Hello, Skullfans! Yes, hello. It's me! Did you miss me? :^)
WHAT
A member of our very own Skullgirls community came up with a way to improve online play! So I'm trying it out...the worse your connection to your opponent usually is, the more improvement you should see. It should make long distances like US <-> EU more playable, and possibly help with wi-fi or bad connections, but it's not gonna suddenly be perfect everywhere it wasn't before.
HOW
Join the ggpotest branch and play online!
- In your Steam Library, rightclick Skullgirls
-> choose Properties
-> choose the "Betas" tab at the top
-> in the box, type goodgamepeaceout and CLICK "Check Code". PRESSING ENTER WILL JUST CLOSE THE WINDOW WITHOUT DOING ANYTHING, so don't do that. :^P
-> it will say "access code correct"
-> in the "opt into" dropdown menu right there, choose "ggpotest"
And you're all good! Go play online!
Note that you CANNOT play this branch against people who have the normal version. I think.
But if you can, it won't break anything, but only the player in the branch will see any possible improvement.
WHAT again
because WHY, WHO, and WHERE didn't really seem appropriate
Normally, when GGPO detects that your game is ahead of the other player's inputs by too much, the game will wait for a small amount of time during which nothing happens. That's standard. However, Skullgirls has frameskip - that is, it runs faster than normal by 'skipping' rendering one frame out of every seven. So instead of simply waiting, now when GGPO detects that your game is ahead, it will simply not skip frames sometimes, rather than waiting, to slow down little by little and allow the other player to catch up without interfering with gameplay. Hopefully.
tl;dr - There should be less dropped inputs in bad connections.
I tested it a bit in a California-UK match, and it did seem to make a noticeable difference. Let us know if it works for you, I guess!