Firo,
We're currently in pre-alpha stages and I'm not too keen on the idea of a dev blog until we have a functional internal alpha(which should be soonish, it's dependent on my work schedule, unfortunately). I'm doing what I can, but I don't want to have elaborated on a description of something and then end up backtracking if it doesn't pan out. You also get a lot of unsolicited "advice" when your development efforts are highly visible. I don't like being called lazy when I just coded for 10 hours at work and want to go home and not do that for a few nights.
Having worked in the modding/dev communities on a few other games (Jedi Knight 2, Red Faction, and RPG Maker mostly) people tend to do these things to you.
The current modus operandi is not to sync all memory information every frame (that's not feasible, there's still too much data for an average connection) but to do a rolling sync over all pertinent data, with location information synced once every few frames and stock/percentage information every 10-20 or so. We're still in efforts to isolate the current action state location in memory, which will be another thing we'll likely sync at the same time as location information. I'm currently coding a hybrid UDP/TCP scheme to communicate this data as quickly and seamlessly as possible, but it's pretty slow going.
The key reason we're going out of our way to do this instead of simply removing randomness from the game and continuing on key-sending is that melee cannot be emulated very well on modern hardware in single core mode.
"Dual Core" mode is not technically using both cores necessarily, it's really a mode that allows the CPU thread to run freely from the Video thread, causing another source of desynchronization which made netplay non-viable in it's current state.
KingClubber said:
Wouldn't trying a setup like OnLive work, Virtually Streaming Video from one computer to another, but allowing the other Computer the ability to control as well?
For example: TightVNC -
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xyCZj4-sLkI
If you set up a safe community, hosting wouldn't be a problem.
Yes, something like OnLive would work, but it would likely be very laggy.
The overhead of compressing and sending video/audio can be pretty substantial, couple that with a dubious ping and the game would end up with a pretty noticeable delay.
We're basically doing the same thing, but we don't have to send as much data as a video stream. Our efforts are designed to make the two separate computers emulating Melee behave as if they were directly sharing the same virtual Gamecube RAM.
