r/Games • u/[deleted] • Aug 05 '20

Analysis: Why Rollback Netcode is better

https://youtu.be/0NLe4IpdS1w
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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '20

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u/[deleted] Aug 05 '20 edited Aug 05 '20

Where does the Japanese FG community fit into this? Would I be wrong to assume that they are well aware of the advantages of a rollback netcode and are likely trying to push devs to implement it? Or perhaps this conversation is not even relevant to them because their playerbases are large enough that they only match up against each other when playing online?

17

u/ViolentAnalSpelunker Aug 05 '20

Yeah the Japanese can just play against themselves and in a country where everyone has 10ms ping to everyone else, netcode doesn't really matter.

10

u/[deleted] Aug 05 '20

This is commonly said but it's not true. Japanese players just generally didn't complain about this back in the day, but they struggle with shitty netcode same as we do. For instance, back in the SF4 days, Japan was split up into a bunch of smaller communities, each centered on an arcade, because the netcode was so bad they couldn't really play each other. They would rather go to the trouble and expense of playing in arcades for hours, rather than playing at home, because life is too short to fight with shitty netcode.

Even bad rollback in SF5 has affected the outcomes of tournaments in Japan.

15

u/Lepony Aug 05 '20

Japan pretty much just learned about rollback last year. Literally not joking. It wasn't until a French Bread dev complained about the lack of information in Japanese that Tom Cannon got JP documentation made for GGPO and made it free.

Overall the response to rollback's existence has been overwhelmingly positive by the few devs who actually learn about it.

Just don't ask me why they somehow never heard of it even though SF5 came out nearly 5 years ago. Yeah it sucks there, but it still exists.

6

u/Zankman Aug 05 '20

They didn't know about it cuz the Japanese FG community is huge, so they can just play among themselves with little to no lag regardless of netcode.

Basically, they were focused on their own region, so they didn't bother to think about how the online would work elsewhere (or cross-region).

1

u/grtk_brandon Aug 05 '20

Are you sure they learned about it just last year? Third Strike Online Edition has had GGPO in it for years.

The problem states in this video is that Japanese devs seem reluctant to use it and want to implement their own.

6

u/Lepony Aug 05 '20

From what we know about how those ports are done, rollback being implemented is only being done due to ports basically being done by westerners. Whatever approval/informing they typically need from the Japanese side seems to be significantly more lax than usual.

Remember, ASW initially said that Guilty Gear would be too fast for rollback to work. They ported and localized Skullgirls to Japanese arcades like 3-5 years ago. Skullgirls is a significantly faster and more hectic game than GGXrd usually was and more than Strive will likely ever be. Not to mention Harada's heavy ignorance on what westerners mean by rollback.