by Blake Chapman A member of /r/StreetFighter reverse engineered a solution to Street Fighter V’s 4-year-old netcode issue in two days. The modder, who goes by ‘Altimor’ on Reddit, posted the fix on January 9 to /r/StreetFighter with a download link along with source code and instructions. They cite the bugs of Street Fighter V’s online mode along with Capcom’s negligence as the key reasons behind coming up with a solution. Other players are not required to have the solution downloaded, but it is still possible for one-sided rollback to occur on their end if they do not have it. Fighting game netcode was not something that Altimor had previously encountered while modding. “It was a bit harder than most UE4 [Unreal Engine 4] games. Street Fighter V uses an entirely custom networking solution, so the UE4 source code didn’t help me,” said Altimor in a Reddit direct message. Ever since launch, the latest iteration in the Street Fighter franchise has been plagued with issues stemming primarily from online play. Even when two player’s games are synced, the game loop, which includes everything from controller inputs to character animations, can lag behind. This issue is compounded when a packet of frames is transported between players, and inputs up to 15 frames or a quarter of a second late can cause artificial lag. While this occurs for one player, the other continues the match like nothing ever happened. Reaction from the fighting game community has been mostly positive—the original post on /r/StreetFighter has close to 3,000 upvotes and a repost on /r/Games has over 6,000. However, the program is only available for PC, and if downloaded, can seal off the Playstation 4 players from crossplay. Rest assured, Altimor does have a patch in the works. As for Capcom, they are aware of the newfound solution and Street Fighter Executive Producer Yoshinori Ono took to Twitter stating, “I’ll try hard to win back your trust.”
