Legionmaster wrote:Mr. Strange wrote:The difficulty comes with cutscenes - either in-game or comic-style. If we allow for that, then the two players can get somewhat out of sync (or we don't allow them to skip the cutstenes - not a good idea...).
Could you elaborate on what this concern is?
Multiplayer fighting requires that 2-4 machines have identical data. When we start the game, we know the exact state of everything - but every time you touch the controller, or a random number is generated (like an AI vehicle) or anything else happens - the two machines need to coordinate and make sure that they are still in an identical state.
There are several ways to go about this - all rather technical and uninteresting. But let's summarize by saying that "lag" is when one machine doesn't agree with another, and they have to decide which version of the game (mine or yours) should become the official version - and correct any "wrong" machines.
Video playback is limited by how quickly the video can be loaded into memory. So if you have faster memory on your PC than I do, you will start your video slightly sooner. But then when you start the game, I will be slightly out of step with your game. This makes it difficult or even impossible for our two games to sync up, since we don't start together with known data.
Fighting games are 10x harder in this respect than shooters. Shooting games only really need to coordinate on character positions and shot events - a tiny fraction of the data in a 4-player brawler. This means that while shooters can recover from pretty bad sync errors, fighters just die. This is also one reason fighting sessions tend to be short - because keeping coordination for 30-40 minutes online becomes increasingly difficult.
Rise of the Kaiju! 
