Capcom's Christian Svensson hit up the Unity Boards again this morning to discuss what it would take to patch Street Fighter 4.In Street Fighter IV, why can't people filter out other players with bad connections? Also, how about being able to save all replays to your hard drive, a lobby system and improving the net code with GGPO?
You guys aren't doing enough to follow up on the game. You're holding out on us.
It wouldn't take THAT much programming time to do most of this, I have experience here, and by my math this would all cost about $30,000 to $60,000. Why can't it be done?
Sven: Any patch on a game of this complexity costs far more than your back of the envelope estimate... tens (multiple) of times more.
For something simple, a patch is often the least expensive part of the work, though what you're proposing is a complete architectural overhaul of the network code, memory allocation/mapping (to handle gamestate tracking for rewind) and graphics pipeline to account for the overhead required in GGPO or similar rewind tech to keep the game running at 60fps. No single one of those elements is trivial. Together it's a massive undertaking... not some throwaway exercise. If you're as knowledgeable as you say you are, you should recognize that. It's not just ripping out a chunk of code and pasting in something else.
Then there's retesting the entire game to see if a solution was actually delivered (and there's almost nothing more expensive than network testing) and to verify the "fix" didn't break anything else. The cost of test could easily exceed the cost of the "improvement". Testing isn't "two guys" playing each other. It's dozens of sessions with dozens of testers around the world just for the network portions. Then there's dozens more playing for dozens of hours in a resweep, soak tests, etc.
I'm sorry you're not satisfied with the experience. I hope future title's implementations are more to your liking. Is it perfect? No, and no game ever is perfect. I think it's fair to say that we still maintain SFIV's network code is more than serviceable for its needs and far better than the vast majority of its competition.
