Some games just refuse to die, nearly 18 years later and three sequels later Super Smash Bros Melee continues to be played and loved by people all around the world. The dedicated Melee community has not only preserved their game but have breathed new life into it by adding a state of the art online multiplayer matchmaking system, something which even the newest entries in the series Super Smash Bros Ultimate lacks. The new online multiplayer utilizes a rollback netcode which significantly reduces lag and results in a nearly local multiplayer experience even with players in different regions. The project was created by Slippi, which had been used in Melee to record replays and provide useful statistics about players in real time. The rollback netcode that Melee uses was even more surprisingly developed in less than six months by Fizzi. The brilliance of rollback is that it avoids the common problems associated with most fighting games that use delayed base netcode which causes stuttering and freezing unless both players have a near perfect connection. With rollback netcode, it never waits for input of the opponent and basically predicts what will happen and the adjusts the frames once they are received. With careful optimization a player will not even notice this change and will only see the successful corrections from both players. The reason predications work so well is that we can assume most of the time when a player has already pressed an input, we just have to figure out how often they change their inputs which turns out can be quite easy to predict. Rollback has essentially solved the plague many online fighting games face and drastically improves the quality of multiplayer in games like Melee. The future of Melee has never been brighter and hopefully this multiplayer will also cause newer players to experience the beauty of Super Smash Bros Melee for the Nintendo Gamecube.
Noah670 