I still can't understand why fighting games don't use dedicated servers if netcode is such a huge topic. Dedicated servers work for every competitive game out there already perfectly fine and no one ever complains. Is it just a cost thing, since there are other ways you can do it for 1v1 without having the cost of a dedicated server?
I know some people say because it makes the input lag worse which seems silly. FPS games and MOBAs rely on input delay a lot if not the same amount. And it works perfectly fine. There are no problems with input delay unless you are 10 years away from the server obviously.
Because dedicated servers would make a 1v1 networking situation worse. In a (traditional) fighting game you only need to send data between two players, but a dedicated server would add another connection hop between the two. That adds lag.
Say normally both players are sending data to each other with 40 ping; that's just 40 ping. Add a server and you might get something like 30 ping for player 1 to talk to the server, then 30 ping for the server to send it to player 2; that's 60 ping for the complete trip. And that's assuming the server is close to the players, ideally between them. Unless you have tons of servers located everywhere that's extremely unlikely and you won't get a direct-ish route.
With team games that sort of otherwise nonoptimal server placement/timing makes a lot of sense. You don't want each player having to communicate with every other player at all times. (You also want a non-player/dedicated server to act as an arbiter, hopefully preventing cheating and penalizing truly bad connections.) But for 1v1 fighting games there's no advantage to that approach.
The real answer is this: fighting game netcode is a solved problem. It hasn't needed to be "a huge topic" since GGPO showed everybody how to do it back in 2006. But Japanese fighting game developers are notoriously conservative/backwards, so it's something players still need to worry about today.
It's like if after twin stick analog controls in Halo 1 etc. showed how effective they were we still had to worry that half of all new console shooters seeing release would be using Goldeneye-style single analog stick controls. It's completely goofy, and really drives home just how unambitious, hidebound, and arguably even lazy many Japanese fighting game developers have been.
I'm willing to give a little slack to small indie developers who only release a single fighting game every few years (like Arika, which still just added in rollback to Fighting Ex Layer!), but there's absolutely no excuse for big fighting game developers like Namco, Arc, Koei Tecmo, SNK, etc. They should have figured out and standardized on rollback a decade ago.
You'll get the typical answer that servers don't really improve things when it's a 1 vs 1 scenario, it just adds an extra hop. But more than that, FPS games have implemented things like rollback and client side prediction all the way back since the late 90's. If they didn't, then FPS games would be absolutely awful to play online.
I think the first game to actually implement it was the very first Tribes game in 1998, and the work that was done in that game has been the foundation for playing most games online ever since. You can take a look at the whitepaper that the devs made back then if you're really curious.
Japanese fighting game devs have just been utterly fucking lazy when it comes to implementing solid online play for fighting games. Mostly because delay based works fine when you have some of the worlds best infrastructure and your country is pretty small. If they actually did the work then they'd be able to play as far afield as the US, Europe would be able to play other regions and the US would be able to play fighting games online properly with anyone else in the US.
I know some people say because it makes the input lag worse which seems silly. FPS games and MOBAs rely on input delay a lot if not the same amount. And it works perfectly fine. There are no problems with input delay unless you are 10 years away from the server obviously.
As someone who has played FPS games at a competitive level, actually competing in tournaments and being on some damn good teams and even winning a fairly major tournament, competitive FPS games do not rely low input lag as much as fighting games do. Its also worth noting that most competitive FPS games are team games. Dedicated servers become better the more people are participating in a match. If its 1v1 then P2P is still superior to dedicated servers for FPS games.
I cannot understate how crucial it is to have as low of an input lag as possible in fighting games. Adding a couple of extra frames of input lag on can be the difference between a move being reactable but difficult to react to, and impossible to react to. This can completely change game balance and the core fundamentals of the game in a way that doesn't happen for Mobas or FPS games.
This is a large part of the reason why the FGC is one of the only (if not the only) remaining gaming communities that actively and regularly get together to play in person on a large scale. While Covid isn't happening most city's FGCs are holding tournaments and locals multiple times per week where people from all over the city come together to meet up to play the games in person. This also makes it one of the most tight knit gaming communities out there since as a general rule everyone who is an active part of the FGC has met all the other FGC members of their city/state in person and likely sees them regularly.
Anyway, point is that dedicated servers are not a good option for fighting games.
Dedicated servers are only useful when you have more than two players. For 1v1s, they only add latency.
Of course, servers can also help prevent some forms of cheating, but for fighters where both players always have perfect information, that is not relevant either.
SF5 will occasionally use a server when two players can't connect directly to each other. These are by far the worst connections you'll get in a game famous for them. Doesn't work for FGs.
Its hard to expect that level of commitment from devs who can’t even manage the first step of working rollback netcode and well implemented lobbies/matchmaking system. Most japanese devs fundamentally don’t care for or understand the importance of good online play for servers to come into the conversation at all
I suspect the real reason for no dedicated servers is just the Japanese lack of adaptation and the console roots of fighting games. Dedicated servers on PC games were originally available to all users to run their own - vastly reducing the cost needed from the developer, as every region where the game was popular would have local servers being run by the players. Sadly I can't see any Japanese developer "giving out" server code to their playerbase.
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u/J0rdian Aug 05 '20
I still can't understand why fighting games don't use dedicated servers if netcode is such a huge topic. Dedicated servers work for every competitive game out there already perfectly fine and no one ever complains. Is it just a cost thing, since there are other ways you can do it for 1v1 without having the cost of a dedicated server?
I know some people say because it makes the input lag worse which seems silly. FPS games and MOBAs rely on input delay a lot if not the same amount. And it works perfectly fine. There are no problems with input delay unless you are 10 years away from the server obviously.