quality between BOTH players (optimal routing, 0% packet loss, low jitter)

the input delay setting can be adjusted on a case by case basis based on previous experiences

[DevilJin_01]

use the recommended input delay… for everything under 100 ms use 2 frames input delay as a constant, over 100 ping switch to 3 or higher. under 50 ping you can probably use 0 or 1, but you should test things out and get a speed setting for certain opponents (ie friends)

i also noticed that there are NO rollbacks, and that oldschool slowdown is used… both mike and ponder chimed in and said that they basically didnt know what people were talking about and that maybe it was an infrastructure thing, to be fair, when the game was slowed down i wasnt getting severe input delay… just tons of dropped inputs and the extreme slowness making it seem like i had input delay, there is a difference between the 2:

slow ass shit is like oldschool virtua fighter and world warrior, they dont have input delay but they still feel like walking under water cause of the slowness of the game, input delay is where the first and subsequent frames of animation happen after you’ve completed whatever move you were doing, like you press jab and at 10 frames input delay, the jab starts 10 frames later…

though i know you know that… just bares repeating.

interesting that you got slow games even under 100 ping though it definitely sucks.

-dime

Yeah this sounds like more what I was getting because the entire match and characters were moving slowly. Which means it might be more slowdown than actual input delay. It’s just obviously things are not going to come out on screen as I press them due to slowdown.

hate to break it to you: bandwidth is irrelevant, ping test to a random server is also irrelevant
what matters is connection quality between BOTH players (optimal routing, 0% packet loss, low jitter)

the input delay setting can be adjusted on a case by case basis based on previous experiences

That doesn’t really do anything to explain why my green connections on 3S OE on Xbox Live were always extremely smooth…but green connections in this game are random.

[keo-bas]

I’m pretty confident my connection is stable since i have my ports open successively with atleast average connection quality (averages at 30mbs downlaod and 4mb upload). The only time I had smooth butter connection was with one of my friends. ( then again is network is optimize on lesser connection as well)

My bad for speaking prematurely. I’m still trying to figure out which pings to stick around to. Normally on PC client I can play up to 160 ping no problem. Doesn’t seem to be the case with skull girls.

[Aqua_Snake]

This is getting very fustrating. I’ve been trying to connect almost 10 times to unranked and ranked matches. But I keep getting this message…

“Sorry, you lost connection to the other player”

Is anyone else experiencing this problem? My NAT is open too.

I haven’t been able to play any online matches at all. It’s preventing me from getting into the game.

[Dime]

not that it matters to you but i cant even play SG online as the only people that it will connect me to have 250+ pings…

-dime

[Tsaikotyk]

Then other times I would get a guy with the same ping and I would get heavy input delay. Still basically zero teleports but I would get old school netcode delay where shit looks slower on the screen and the inputs are slow and everything. Basically like I went back in time to 2003/4 all over again. One of my friends that I played with on GGPO that had 100 ping (enough for yellow grade connection) I also got a similar connect. No teleports but heavy input lag.

I’ve had this happen twice on PSN, but after msging my opponents, I found out that they were European(I’m EC, I can’t imagine how underwater Europe to WC would be), and I’m thinking that might be caused if they are running on a CRT PAL TV. We’ve already seen that it runs demonstrably slower due to PAL being 50 Hz, but it’s unknown if that’s the exact case, and what issues would arise from their game running at 80% the speed of mine while trying to synchronize over the internet.