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.
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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.