Super smash bros melee is having a bit of an online renaissance due to a combination of the COVID 19 pandemic and the recent implementation of rollback netcode by a community member that quit his job.
The fact that Fizzi was able to get implement rollback netcode for a game by just directly editing the assembly code without any access to a the game's source code is insane. The delay based netcode for the newest smash game, Smash Ultimate(2018), is so bad that it went from being the biggest fighting game of all time in terms competitive playerbase to basically having no scene at all due to covid killing lan tournaments. No one wants to play ultimate online. I wonder if this comparison is what caused nintendo to cease and desisted an online melee tournament that intended to use rollback.
> I wonder if this comparison is what caused nintendo to cease and desisted an online melee tournament that intended to use rollback.
No, Nintendo famously doesn't bother to understand or pay attention to details like this. Their higher-ups can't be embarrassed because they barely understand the very concept of networking, let alone how it affects their own online multiplayer, let alone the distinction between delay-based and rollback, let alone how such a distinction might manifest in a foreign tournament on the far sign of the world. Nintendo's lawyers, on the other hand, are predictable: advertise anything about a modded game of theirs and the C&Ds come out. It's the same reason they went after Project M.
But they really aren't that predictable. There have been other events after the big house that didn't get a nastygram. Who knows why pokemon showdown is allowed to exist. The Melee community is pretty crazy though I would imagine if nintendo keeps coming at them they might just decompile the whole game and move to new version sanitized of nintendo ip.
I'm sure a lot of the work is done through the dolphin fork, but a lot of code also has to be injected into the melee iso as well. Which is why project slippi doesn't allow rollback for all dolphin games (sorry project M)
The rollback is truly something else. Although - and I may be crazy - I swear it isn't quite as good as playing local people with delay-based netplay (such that the network delay can "hide" behind the inherent lag of the Gamecube/game itself)
The fact that they were able to optimize two frames of input lag away to make the online gameplay have the same latency as offline is itself incredible.
As far as I know, even other rollback-equipped fighting games still add a little bit of latency in order to play online without requiring constant rollbacks.
That said, Melee is also a game that is very hard on the rollback, because movement and attack startup are far faster than in many fighting games.
Dashdancing with rollback leads to some annoying camera judder.
Depends on the ping. I would say once you start pushing 80 you can definitely feel it. But >60 ping rollback feels very good if you are playing on a good monitor.
In a way, Melee shows that a couple of artificial frames of lag can be beneficial and allow for seamless online play on-par with LAN. Since the game is already one of the fastest & most reaction-oriented out there.
