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Comment by nemetroid | Hacker News Reader

Fighting games take this one step further through "rollback" netcode. Instead of delaying the game while waiting, the game predicts what the opponent's input is going to be. If it turns out when the input arrives that the prediction was wrong, the game state is rolled back, the correct input is applied, and the game fast-forwarded to where it was.

Here's an extensive writeup about the concept:

https://ki.infil.net/w02-netcode.html

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Many realtime online games use the same techniques today. For a very understandable walkthrough of the concept, I recommend Gabriel Gambretta's excellent 4 part series: https://gabrielgambetta.com/client-server-game-architecture....

Interestingly enough, your brain does the similar things, playing games with temporal relationships and fixing it all back up after the fact in a way that you normally can't notice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chronostasis

I was talking to someone about a related topic a couple weeks ago, how the brain "fudges" with the experience of time to compensate for the latency of perception. But I couldn't remember what it was called.

Thanks to the link above, I found the exact phrase: neural antedating/backdating. Ah, it's nice to have resolved that question.

Except Super Smash Bros, which has the worst netcode and online play possible. Nintendo is this weird combination of incompetent and brilliant that I don't really understand.

Nintendo's track record with online is truly bizarre.

They clearly have some phenomenal tech chops in the company. Iwata hand rolled a compression algorithm and Nintendo were in the internet game waaaaay early and had aspirations of being an ISP with their Famicom Modem in the 80s.

That said their web infra just seems so janky and backwards - I've heard excuses like the friction wrt online gaming keeps it family friendly and helps disincentive trolling.

Nintendo has also always been more focused on in person social which works well in Japan where console market penetration is very high, gaming in public is normal (both socially and public crime/mugging doesn't exist) and population density is high. Monhun (Monster Hunter culture) being a great example of JP cultural gaming trends that didn't export nearly so well outside of Japan. (did ok-ish in Asia). [--aside: Must have been so ace to have monhun parties after work /sigh--]

If Nintendo could make their estore more optimized for UX (think Amazon or Apple App Store / Google Play Store) I feel like they would be a money printing machine.

Of Sony, MS, Nintendo, Nintendo are the only pure games company and those marketplaces are fantastic cash cows...

I remember hearing/reading when Slippi (community rollback netcode implementation for Melee) came out the creator mentioning that Japanese fighting games don't bother with rollback because it's more work and Japan is small enough and well wired enough that it's never a problem. Contrast with fighting games that come out of the US that normally implement rollback.

Yeah the Japanese seem to operate under the impression that the entire world lives in Japan. I'm a semi-pro Super Smash player and I've desperately wanted to play it online, since like forever. But every version, the lag is unbelievable. It's always some p2p bullshit where one person lags, everyone lags.

I remember when the Wii U Smash was coming under criticism for the unbearable lag, the developers released a statement in which they literally said: we tested the online play in development, and it works great. Are you fucking serious? How can they care so little?

It should be noted that Japan is not the only country that frequently disregards technical constraints, units of measurement and other cultural circumstances from outside one's own country or seaside metropolitan area.

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