Tekken Producer Katsuhiro Harada Talks to Kayane about GGPO

by Keits on July 17th, 2011 at 9:44 am

Though many topics related to Tekken, the Tekken movie, Tekken X Street Fighter, and Soul Calibur were discussed by Tekken series producer Katsuhiro Harada in the video interview clip below, the part that sticks out most is what he says to Kayane about GGPO netcode technology. Geek in Studio provided this interview, taken at the Japan Expo 2011 in Paris, France.

[via 8wayrun]

CSword123

Nominated for the most random article on the SRK front page.
InFamouZKnight

the voice comparison is pretty funny. he sounds like a japanese business man, and she sounds like she’s from japan tryna speak english but is confusin it with french
- SuperFLI
  
  hilarious, and felt the same about the frenchiness of how she sounded
  - Sexperienced.
    
    isnt she french?
    - The Phantomnaut
      
      Yeah. French and Chinese I believe.
barbicoh

If it were Ono she was interviewing you’d only see him hold a bunch of random game images in obscured angles and speak in limericks all the while holding his Blanka toy in front of the camera so as to block the view of the whole interview.
- Affliction
  
  Dont forget the focus on the camera has to be blurry! LOL
HFX

lol the way he’s sayin “these motherfuckers talkin about ggpo like its some kinda magic dont know jack about network…… bla bla….. you guys better stop with that shit”
xS A M U R A Ix

Her French accent is really cute I think!
PeterIvoryKing

I don’t believe his technical explanation, but I’m so glad he said people look at GGPO as a form of magic. It’s so true. It’s not like you can’t have rollback without it, anyway.
TS

6:15
Taito

did he smash
The Lone Dragon

Harada lookin’ like a Mishima in the Youtube still shot.
k0rr1

Highlights:
- When he calls out GGPO
- When he says txsf is 0% completed.

the ending was kinda of weird, she started moaning.
- PeterIvoryKing
  
  Damn it. I hadn’t watched the end earlier, so I loaded the video back up to hear her moan. Your description was very misleading. So disappointed.
urkangijordi

Yeah the GGPO statement is right on the money. There is a huge misconception that game companies don’t realize there is room for improvement for online play, but there is an even bigger misconception on the quality and availability of broadband to most of the world. Harada couldn’t have made that statement any more clear. GGPO isn’t a magic key.

Of course if anyone wants to prove GGPO will indeed work on 3D fighters, there are emulations of older Tekkens and Virtua Fighters to prove it with.
- Surenio
  
  Or look at the dbz arcade game, tht’s in full 3d, that uses ggpo…..
  - The Phantomnaut
    
    Take into account that Dragon Ball Zenkai was built with GGPO in mind. In result, they were able to implement easily it without any issues such as needing the whole data of the game to actually transfer instead of the necessary elements if the source code was accessed.
    - Surenio
      
      And why shouldn’t new tekken games be built with ggpo in mind? It can be done, As Namco Bandai already showed with said DBZ game. One section of the company gets it, the other doesn’t seem to. Your other comment is rather pointless since the devs sure as hell have access to the source code. It’s not a rom they are tinkering with.
- bitkid
  
  GGPO isn’t free for anyone to just tinker with either. So its not like someone can just grab the source code and start implementing it in their favorite emulator.
D-Proto

the end was akward, but nice interview.
Robo-mitsu

Thank fuck for straight talkin’ Harada. He actually lets us know what’s up.
io

Tekken 6 had some magically shit netcode.
- Tonio
  
  lmao good point
tataki

You need to build the game from day 1 with GGPO in mind. Ponder already said that. You’ll need to compromise on graphics and other stuff for it since GGPO takes a lot of resources. But in the end it’s worth it IMO.
ChampionshipEdition

People don’t understand that even the arcade versions of current 3D games are built with restrictions of porting to PS3 and 360 in mind. If these games were ported to consoles with much more system memory, faster buses and faster CPUs, working in GGPO without sacrificing graphics would be much easier.

He is right. People who don’t understand how games work think GGPO is a magic spell and any developer who doesn’t use it is stupid and lazy. But at least they are starting to talk about it now so hopefully the gaming public gets the point.
booda

Yes, GGPO is not a magical boon that eliminates lag. What it does do is alleviate execution errors due to 2 or 3 frames of lag. That’s what it was intended for, that’s all it does. It doesn’t “cure” lag.
Dannkk

Biggest problem with ggpo is you have the producers on one side, saying it’s not possible, and Tony Cannon on the other, saying it is. Can’t blame him for maintaining his horde of ggpo followers, but who’s telling the truth? Just the idea that Tony Cannon has a lot to lose by devolopers giving up on GGPO leads me to believe that the producers are correct. Producers want pretty games, and Tony Cannon wants them to dumb down the physics and graphics, in order to improve online play. It won’t happen. The casual masses care a lot more for how a game looks, than perfect netplay.
- Ponder
  
  To be 100% clear, my goal is to have these games to be played competitively at as high a level as possible online. If someone else finds a way to do it that’s better than GGPO, by all means I believe we should adopt that technique. Right now GGPO on the whole is a better solution than fixed or variable input delay, which is what most games use.
  
  GGPO uses the CPU to compensate for the latency in the network by executing the game state for a frame several times. If you are using a very large percentage of your CPU to calculate the game state, then this can be an issue. My argument is that using a large percentage of a CPU to calculate the game state for a fighting game is unnecessary. Clock-for-clock 1 core of an XBox 360 (3.2 Ghz) is 200,000 times more powerful than the processor used for Super Street Fighter IV Super Turbo (16 Mhz) and over 100 times more powerful than the processor used for Tekken on the Playstation (33.86 Mhz). The differences in gameplay between ST and SF4 or Tekken 1 and Tekken 6 are not so dramatic as to require a 100x increase in CPU, IMO. It therefore stands to reason that you can use 95% of the CPU to increase the visual fidelity of the scene and still have plenty of CPU available to execute the game and run GGPOs rollback frames. If you design your game in such a way that you burn 20% of the CPU executing the game state, then you will have a problem, but it’s not necessary to design the game that way, especially a 2D, hit-box based game like Marvel or Street Fighter.
  - DeathGun
    
    Knowing them (Ono, Harada and theirs working groups), do you think that after DBZ, Skullgirls and 3SO come out they will stop hidding behind these “its not possible, were using all the CPU to make the game runs ok and theres not enough power for such a “Jumbo” like ggpo”?
    
    Another question, do you think, from a technical point of view, that it’s possible to do a SF4 online edition using GGPO or something similar, for high end PCs (>3ghz quadcores, tons of mem) w/o much effort?
SVN4

Came directly from Chris Hu’s english classes…

Also, i liked his emphasis when talking about listening to SF fans about what they want to see in TKxSF. And being not from Ono makes it even more interesting.
- chaoslimit
  
  ^ Pot calling the kettle black…
Atomsk

i would LOVE to see a soul calibur movie
- AriesWarlock
  
  Me too!
Jazz

harada still the coolest dude in the biz

can we get a kayane vs burnyourbra runback at evo?
Valiantheart

Sounds like a pretty smart cat. Not an empty suit or well paid troll like Ono appears to be.
Shinkada

Even if they DID dumb down the graphics and physics to make GGPO work well, as others have said, it still wouldn’t eliminate lag. It’ll still be a couple decades before you can go online and play the same game as if someone is sitting next to/across from you, so as far as I’m concerned we should just forget online for fighters until it’s viable.

After all if there was no online we wouldn’t have scrubby idiots complaining about Phoenix and X-Factor.
- kedawa
  
  So in a couple of decades the speed of light is going to increase?
christopherblizz

ownage
Tatsumaki_12

I’m so watching asian porn tonight after watching that interview.
Terrastorm

This is from Ravidrath of NeoGAF concerning the interview.

“Yeah, so I asked Mike Z, and he confirmed that there is no technical reason they couldn’t convert their game over to use GGPO.

Originally Posted by Mike Z:
It may be that since their games aren’t frame-based (or possibly are not syncing random seeds) they have to send data like dT and other things… however, everything in a computer is able to be entirely predictable, since there IS no real randomness… it’s just a matter of if they want to do it.

I worked on games with incredibly complex 3D animation systems, and all of them could be predicted simply from inputs.

So even though it may be a lot of work, and they are probably deciding it’s not worth the effort, in the end yeah it’s just “We don’t want to.”

There is zero technical reason why they can’t.

So there you have it from someone who has actually converted his game’s code to use GGPO and implemented it.

GGPO is entirely based on just sending inputs and any other relevant data like character select, random seeds, etc. It takes some restructuring of your code to do that, and what this statement from Namco says that they just don’t think it’s worth doing.”
ruff0123

So what would the masses demand when they finally get their hands on GGPO and it didn’t live up to the hype??? There are going to be a lot of unsatisfied people when it does happens……
- Terrastorm
  
  That’s kind of a foolish question, GGPO has already proven itself. Go play the online client.
Ponder

In case anyone is wondering, I do not believe the technical considerations raised in this interview are very relevant to whether or not GGPO could be applied to a 3D game like Soul Calibur or Tekken. GGPO’s techniques do not require more bandwidth, and people currently play on GGPO all over the world, including areas like eastern Europe and South America which have notoriously narrow and high latency pipes.

Fundamentally, the rollback techniques used in GGPO use excess CPU power to compensate for latency in the network. Though no technique can completely eliminate the effects of latency, the ones employed by GGPO generally provide a better user experience to the input delay techniques used by most online fighting games.
ironboy89

I don’t you reading that right. His main point stays consistent for the entire paragraph. Even his beginning paragraph is pretty consistent to the point that there is no techinal reason why GGPO couldn’t work.

Even than, i’d say he has more knowledge than you do considering that he actually programs a game in the first place.
ironboy89

@ sorry for the triple post, but my post is replying to Windisago.
Cauldrath

I wonder if one of the bigger problems with 3D games is developers being dependent on particle systems, which don’t seem like they would be very friendly with GGPO, because they require a great deal of processing power, depending on particle count and complexity, and they are dependent on the previous frame’s data.

Animated textured quads for everything, then? Or has someone come up with a good solution for a GGPO-friendly particle engine?
SendMaster

I wonder what type of game-data is compressed before transmitting.

@Ironboy89 predicting inputs wouldn’t be the right approach as some inputs are used to exploit the game engine. Eg: plinking, wave-dashing.
(not criticizing, but trying to understand)

If GGPO uses more cpu processing the cell-processor architecture is perfect for this. You could assign one/more of the slave processors for handling roll-back. I wish the dev’s could be more vocal about this.
HFX

maybe if they used ggpo people wont go to arcades anymore…… ggpo arcades……
randomjohn

I don’t know why but I find a cute Asian chick like Kayane with a French accent pretty sexy haha.
PROnetwork_117

YEEEEAH, ZERO PERCENT!! XD
J.S.P

Good interview, I just need to know one thing. What kind of shades does Harada have, those things are damn awesome?
ANewChallenger

Repulsive French accent is repulsive. Maybe this’ll get some of you guys off that chick’s nuts, but judging by the comments thusfar… =_=
Diernes

I don’t buy what harada is saying. I am with Ponder on this… You people can live in denial all you like I think the reality is Namco just cant be arsed building their games around decent netcode. They only care about their arcade games…

and the bottom line is, if it’s really a technical limitation of the consoles I want to see new hardware before tekken x SF comes out….
ihira

Hah.
Harada does a pretty good job at twisting answers as you can tell by the number of comments actually believing what he says.
Notice how he failed to give a technical explaination to why ggpo netcode cannot be inplemented? instead tries to convince the viewers that ggpo doesnt work for our games period, it uses too much bandwidth (which is absolutely untrue).

I would beliwve Ponder or Mike Z any day over the developer that makes some laggy shit netcode (tekken)
PANDEMlC

Kayane, the perfect women. Non annoying accent, asian, and a gamer. <3
Data Beast

It looks like we can write Namco off for the rest of this console generation. Maybe they’ll get their act together when they’re forced to rewrite code for the next generation of consoles.

Lets hope Dimps does the right thing with SFxT.
Pasky

I’ll do everyone a favor and tell you all the GGPO talks starts about 6:45 the rest is just stupid BS.
Sadistic Masochist

not a bad interview.
Pingback: Entrevista a Katsuhiro Harada por Kayane | ArcadiaFighters
ironboy89

“I worked on games with incredibly complex 3D animation systems, and all of them could be predicted simply from inputs.”
I like how you ignore this part of the interview.