Fighting-Game Netcode Comes to Brood War

In a new video, a group of enthusiasts walks through their experiment: porting the kind of networking model associated with fighting games into StarCraft: Brood War, a real-time strategy title that dates back to the previous century.

Fighting games are notoriously demanding when it comes to netcode. Matches are decided in fractions of a second, and any lag is felt acutely. That is why the genre popularized an approach in which a client does not wait for confirmation from its opponent but instead predicts the opponent's inputs immediately and, when the real data arrives, rolls the game state back if needed. To the player, this feels like a nearly instant response even over an imperfect connection.

Carrying this scheme over into a strategy game is far from trivial, if only because the two genres are built differently and the original game was designed around the networking logic of a very different era. The very fact that it could be bolted onto a classic title is what makes the story worth telling.

Unfortunately, the details live in the video itself: there is no accompanying write-up for the material, so anyone curious about the technical specifics of the implementation should turn to the original source.

Source: Lobsters