Howdy folks, it's been a long time since I've last publicly posted anything about this, but considering our very recent leap in progress, I figure we owe you all a status report. So here it is.
This is the most basic and important form of sync, and the first of many we will implement in the near future. With these rudimentary variables synced, regardless of what happens on both clients, they will both have the same outcome as the server.
Now that the official business is out of the way, allow me to explain some of the background work for people who have no idea what that means or are just getting started with this whole Melee online Conversation.
Background Information
The Dolphin Gamecube/Wii emulator currently has some rudimentary netplay functionality. People constantly posted about attempting to play Melee online, asking if it worked.
It didn't, moreover it couldn't. I explained, much to their chagrin.
The only way to make melee work online acceptably between computers was to eliminate or greatly reduce de-synchronization (desync) events between the two emulations. I posited a few times in a few threads about a method by which this could be accomplished: monitoring and transmitting emulated game memory. So, with the help of Internet Explorer (IE) and a smattering of accumulated game knowledge (mostly Action Replay data), we set out on an ambitious project to make this game work online.
We sent a few IMs back and forth and established a primitive distribution of labor. IE would tediously create a very complex memory map of the locations we wanted to sync, and I would hack through the Dolphin source code to locate an entry point, write methods to sort through, isolate, and read/write memory, and invent a method by which to sync game memory between clients.
Both of these goals have been achieved at a very basic level.
I will be happy to answer any technical/nontechnical/inane questions you guys might have in this thread, as well as pretty much anything else you may want to know about this project. (I'm pretty sure IE will as well).
But first and foremost, let me answer one question right now.
We are not currently looking for playtesters.
There is no method by which you can download the alpha and play it. I will not send it to you, nor will anyone else.
This is just a status report.
We currently cannot state any date to expect this to be released. Anything we say would probably not be accurate anyway, since the team's time is divided by work and school, respectively. Nobody's paying us, we are doing this because we enjoy melee and want it to be playable online. We don't really
owe you anything, we're just cool dudes who want people to know.
Valve Mode Answer: It will be finished when it's finished.
We also have a dev blog which will probably be updated quite sporadically.
You can find it at the lovely web address
http://ssbmo.com/.
