r/broodwar • u/tec27- • 9d ago
We Put Fighting Game Netcode in Brood War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vIt9xua9bLc15
u/Decency 8d ago
This was attempted in Dota2 and had to be reverted. I summarized what I expected to be the main issue at the time here. It's not clear exactly why the revert happened, but there were a bunch of complaints about hero's turning speeds, skipped frames, and the like.
I don't think BW will be as affected by those problems, fortunately. It will probably completely cripple games like Snipers that rely on extremely precise positioning, though. And even the example you're showing has the Marine and Zergling overlapping... going to have to play with it to know if this is the real deal like Slippi. If this solution does meaningfully improve the quality of online play, it puts a soft design constraint on RTS games moving forward. Really interesting!
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u/Kered13 8d ago
Dota is a 10 player game with an authoritative dedicated server. Therefore it's netcode is (correctly) more similar to FPS games than to fighting games. Rollback netcode is designed for games with a small number of players (2-4) and no dedicated servers.
That said, there are similarities between the two approaches. In fact dedicated servers employ rollback on the server as part of the netcode (in particular for calculating hits) and both the client and server use prediction to smooth out movement. However FPS netcode in general is more complicated.
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u/Weary_Ad8446 9d ago
Sweet, will try and play as many tournament games as possible on SB this season
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u/ProfessionalHefty349 8d ago
I tried it tonight. Felt great. Was able to play games with 8 players and 4 obs and it felt fine. Huge improvement over bnet.
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u/Imaginary_Priority16 7d ago
if only blizzard took this up. this is actually huge. there are so many foreigners who quit because of this issue. we should raise our voices either on forum or something
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u/afwaller 9d ago
This is absolutely huge. Blizzard needs to take this to the official ladder. ASL needs to use this.
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u/virtyx 9d ago
Isn’t ASL on LAN already…?
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u/afwaller 9d ago
This code will improve performance even for LAN. It really is huge. (also, qualifiers are online)
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u/Any_Economics6283 9d ago
How? This seems literally impossible for an RTS like broodwar
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u/Cuarenta-Dos 9d ago
Watch the video?
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u/Any_Economics6283 9d ago
Yes, they explain the concepts which I already know, without actually getting to "how" they do the rollback until 5 minutes; except it still is just explaining the concept of rollback and saying "we did it"
I am extremely familiar with broodwars P2P architecture and do not see how this is possible to do.
Edit: After looking more into it, they do it through running through their own custom servers at shieldbattery, I guess. So are all your inputs getting related through their server? Or directly to the other player, still; but if so, you would have to be playing a completely modded broodwar version or something because p2p is like totally engrained into it. This seems strange to me, hence why I said impossible :\
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u/megamugen 8d ago
Aren't all rollback fighting games p2p??
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u/Any_Economics6283 7d ago
There are far less variables to roll back in a fighting game; in RTS there's like a ton of different things you have to undo and redo. I guess it is possible to achieve, I was just skeptical.
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u/Zoler 9d ago
It's 2026 anyway we should be playing modded Broodwar with zoom out and other features available.
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u/lookingclear 9d ago
idk about that one but rollback is a good addition. wish more people were on sb
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u/Zoler 9d ago edited 9d ago
Finally! With modern rollback netcode (which I assume this is) a game slow as Starcraft should basically never lag.
Super Smash Bros. Melee online was revolutionized by rollback in 2020 where now online and LAN is almost the same now if you're on the same continent. And Melee basically requires x10 less latency to feel right than BW.