Re: promoting swos online

At the risk of sounding like a broken record...the terrible netcode and the inherent user-unfriendliness of the WinUAE/Kaillera combo are holding the game back, in my opinion.

As of now only the most haijin, die-hard fans among the potential SWOS playerbase are willing to put up with so much shit (disconnections, desynchs and the whole ultra-convoluted process of setting up a game) and I ve had plenty of friends who were absolutely crazy about Sensible Soccer back in the 90 s giving up on SWOS Online because they could not make the emulator work properly (compatibility issues, frame rate problems, the game freezes, there s no sound, controllers won t work and so forth, you know the deal).

And then there s lag. Sure you can get accustomed to it, however it s still going to edulcorate the gameplay in a way or another, oftentimes to the point where it doesn t feel like playing SWOS anymore.

Tell you what, I ve been playing a lot of Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike on 2DF/Starcade as of late and it s such a relaxing experience in comparison; you boot up the emulator which pops up as a tiny browser-like window with integrated chat, click twice on a name on the list and if the opponent accepts the Challenge message bam, the game starts and you re playing within seconds from logging in. After the match the replay will be up on the website (anybody can watch it anytime) and the results/data/statistics will be automatically submitted.

How friggin cool is that (2DF is totally free and was coded by just 1 person btw)?

Furthermore the netcode was specifically designed to allow people to play over long distances with minimal input delay/lag (case in point, CAPCOM just bought the rights to implement the netcode into their PSN/XBLA retro-games such as the upcoming Final Fight and in the future iterations of the Street Fighter franchise, yet no one would believe me when I was advocating the use of this on the forums like a year ago...), so you can play with people in the US orJapan without issues of sort (as opposed to SWOS where most of the times you re getting awful lag even with people from your own country) almost as if you were playing offline.

I tried to convince the people behind this stuff (mainly damdai, 2DF/Starcade creator) to add SWOS to their games library (PM ed/email ed em, posted on their forums about SWOS to raise awareness, pointed them to the ss.de website etc.) but couldn t do much in the end because after all I m just a very passionate fan who cannot, in any way, shape or form speak on the SWOS community behalf, however if the SWOS United representatives (talking about the alleged company , not the forums) get serious about this and contact them explaining that there s thousands of people actively playing the game day-in, day-out, some of which might also be fine with paying a couple Euros for a better overall experience, odds are that this could be done.

For those who re interested here s a few screenshots of the old 2DF web-based interface (there s plenty of videos on YouTube as well):





The aforementioned Challenge pop-up:



GGPO GUI (same deal, slightly different netcode):



playing 3s on GGPO with an american dude: 0 lag



tl;dr: we need to wake up and get with the times if we want to appeal a wider audience

see ruichi...no one gives a damn lol, kinda sad though cause with 1/5 of the money people collectively paid to go to the SensiDays last year we could prolly get the online revamped.

I guess the majority of people would rather see the movement s(hr)ink into forgetfulness due to the aforementioned reasons (obsolescence of the netcode/middleware, etc., I think we re still relying on stuff which dates back to 2003...) than change. Fair enough.

That being said I ll most likely keep playing SWOS forever regardless anyway hehe...taking the online competition seriously is just kinda difficult given the circumstances though.

I ll try to contact damdai again then, he s just updated 2DF with an even more refined interface and I ve heard he s looking for donations to keep the site running, so it might be a good moment to ask.

@Bomb

that s the number of players that were either playing or chilling in those particular rooms (SSFIIT and 3rd Strike) at the time.

There s like thousands of people on GGPO/2DF/Starcade at any given time since each site supports hundreds of games, mostly beat em up s and shoot em up s from the bitmap graphics golden age such as Street Fighter, King of Fighters, Marvel Vs. Capcom, Metal Slug, 1942 and so forth.

due to the brilliant netcode playing over long distances isn t as bad as with Kaillera. I can play just fine with japanese and americans (think of a 2~ frames delay match in our current SWOS) and the game feels just like the offline counterpart while playing with europeans.

Ejder-z would love this stuff hehe.

the emulator also runs Megadrive/Genesis games, so technically it s possible...they just need to write Amiga drivers for it.

Anyway, damdai gave me the contact of the guy who wrote the emulator and I ll be mailing him over the weekend. Stay tuned.