Just seen on TV that the next Tekken (fighting game) is going to support online play for the XBox… I think we’ve talked about this before, how the hell are they going to do that then?
Kev
Xbox is broadband only.
Even on broadband, latency can still be >100ms.
10th of a second in a fighting game?!?? Life or death.
Kev
Cyberstep launched GetAmped in Korea (3rd most played online game in Korea! and all Java!) which is a multiplayer online fighting game and it works fine. However, I do believe that the action in Tekken is faster, but not by much.
-Chris
GetAmped isn’t really a fighting game, more of a deathmatch with some close range weapons (much like Smash Bros. Melee). Although I would agree that would be tricky to implement across a network, Tekken is a whole different matter…
Tekken’s gameplay relys on 3 things: timing, timing and timing. Its all about getting your move just at the right moment to counter and then folloing up with the right timing of a sequence of combo moves. (maybe I’m preaching to the converted here, I’m sure we’ve all played Tekken to death?)
Even across broadband we take steps to get approimate syncrhonisation between movement in most games and then work round the problems with game mechanics… I really can’t wait to see what they come up with!
Kev
Tekken is about timing, yes, but it’s also a very slow game.
Most moves take hundreds of milliseconds, if not thousands, to play out, and you generally can do nothing else during a move other than invoke combos.
This “all or nothing” forces you to be very careful tactically, since once you’ve committed to a move, your options for the next 0.5 seconds are severely limited; of course, you still get a range of options to control what move you’ll move into post-move (i.e. there’s often 3 or more combo options at any one point).
Over a network, one thing you could do (assuming you have trustable timestamps) is to send a message saying when the move was started, and your opponents would see animations that either started partway through, or, more realistically, played ultra fast for the first 100 ms to catch up with where they would be by now if they’d actually been received on-time.
A slight lengthening of the response-windows (the period of time in which you can pull-off a response to a move being acted upon you), e.g. 50%, could provide tolerance for quite large latencies.
This is just off the top of my head guess-work for something that might work for Tekken - I have no idea what they’ll actually be doing.
Oh, and if I had MS at my disposal, I’d just make a contract with the main ISP’s in every country, so that each ISP had a dedicated Tekken server next to their modem pool.
Players would only be allowed to play with other people on the same ISP, guaranteeing sub-30ms latencies for most DSL broadband users. MS has already shown themselves happy with the “give you no option over who you play with” model in order to solve technical problems (like griefing).
FWIW, I know that at least one giant corporation in the games industry really wants to take this approach to online gaming - put everything local in at the ISP, and cut out most of the hard-to-predict, impossible-to-control internet (including griefing issues - think how much easier it is to manage when the game admin has the home address of every player, and DDOS attacks are impossible (because you don’t even need to accept connections from outside your network)). Apparently the (temporary) difficulty is getting the ISP’s to play ball.
Big question is is the players will go for it.
This already existed once before-- anyone remember DWANGO? Their luinch got eaten by the full internet game providers.
[quote]Big question is is the players will go for it.
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I’d play Tekken on my ISP’s server if they (Yahoo/SBC) offered it 
I find playing ‘twitch’ games online is extremely irritating. Lag ruins the experience for me (I’ using DSL with ping << 100ms).
Quake 3 is really the only one that I play though… maybe others aren’t as bad. But when, as far as what draws on your screen is concerned, most of your shots don’t count and you are being killed by completely missing enemy fire it is no fun.
Actually, for the pros, Tekken is a very fast game.
There are certain combo strings and tricks that require the user to input a command after a certain ammount of frames. These moves are called “Just frames” because, in order for them to work properly, they must be inputted in just one frame or performed on a certain frame during, after, or before an attack. There are tricks which allow certain moves to become unblockable. To do this, a move must be charged for 34 frames and released on the 35th frame- NOTHING LATER! Now, the game runs internally at 60fps- imagine the speed and timing required for this.
If the lot of you think I’m crazy, I urge you take a look at Virutal Fighther 4: EVO. Go to training mode and watch the pro replays with their commands displayed. You’ll see MANY just frames and frame perfect delays.
Fighting games online is a wonderful idea. However, until latency is vastly improved, it will forever be a venue for esser skilled players to battle.
Why?
Client-side prediction : measures which frame you performed which moves on. All it has to do is tell the other side “you think my player missed the kick on frame 13, but actually they got it, it’s just that a latency spike hid it”. So long as game animations can lag by 100 ms or so without ruining the game - or be 30 ms most of the time, with jumps of 100 ms where the client mis-predicted…
The real interesting subject is that where there are many different ways to “solve” the latency issues for Tekken, the question is “which one(s) are they going to use?” since all have different subtle impacts on the game-design. Despite having been a hardcore tekken 1,2,3 player, without seeing the source-code I’m not confident which would be impossible - we’re talking about how sub-second delays and spikes affect gameplay, which is rather difficult to tell on a game that’s never been networked before, especially with prediction systems.
Makes animation smooth by lying to you.
[quote]So long as game animations can lag by 100 ms or so without ruining the game - or be 30 ms most of the time, with jumps of 100 ms where the client mis-predicted…
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In any action game that amount of lag is quite a bit… specially since 30ms is already 2 screen refreshes at 60Hz… enough to clearly see the erroneous prediction and start to react. In Q3 the usual result is shooting a wall you thought you were past (because it DID draw that way). The rocket explosion kills you, the other players think you are a fool, only because you have GOOD reflexes :).
Prediction system thus far have ruined the gaming experience for me. Smooth animation that is blatantly wrong doesn’t make for fun games.
But that’s a problem caused by server-side game-state management and lack of trust for the client. You’re talking about the situation where the game-logic that is executed is executed against a representation of the world that is NOT the one you are seeing.
Tekken is not traditionally a game about ultra-fast reactions as much as it is about guessing what your opponent might do, because usually once you start a move you are committed for hundreds (often thousands) of ms. Yes, there are occasions where timing is everything - e.g. if you wait for them to do something which you expect them to do, and need to counter attack, but that’s the kind of thing that you can provide by doing local-client evaluation of whether you timed it correctly.
Of course, I inherently don’t like designs that produce non client/server games, nor games where the client is trusted - but Quake3 was still fun despite the fact that you could cheat in various ways using a secondary automated client (like aimbots, but there are so many more options…) :).
[quote]But that’s a problem caused by server-side game-state management and lack of trust for the client. You’re talking about the situation where the game-logic that is executed is executed against a representation of the world that is NOT the one you are seeing.
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It isn’t about trust - it is about time. Unless you go back to the synchronous model of Doom II (where one slow connection slows everyone down) you are stuck with the fact that the game logic and the view on the individual clients are necessarily different.
[quote] - but Quake3 was still fun despite the fact that you could cheat in various ways using a secondary automated client (like aimbots, but there are so many more options…) :).
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Q3 can be fun on a LAN (though the lag still causes an occasional screw up), but over the internet it is hopeless… it’s only fun then if the players are so unevenly matched that the total lack of a consistent view doesn’t end up mattering. Q3 is not “what you see is what you get” and that makes me feel cheated most of the time I have ever played with a ping > 10ms
I don’t see what’s wrong with that in this scenario? If you don’t care about trust, then you can decide how to deal with the player’s actions by looking at what they thought they were doing.
e.g. the equivalent analogy for Q3 would be that if you fire a rocket when you’re in open space, but the server knows you’re actually in front of a wall, the game would NOT kill you because it knew that you genuinely believed you were in open space when you pressed fire.
I’m not confident of how well it would apply to Q3 because Q3 is a lot more free form than tekken (in tekken, you are playing a game a bit like chess - each time you make a move, you are “on rails” unable to change your mind until the move completes, although you nearly always have a few (e.g. 3) options of how you can evolve the move whilst it’s playing out).
Funny; I used to have no problems regularly winning on the barrysworld servers, back when they had a lot of traffic, with a ping of 70ms. I only played for 5-6 months before switching to UT which I found had more satisfying MP gameplay, but I was certainly one of the better players and usually playing similarly matched people (and getting smacked down into 2nd place quite a lot).
I’ve even played with friends who were on a 250-300ms ping from dialup and they managed to do pretty well (although we were perhaps unevenly matched in those cases).
[quote]e.g. the equivalent analogy for Q3 would be that if you fire a rocket when you’re in open space, but the server knows you’re actually in front of a wall, the game would NOT kill you because it knew that you genuinely believed you were in open space when you pressed fire.
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Which then cheats the other player when your rocket comes flying through a wall. I think only reducing lag can help - prediction is about making nice animation, trading it off for fairness.
Point taken about Tekken being less sensitive to reacting to an environment that is not what it seems.
[quote]Funny; I used to have no problems regularly winning… with a ping of 70ms.
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I never said I didn’t win 
[quote]I’ve even played with friends who were on a 250-300ms ping from dialup and they managed to do pretty well (although we were perhaps unevenly matched in those cases).
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In that situation the game would be completely unplayable… amounting to a collection of random events as far as the players were concerned. Of course, you weren’t playing on their connections … you likely had a fairly consistent view of the game world.
Yeah, this is my point: things that can’t work in Q3 actually could work in Tekken, because of the much more constrained gameplay.
I suppose a better way of explaining this is:
"In Q3, most of the time the environment you interact with is static: you run through doorways, along ledges, jump gaps, run over motionless powerups, etc.
In tekken, most of the time the environment you interact with is dynamic: you are only concerned with what the other player is doing, which is inherently unpredictable already. You don’t interact with the static environment at all - there aren’t holes in the floor etc"
(of course, that’s a generalization - there sometimes are holes in the floor in Tekken, and you could have a wide open arena in Q3, but both are exceptions, not often played, and … it would be interesting to see how these affected the noted problems / lack thereof. Does lagged Q3 become more bearable in a level with no walls and walkways?)
You’re confusing the server’s representation of the game with how you play it. When you play a lagged game, you learn to play it with lag. It’s all part of the game. Lag compensation is part of the overall experience. Just like riding a turbo bike, you learn to open the throttle moments before you want to have your arms torn off and it becomes second nature very quickly.
When people used to DM with a high ping get a low ping connection they’re usually really crap players for a little while because they’re so used to aiming differently to compensate for 200ms lag instead of 30ms.
Cas
[quote] When you play a lagged game, you learn to play it with lag. It’s all part of the game. Lag compensation is part of the overall experience.
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Forgive me for not finding a completely random element that kills you without any chance of defense - “not fun”.
You can learn to play with a log that is consistent, I suppose. But often, on cable modems that I have used at least (I now use DSL), the lag was so random (ping fluctuated wildly) that there was simply nothing to get used to but random death.
In any case, I would rather not have to get used to the display occasionally lying to me.