Massive
Smash Champion
I've seen the same idea posted about 5 or 6 times now and I've tried to refute them adequately but I figure an actual thread to point to will be more convenient at this point.
Melee cannot currently be played properly online via Dolphin with it's included netplay or any other service.
Here's why:
The way netplay is currently handled for gamecube games involves sending control pad data. Right now a buffer is created for your controller inputs and that buffer is sent to a server, where it is then sent to the other player.
If you have very low latency, that is, less than a 17ms ping (or about one frame) it may play acceptably for a short period of time.
Both games are running independently on different timers. Even if your game clocks are matching perfectly, the internal clock is still going to be off by a large enough margin to disrupt when your button inputs go through and differ the random seed on all events.
A very tiny delay in transmission can mean the difference between shielding and getting hit, and that is enough to cause a desync and make the games different from one another.
There is another issue, randomness within characters. Peach, Luigi, and Game and Watch all have moves which are based on "random" events. Stages like Pokemon Stadium or Fountain of Dreams change based on a "random" timer which will not be the same between two different machines.
There is a solution to this, but it is complicated and time consuming to implement.
In order to prevent desyncs, game memory state data would need to be sent almost every frame. The gamecube memory size is 43MB, which even compressed still weighs in around 15MB. 15MB cannot be sent in 1/60 of a second over nearly any internet connection you will encounter (do you have a 7.03 Gb/s synchronous connection? NOPE.) Luckily we only need a very small chunk of it (the player location, state, and stage data), but isolating that chunk is the hardest part. Until someone invests the time to find the memory locations of level and character data within the memory and alters the dolphin netcode to send and receive memory information there will not be truly functional melee net play.
Melee cannot currently be played properly online via Dolphin with it's included netplay or any other service.
Here's why:
The way netplay is currently handled for gamecube games involves sending control pad data. Right now a buffer is created for your controller inputs and that buffer is sent to a server, where it is then sent to the other player.
If you have very low latency, that is, less than a 17ms ping (or about one frame) it may play acceptably for a short period of time.
Both games are running independently on different timers. Even if your game clocks are matching perfectly, the internal clock is still going to be off by a large enough margin to disrupt when your button inputs go through and differ the random seed on all events.
A very tiny delay in transmission can mean the difference between shielding and getting hit, and that is enough to cause a desync and make the games different from one another.
There is another issue, randomness within characters. Peach, Luigi, and Game and Watch all have moves which are based on "random" events. Stages like Pokemon Stadium or Fountain of Dreams change based on a "random" timer which will not be the same between two different machines.
There is a solution to this, but it is complicated and time consuming to implement.
In order to prevent desyncs, game memory state data would need to be sent almost every frame. The gamecube memory size is 43MB, which even compressed still weighs in around 15MB. 15MB cannot be sent in 1/60 of a second over nearly any internet connection you will encounter (do you have a 7.03 Gb/s synchronous connection? NOPE.) Luckily we only need a very small chunk of it (the player location, state, and stage data), but isolating that chunk is the hardest part. Until someone invests the time to find the memory locations of level and character data within the memory and alters the dolphin netcode to send and receive memory information there will not be truly functional melee net play.