Rich Whitehouse, the creator behind BigPEmu, is set to launch his new and improved Killer Instinct emulator in beta. Initially a fully-commercial project, funding had been pulled back in March this year, but now it seems that enough support has come through on Patreon to keep the development going.
According to Rich Whitehouse’s statement, the beta release will be made available in just a few days, giving fans of the classic fighting game an exciting opportunity to try out what could very well be the best way to experience Killer Instinct and Killer Instinct 2.
Some key features include:
- Silky Smooth Multiplayer
- Brand New Stereo Sound Script
- Fast MIPS III Interpreter
You can gain access to the emulator by backing Rich on Patreon.
What aspects of this new emulator do you think will most improve the gameplay experience?
This was my fighting game back in the day.
“Silky smooth Multiplayer”? Rollback then? Wich would make sense since in many cases rollbacks destroy the sound sync so anouncing a new sound script is because you have to to do a new one. I can’t imagine the nightmare it would be.
I never thought about how rollback would affect audio. Thats a really good point. Ideally, rollback would trigger a re-fire of whatever audio script it needed to locally, right? I wonder if KIs original netcode is sending some audio cues over the network and that’s the work around.
AFAIK it refires sometimes but usually it keeps playing on frames it shouldn’t ot cuts off totally. Depending how the engine work it could even disable the audio channel cause the audio buffer never sent the signal that it stopped playing. It basically takes a whole subsystem to resync the audio to the lost frames.
Again this is all AFAIK someone with better knowledge can come and correct me.That’s crazy. I’m clearly not an expert either but what you’re saying makes a lot of sense though - at least, to my dumb ass lol. Its probably one of the reasons why I hear its so hard to implement. One day I’ll dive deeper on it.
GGPO is one of the oldest if not the first, but best implementations of rollback netcode there is, AFAIK is used by fightcade. I’d say is the best place to start reading they have good socs and is MIT license.
Oh yeah, Im pretty sure it was the first one and I think it was created by one of the cannon brothers. Idk if you’re into fighting games like that but they started evo and are currently the lead developers on Riot’s 2xko. Great dudes, super smart. Blew my mind when I found out.
I dont know much about Game dev, other than its really hard. I’m more into the networking & infrastructure side. Thats what drew me in to rollback in the first place. I’ve also been playing fighting games for longer than I care to admit lol
I might have heard of fightcade before but I didn’t know what it was until you mentioned it. It sound amazing, Im definitely going to check it out. Good looks!
