Petition to get Soul Calibur V on GGPO

This petition is to ensure that the online experience is as best as it can be for us, but this won't happen without your help! You need to sign the petition and tell everyone you know to sign it as well. With your help, this will happen! We need to show them that the players demand this!

SIGN HERE​

In recent years, GGPO has become the gold standard for online netcode in video games. If you do not know anything about the GGPO netcode this is the description, copied and pasted from their website, http://GGPO.net :

What is it?

GGPO is a networking library that game developers can use to add networked gameplay support to arcade style games. GGPO's latency hiding techniques give each player a gameplay experience that is nearly indistinguishable from playing with their friends locally, even against players around the world.

How does it work?

GGPO uses a peer-to-peer topology to run a complete copy of your game for each player, transmitting controller inputs over the network to keep these copies in sync. Each player's inputs are sent to their copy of the game without having to wait for their opponent's to arrive over the network.
If the simulations diverge, GGPO rolls back to the most recent accurate state, corrects the mistake, and jumps back to the current frame, all before the player can notice. This provides the illusion of lag-free gameplay.

How does it perform?

Thousands of gamers are already using GGPO to play classic, old school fighting games against opponents around the world. GGPO's latency hiding techniques maintain the illusion of lag-free gameplay even during intercontinental play.

Can I try it out?

Absolutely! Click the "Try It!" button to get started.

http://www.facebook.com/?ref=home#!/pages/GGPO-for-SoulCaliburV/226542944023734

 

Black:
1. You've just ignored my post. Game engines don't work in a way in which you need to store something like that. This is actually more dominant in 2D than 3D. The number of pixels moved in 3D is higher; however, that isn't relevant.

2. Again... ignored. So, I'm leaning towards just raw troll. I said the youtube file is low res, thus the quality of the game cannot be judged. I know the DBZ game VERY well. I also know how games work very well. I would say the DBZ game has as much going on, especially in terms of physics, as T6 (actually more).

4. I've listened to that podcast. I also know what producers do. I also know even if one talks to the programmers on their team, that doesn't make them an expert. I know the DBZ game uses it, has to calculate 4 players, tons of projectiles existing in the world space, and a persistent world that can be destroyed that must also be seen by all players.

5. I didn't say they did. Learn to read. I hinted they stole a lot of netcode from GGPO. GGPO helped with the ST HD remake. This was before those were released. Suddenly SF4 and MvC3 have rollback netcode. Also, as a fact, SF4 and MvC3 do have rollback netcode... which nullifies your point. It isn't hard to see SF4 (or GGPO) rollback, introduce a heavy amount of packloss and voila.

I don't like it when people stand against things without knowledge ANY of what they are or what they can do. I don't like bandwagon mentality at all.

I understand the concerns about netcode, because I share them. Nobody ever said GGPO will magically solve all netcode issues, you are simply mistaken. GGPO itself may not be your answer. Daishi mentioned on his twitter and in other forms of media about how he understands the importance of netcode. However, I still agree with the point of the petition. I see the concern for it, and there's a real point. I'm on a horse.

See what I did there? Putting your opinion out as fact (1-5) followed by actual opinion is a form of trolling.

 

I signed because I just want them to understand we want something non-terrible.

The same reason. I see Tekken 6 quality as the floor of what we'll get, so I'm not too worried (it's average netcode, and with SC's popularity you should be able to get good matches for months)

I want better though.

 

snip

You are pretty godlike.

Blackstar, we are trying to prevent a repeat of SC4. Nobody made a big enough stink about the netcode with SC4 so it never got changed. When T6 came out, I heard the netcode was really bad. The Tekken community yelled real loud "FIX OUR ONLINE" and NB patched it. While it isn't 100% lag free, it is an improvment. However, from what I understand, there is a soft ban on using throws while playing online. This to me seems like a problem. I don't think that is a sufficent netcode if there are soft bans on certain moves. WE WANT THE BEST! From what I've experienced, and seen from the community that uses it, is that GGPO's netcode is phenominal. It is created by a person who truly wants to make online a valid place for competition for fighting games. He's not doing it for a paycheck. Now I may be wrong about the other programmers that have created netcodes for the games they've worked on, but what I feel is that they haven't put as much time and effort into their coding as Mr. Cannon has. They do what they can, test it a little bit, and when it's "good enough", they roll it out. It's all about making that deadline and to my understanding, online netcode is typically the last thing to get done so this is why they are crappy. GGPO has been constantly worked on and fine tuned with testing by users from all over the world; in all kinds of different connections. This is why I want GGPO. I don't want just "parts" or someone elses interpretation of it. I want GGPO!

 

Gotta remember the timeframe. When SC4 came out, PS3 owners had no fighting game to compare it to, and the 360 was unproven as a FG console, and only had DOA and VF, and DOA wasn't respected and VF only a small lucky few played.

So people didn't know to yell about the online. With Tekken it was different, SF4 had come out, and folks knew that it could be much better.

I don't think Namco will do a repeat of SC4, but we do need to keep the pressure on them just in case.

 

Street Fighter 3rd Strike Online edition for the 360 is using this GGPO =3

 

I see the concern for it, and there's a real point. I'm on a horse.

Look down. What do you see? Diamonds.

 

Ah my mistake. Whatever mod it was, TY.

Sec:
If you want to continue the conversation, PM. We weren't adding value to the topic.

 

Ah my mistake. Whatever mod it was, TY.

Sec:
If you want to continue the conversation, PM. We weren't adding value to the topic.

Hey man sup, i have a question, do you think namco would do us the honor to at least give us a decent online?, cause i recently moved to miami from DR and there are no players whatsoever, so im just hoping that namco takes its time with the netcode, cause if not im going to be bored when sc5 comes out. O and by the way im asking you cause you seem to know a lot about netcode, thanks.

 

Omega:
Well, all capitalism works in the same manner, supply and demand.

 

You are pretty godlike.

Blackstar, we are trying to prevent a repeat of SC4. Nobody made a big enough stink about the netcode with SC4 so it never got changed. When T6 came out, I heard the netcode was really bad. The Tekken community yelled real loud "FIX OUR ONLINE" and NB patched it. While it isn't 100% lag free, it is an improvment. However, from what I understand, there is a soft ban on using throws while playing online. This to me seems like a problem. I don't think that is a sufficent netcode if there are soft bans on certain moves. WE WANT THE BEST! From what I've experienced, and seen from the community that uses it, is that GGPO's netcode is phenominal. It is created by a person who truly wants to make online a valid place for competition for fighting games. He's not doing it for a paycheck. Now I may be wrong about the other programmers that have created netcodes for the games they've worked on, but what I feel is that they haven't put as much time and effort into their coding as Mr. Cannon has. They do what they can, test it a little bit, and when it's "good enough", they roll it out. It's all about making that deadline and to my understanding, online netcode is typically the last thing to get done so this is why they are crappy. GGPO has been constantly worked on and fine tuned with testing by users from all over the world; in all kinds of different connections. This is why I want GGPO. I don't want just "parts" or someone elses interpretation of it. I want GGPO!

Im with 1000%, we really need this, we have players all over the world and great players, what i suggest is lets tell daishi every fucking day in twitter until it gets done, lets ask him what does it take for them to give us the best online ever, just like vf5, o and congrats on the tournament great fights.

 

I'll just reduce my argument to my main point: I think it would be more worthwhile to petition Namco into making a better netcode at all, GGPO shouldn't be the only option. Shooters have found a ton of different solutions to latency problems, fighting games shouldn't be limited to just 2 solutions (one of them being nearly useless, the one which most games use right now)

can you, perhaps, briefly explain what was used in SC4 and also VF5, and why/how GGPO could potentially greatly reduce lag from the netcode of SC4 and emulate VF5 online play? i ask because much of what i hear is that VF5 had equal if not superior netcode to GGPO. we all know that SC4 netcode was terrible, but we don't really know why, or what GGPO will do to make it different.

this question is not directed specifically at you, but to anyone who feels they may have answers. i think it is best if we can build the strongest case possible for why this is, without a doubt, something that will benefit SC5. this thread should be a place to not only hype the idea of SC5+GGPO, but to consider the alternatives and make it clear to supporters exactly why they are signing off on this.

to anyone who can answer these difficult questions for me; *pre-emptive high five* you rock.

I can give a quick explanation for the 2 netcodes (I can't go into detail about VF5, as I know nothing about it).

The type of netcode which most fighters use right now has the benefit of being very easy to implement and it should always stay in sync (same netcode which SC4 used). It works in the way that each client (client being each running version of the game) initially is paused and only processes a frame once it has received player input from all players. Once it starts running the game it should run smoothly, but it always processes old player input. The input lag becomes roughly the same as the ping. This should mean 50-100ms if you play against someone who are in the same country(this is playable, but it's still enough input lag to make it too different from local play), or more than 100-200ms if you play against someone who's in another country (this is where it starts to become close to unplayable).

GGPO works in a different way. Instead of waiting for player input, it'll do a form of client side prediction. Once you do any input, it'll process them and show the effect on screen, and the opponent's inputs will be processed as they received. Whenever there's some kind of desync (for instance, you attack the opponent and he gets hits, but on his screen he was able to block in time), then it'll roll back to a previous frame which was in sync, it'll quickly re-process the previous frames with up to date player input and then resume at the current frame with the new proper state of the game. GGPO also adds a small constant amount of input lag to reduce the chance of desync (I think this is 20ms or less).

GGPO has the downside that you'll need to reserve memory for many previous frames for rollbacks (although this should only be a concern for emulated games) and that you need to be able to re-process frames in the timespan of a single frame (otherwise the game might freeze for a split second whenever it rollbacks).

I may have a few details wrong about GGPO, but that's how it works overall. The upsides are pretty obvious: you'll have far far less input lag. It also works as an overall netcode solution, you shouldn't have to add lots of code for special cases. It's also one of the few netcodes which works with emulators (you're extremely limited when it comes to adding netcode to an emulated game).

As a quick history lesson: the former netcode I mention was very common for all games in the 90's, but then most games were played on LAN at which case you were dealing with so low pings it didn't matter. That kind of netcode is pretty much obsolete now. Outside of fighting games and emulated games, you practically never see it.

 

Graphical effects at different times aren't produced out of thin air... the use of the (unmodified) GGPO technique is not possible without restructuring (and adding restrictions) the graphics engine used

This is based on a misconception. GGPO applied to emulated games requires rolling back the entire program state – all RAM, audio buffer, video buffer, hard drive data, etc. This is possible on old programs that are extremely lightweight and would of course be completely infeasible for modern resource-intensive games, exactly for the reasons you describe.

But that is NOT what a modern GGPO implementation would use in reality.

If a game is built from the ground up with netcode based on rollback, then only those variables relevant to the player positions / inputs and other basic game state determinators (camera position, whether equipment was broken, whether certain stage effects had been triggered yet, etc.) would need to be recorded. In other words, the same extremely lightweight data that is used in replay modes. If the game has to roll back to a previous frame, it merely updates those variables with their previous values. At that point the rendering engine would proceed to draw the frame based on the game state exactly as it does for every other frame. Absolutely no graphics ever have to be buffered or restored.

See, the thing is, “graphical effects at different times” are entirely produced “out of thin air.” Each frame is drawn according to the world model built from the key game variables in less than a 60th of a second. Change those variables back to previous ones, and you can render a previous graphical frame in the same (negligible) amount of time, because fundamentally you haven’t actually changed anything about how the software normally operates.

Now, this is a slight simplification. Certain processes such as particle effects may not run entirely by storing variables in the RAM, but be instead the result of dedicated hardware on the graphics chip running its own process. While it would not at all be a problem to tell such hardware to “stop and redo” in case of a rollback, there is no guarantee that you could make that hardware restore a previous state like you could for other variables. So there would be a visual hiccup in which the particle effects (just as a hypothetical example) would be restarted, or even just rudely dropped for lack of a better option, and not perfectly match their previous appearance.

That’s just a theoretical exception however. And any rollback will of course require at least a little bit of a visual hiccup anyway. More importantly, provided the rollback code was programmed in from the start, such obvious discontinuities could in most cases be avoided.

 

@gabedamien: You'd be right about most 2D games, but something like Soul Calibur does have many minor graphical effects which would definitely be stored in memory. Like info for all the dynamic clothing, and the various particle effects when blocking/getting hit. There's also some more rare stuff, like some stages has havok physics on debris as a character is thrown into the ground. Those are elements which could be problematic for rollbacks.

I think the clothing would be the most difficult part as it can move wildly around compared to the character. So if they don't store any info about clothing, it would snap to some rigid position before starting to naturally drop down after a rollback. But well, maybe they'd have enough memory to store that info or find another solution.

 

Maaaaan if we can get this, it'll eliminate 50 percent of the laggin trash talk I hear online! SC5 i'll be heaven on Xbox/PS3!