Street Fighter IV, the game that basically revived the fighting game genre back in 2009 and gave birth (not literally) to a new subset of players lovingly referred to as ‘09ers’, saw its final iteration in 2014’s Ultra Street Fighter IV. While it wasn’t the most perfectly balanced game, it’s remembered fondly by its players and is viewed by many as the last vestige of ‘honest Street Fighter’. It’s also burdened with being limited to delay-based netcode rather than the more modern and more stable rollback netcode, but this is something modders are attempting to fix. Using genAI. Sorry if I got your hopes up.

To quickly explain why the different netcode matters, delay-based netcode handles latency issues by variably delaying inputs to match unstable connection, while rollback netcode removes this delay by accepting inputs immediately and then reversing the game state (rolling back) if the connection instability causes inconsistency between players. All of this to say, rollback has become the industry standard for its stability since the mid 2010s, leaving delay-based to rot in input-eating hell.

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