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 Famitsu
recently published an interview with TEKKEN producer Katsuhiro
Harada, who gives his input on designing and developing a fighting game's
netcode to keep latency low, minimizing lag. While fighting games online
certainly aren't "perfect", they've definitely come a long way
in recent years (with TTT2's netcode being nothing short of
excellent). In the interview, Harada explains that it's not as simple as
"writing netcode" and reveals some of the planning that goes
into netplay for TEKKEN games specifically.
Famitsu:
With
regards to the online play in Tekken 7, we're wondering if you
could tell us more about the techniques or methods the development
team utilized in order to keep latency low.
It's often said that lag is often the result of badly-written
netcode (the part of the game program that deals with Internet
communications), or so we hear...
Katsuhiro Harada: Nope,
nope, latency issues aren't something you can resolve simply by
changing the way the netcode is written.
Tekken titles contain some of the highest amounts of key input
data, when you compare it to other fighting games, sure. But with
that said there's still no such code that automatically makes
latency issues go away, like magic.
On a very superficial level it's easy to attribute all of the
latency issues to "netcode" because it's a buzzword
that's easy to understand. But really the term is just something
that people like to use because they don't know understand the
latency issues very well.
Rather than "write a better netcode", what's truly
important here is that the developer has to design the entire
fighting game with the notion that it will eventually be played
online.
For instance, imagine if the developer were to implement some
moves in the fighting game that have a start-up animation of 1F
(1/60th of a second in the case of recent Tekken games) after the
player hits a button.
If a developer were to do that, then when the game is played
online, you'd definitely run into latency issues where these moves
would lag behind by numerous frames.
Famitsu: Well,
yes, that's true. It takes time for the data to travel through the
Internet pipes over a long distance.
Harada: And
that's why 1-frame start-up moves would definitely be heavily
affected by lag in online matches. This is a bit of an extreme
example, but basically when a fighting game supports online play,
what it means is that the game has to be designed with that
premise in mind.
This is a topic that other fighting game developers have been
discussing quite a lot about recently too. Like I thought,
everyone's facing pretty much the same kind of problems and
challenges when making their games playable online.
Famitsu: So
how does Tekken 7 solve these problems?
Harada:
For instance when the player hits the punch button or
perform other actions, we put in a brief buffer period between the
button press and when the punch move or action actually starts
happening on-screen, as a measure to reduce the perception of lag.
Subsequently, if there is lag online, what the game can do in
theory is to skip over certain frames or parts of the move's
animation. In other words, in order to keep the amount of time
elapsed -- between when the player hits a button and when the move
actually hits -- consistent, the game makes adjustments to the
move animations accordingly.
But that's not all. That's just one example. There's a bunch of
other game system measures like this we've put in place.
By the way, for Tekken Tag Tournament 2 and Tekken 7 we've
actually put in place pretty much the exact same system measures
to reduce the perception of lag. So in terms of response times
[between when a player hits a button and the move taking place
on-screen], nothing has been changed from TTT2 to Tekken 7.
And yet every time we release a new title, there are always people
complaining that the new game "has gotten sluggish"
compared to the previous release. Unfortunately, they're mistaken.
We can even show you the data. If anything, we've actually made
improvements in many areas.
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Currently, TEKKEN 7
arcade cabinets support online play between not only players in different
parts of Japan, but Korea as well. While very smooth online matches are
common, there have still been some lag issues that have popped up in the
arcade from time to time. At the least, this will give Bandai Namco more
time to improve their latest build of online mode before the console
release of TEKKEN 7. (Still no date for the console version has
been set).
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