as someone not familiar with rollback netcode, what happens if it predicts wrong what the player was going to do? the article just says that it's very good at accurate predicting inputs, but doesn't go into the specifics about what happens when it makes an inaccurate prediciton.

Ticking alot of boxes so far. Is it on Xbox and PC? Hopefully it is fighting games suffer from tiny communities. Been hearing tons about roll back but never experienced it. Hopefully SF can get back to former glory

Rollback is practically a requirement these days. I would play smash ultimate a whole lot more if the online matches we're actually stable. Good to see Capcom adopting these must have features

Maximillian Dood got over 2 hours of 4k60 footage of him fighting the devs - he went through it on his channel,. Which is to say, he uploaded the part of his stream where he went through it onto the channel. If you want more info, he probably played more of the game than anyone else outside of the developers.

> this video does a pretty good job of explaining it

that video was really good.

that makes sense that it's only a few frames out of sync so it can figure out it was wrong before anyone notices and can simply speed up an animation to get back into sync.

Nice. Thats good to see. I think all fighting games should be cross platform period!

you know how when someone disconnects in any online shooter of the last 20 years his character just keeps going in a straight line unless they reconnect and "roll back" to where they were actually going? fighting game developers who are notorious for being old men with dementia just realized they can also do that instead of making everyone else have lag

it means they wanted sf4 to be backwards compatible with earlier street fighter games so you can play older characters in sf4, without increasing the net amount of code (otherwise you would have huge file sizes)

its when you back roll using your mind like Neo in the Matrix

Google is free bro 😭

"Netcode" is a nonspecific term that basically just means "how the game does online play". There are basically two ways to do fighting game netcode. Delay (the old way) and rollback (new way).

Delay says "the more latency there is, add more input delay so both players are perfectly in sync at all times".

Rollback is a way to keep input delay to an absolute minimum while also keeping the visuals as in sync as possible. Honestly, you should watch a video with a visual example to understand exactly what it's doing. https://youtu.be/0NLe4IpdS1w?t=115 That whole video is good, but that part specifically covers what it does.

>Tsuji: Actually, the adoption of the rollback method was not decided from the beginning, but rather during the development process. As a programmer, the impact was quite large, and I had a hard time with the schedule (laughs).

>--(Laughs.) So you were hired on short notice?

>Aerial: Yes. The reason for this was the large number of requests from players and the impact of the Corona disaster. As the opportunities to play offline have decreased, it is necessary to be able to play well online. In particular, overseas players were very sensitive about whether or not the game was adopted, so we decided that it had to be included.

Saving this for an extra proof for all the retards and future retards that will try to change history and how it happened

I think it's great to give the audience a sense of the pain and difficulty of implementing rollback. Quite often those with no technical background seem to think that it's a pretty universally plug-and-play process.

>I feel that we've gone as far as we can as a team

yeah okay looks like matchmaking will never be fixed

Okay, but is it good rollback net-code?

SFV rollback was so bad people really think it didn’t have it LMFAO

Hopefully it uses a newer version of the netcode based on what they had for MvC:I.

More importantly, the game will have cross play

> Does it give players a smoother connection or something?

Yes. Here's a quick ELI5 explanation:

In any online connection, there's some finite amount of time between when information is sent from one PC/console to when it arrives on another. To make it possible for two players to simultaneously play a game, there needs to be a built in delay to account for this. Delay netcode does this with a delay only, by looking at the ping and adding input delay to the game that's slightly longer than how long it takes for information to travel to the other player. This gives the game enough time to say "on frame X player 1 did A and player 2 did B" and have both players see the same result of those actions. For example, if your ping is 62ms, then the game would have a delay of 4-5 frames, which gives it about 67-83ms delay. As long as the ping stays below that 4-5f mark, everything works fine. If it doesn't, the game has to constantly change the input delay or simply stop and wait for inputs, which results in chugging as well as affecting the speed you have to do inputs for strings to work properly.

Rollback netcode is a solution that's added on top of delay based netcode. It chooses a sensible delay, then says basically "even if ping is fluctuating or packets are lost, I'll try to keep the game going and fix any errors after they occur". How it works is that any time an input is late, the game assumes the player is still pushing whatever button they were on the frame before that. Then when the late input comes in, it basically backtracks behind the scenes and recalculates what the gamestate should be based on what the player actually pushed and fixes it. Because these late inputs are usually only late by a handful of frames, these corrections that are made are minimally disruptive, and frequently so small you can't even tell anything happened. These corrections are called "rollbacks". By implementing the netcode like that, input delay stays constant and it means that even when there's connection issues, your timing for inputs always remains consistent.

If you're familiar with predictive netcode that's used in servers for FPS games and Rocket League, it's a similar idea, but implemented for peer-to-peer connections.

Infil made a great article with cool animations showing how rollback works that can be found here.

You can check out the long text form explanation at https://ki.infil.net/w02-netcode.html

Everything you need to know is in this video

> like it’s the best thing since canned bread

As it happens, it IS the best thing since canned bread.

Basic summary.

Delay code: the game pauses on every frame to wait to hear both players inputs.

Rollback code. Your inputs happen as soon as they are heard. The opponent’s inputs are added as soon as they are heard, but “happen” in the past to account for the time difference. A “rollback” is the visual artifact of the game realizing “oh! The opponent moved a few frames ago!”

During a delay, the game might not read inputs, or might mess with your combo timings. Also it makes all actions happen late to an inconsistent degree. Rollback solves that problem. The main downside is that rollback has visual artifacts and can eat a few frames of startup animations.

It's also a form of netcode there's delay based where if there's a gap in data packets between the two parties the game increases the delay and slows down gameplay to compensate.

Then there's rollback, it has an initial buffer of a frame or two however when there is a gap or a discrepancy in data packets between the two parties the game assumes the next action of your opponent if it's right frequently you get to play less stable connections as if they're stable but if it's wrong "rollback" occurs. When rollback occurs the game will rollback to when the discrepancy happened and skip the next few frames afterwards to sync your games.

Generally rollback is pretty good for fighting games as a peer to peer connection (what most FGs use for online) is pretty simple and while rollback occurring sounds messy on paper due to the inputs required for fighting games like holding back to block it's not terribly hard to guess what happens next, meaning most times rollbacks are harmless.

Virtua Fighter 5 Ultimate Showdown uses servers. MultiVersus uses servers as well as rollback netcode. Project L will be doing the same thing as MultiVersus.

Rollback is our god, and Sajam their prophet.

That's what Project L will have. The main fix of dedicated servers is dealing with really bad connections and rage quitting since the non guilty party is unimpeded by the other, but rollback is still needed.

Ain't no netcode out there letting you block the curse mixups

Nooooooo. All dedicated servers do is add a middleman that will likely result in more latency than if you just went straight from peer to peer. You now also need servers strategically placed around the world instead of just one (or maybe a couple) matchmaking server. And you need to pay to keep those running or else the game becomes literally unplayable. A couple games have tried this.

Multiversus had servers and rollback netcode. It worked...most of the time. As long as it put you on a server close to you.

The rerelease of Virtua Fighter 5 had servers and delay netcode. I have not personally played it but it doesn't seem like anyone else is at this point so that probably answers that.

Yes absolutely. There’s no excuse not to have a functional rollback implementation at this point. DBFZ came out in 2018 with one of the most popular IPs in the world. The original GBFV basically died when it had bad netcode and the pandemic hit soon after its release, driving everyone indoors. A lot of the competitive environment has moved online now in the post-pandemic world and good netcode is a requirement for that.

Standards change with time. When everything else has rollback and you don't, that's a major disadvantage. DBFZ was released when there's no big Japanese name had rollback, so it was not a major talking point.

Since netcode is what makes or breaks a fighter's success these days? Yes. Absolutely.

Dbfz's success has basically nothing to do with being a good fighting game and everything to do with the dragon ball IP. They could sell a turd wrapped in Gokus and it would sell, as Sparking Zero shows. Fortunately, DBFZ happened to also be a good game, and even then it struggled competitively without rollback.

I consider any company trying to sell me a fighting game without proper netcode as insulting my intelligence, and they can shove it up their ass.

100 Matches
Console: PlayStation 5

Average Frame Delay: 1 - 2 frames (Around 85 of the matches)

Total Disconnects: 5 disconnected matches in the span of 6 hours

Rate of Matchmaking: Constant

Verdict: This game has EXCELLENT rollback netcode on PS5

This is definitive proof HxH Nen Impact has outstanding netcode following the post launch patch. I believe it was briefly messy in the first 3 days. But this online patch is excellent

Personal results may vary. As with ANY game. But we can stop this long game of telephone that the online is broken. It's quite excellent

Video of the complete 6 hour livestream is linked at the top. No commentary

It makes me wonder if the bad netcode is a PC only thing.

Did you play ranked or player matches? For some reason yesterday, in player match. It kept disconnecting, not sure if that’s netcode related.

Interested to see how this works in practice. Certainly a nice improvement but I doubt it'll restore things like super meter. 

Also did I miss something? Why are we specifying one on one?

Whatever your opinions on SF6s gameplay (ie if they’re negative), you gotta love the QOL enhancements they keep adding. I wish every fighting game from now on has as in depth options as SF6 does.

TNS and Can Opener cheering right now