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Online: What it Would Take to Have an Online Competitive Ikemen Community (Read 16931 times)

Started by EVILED, July 31, 2021, 07:51:56 am
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Online: What it Would Take to Have an Online Competitive Ikemen Community
#1  July 31, 2021, 07:51:56 am
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So, this has been on my mind for a long time lately. I’ve been thinking about a lot of things regarding this.

One of the key things I do miss in Ikemen GO (which I will simply call Ikemen from this point onward) compared with other fighters such as street fighter 5 is a thriving community. Playing against other people, to me at least, is far more interesting than playing against computers most of the time.

That said, Ikemen is uniquely positioned to have a lot of problems with this. It’s of absolutely no fault of the program’s developers. It derives from the very nature of the project itself.

I will no go forth to innumerate the problems facing us. I think there should be a place where these problems are named, numbered, and possible solutions are discussed if we are ever going to get a thriving online community for Ikemen.

1: Master Server List

The first and biggest problem is that nobody can find anyone to play with. A Master Server List would solve this problem.

Right now, you have to either personally introduce Ikemen to a friend or find some random person online. This task is slow, sluggish, and will never develop a thriving online community.

I defer to the Doomseeker launcher as the type of idea that would need to be implemented. The reasons for this are clear to me.

One might ask, at first, why not simply add the ability to search a Master Server List into Ikemen itself instead of creating a multi-platform Free Software Launcher for the game as a separate program? I know I asked myself this.

Well, the reason is simple; really. Ikemen needs to have mirror versions on everyone’s computer to work online (just the nature of any online game engine) and everyone’s Ikemen is different. Everyone adds different characters, stages, and changes different pertinent settings to the game.

Even something as simple as enabling zoom may change syncing issues (I would assume that it would) because it would change where the screen barrier is for the different players as the person with zoom will have a dynamically growing and shrinking screen while the person without zoom will have a static screen in this regard.

Because of this, the only real way for a Master Server List to work is to go into point two.

2: Downloading the Game Instance From the Server

Similar to how ID Tech Engine games (like classic Doom and Quake Games) have to download all the needed mods from the server to allow access to joining players in a sane way (instead of giving them ‘file not there’ errors and telling them to go find the downloads on the Internet somewhere themselves) the Sever is going to need an option so that when someone joins who has never played before; they simply download the entire Game Instance of Ikemen from the server hosting on the Master Server List. That way they get a perfect mirror, the characters, stages, pertinent games settings; everything.

This is the only sane way I can think of doing this. Otherwise, you’re telling people to go out to the Internet and try to find all this content themselves.

3: Competitive Games

Someone is going to have to create a community agreed upon game for Ikemen that is competitive; meaning fairly balanced. This is going to be difficult to do because everyone is going to want their favorite characters in the game and deciding as a community on which characters are fair for competition and which ones are not is going to be difficult.

This is solved, to some extent, with games that have a single theme. But, a lot of people are going to want that ‘random’ flavor that Ikemen can provide of Squidward fighting Big Bird.

There would need to be established a testing and ranking community for this collection project.

4: Character Tier Ranking

To go along with point three, you’d really need a tier ranking system so that every type of character can be included. Maybe have like six or so instances of the engine hosted that offer fair play at different ranking. That way super boss characters are only included with each other and normal characters are only included in their own instance.

5: Leader Board and Match Making

Each game instance should really keep track of high scores and each person’s performance on the server’s end. That way people can show their high scores off and have proper Match Making. That way noobs are not thrown up against pros. Few things kill an online competitive community more quickly than throwing noobs up against pros.

6: Legal

Point two, sadly, leads into point six. I think, honestly, that point six is the hardest difficulty we have. Sense the only sane way to do this is to allow game instance downloads from the server for new players; that puts the sever host at risk for enabling copyright infringement every time they host a server with Homer Simpson or Ronald McDonald on it and someone downloads this. Each and every single download could easily be about a hundred acts of copyright infringement.

I have now idea how to prevent this; as the law really sucks for situations like this. I am honestly surprised as many mugen content hosting platforms exist as they do now for characters and stages. I think companies let it go because it’s seen as fan projects. But, if Ikemen being played online became popular; I could see this potentially being a big problem in the future.

These are the six points I see as being problems that would need to be solved if a real, competitive, online Ikemen community were ever to truly become a thing. Otherwise, the online mode is nice, but is very difficult to find anyone to play with.
Re: Online: What it Would Take to Have an Online Competitive Ikemen Community
#2  July 31, 2021, 08:36:13 am
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UMT Season #2 - 2nd Place
UMT Season #3 - 1st Place
CvS2 vs POTS Season #1 - 1st Place
NorCal Crab Battle CvS2 - 2nd Place
Re: Online: What it Would Take to Have an Online Competitive Ikemen Community
#3  July 31, 2021, 11:31:19 pm
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Last Edit: August 01, 2021, 12:17:27 am by EVILED
Re: Online: What it Would Take to Have an Online Competitive Ikemen Community
New #4  August 01, 2021, 06:35:40 pm
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Yeah, you can join my discord if you want. Let me know if you wanna join.

You can make requests when you join and we'll add your chars in for the next tourney. Plus, you can meet our fighters.
UMT Season #2 - 2nd Place
UMT Season #3 - 1st Place
CvS2 vs POTS Season #1 - 1st Place
NorCal Crab Battle CvS2 - 2nd Place
Last Edit: August 02, 2021, 06:21:58 pm by extravagant
Re: Online: What it Would Take to Have an Online Competitive Ikemen Community
#5  August 02, 2021, 01:22:31 pm
  • *****
  • WIP: Tons and tons of IKEMEN stages
Current release: SF vs MK, fully interactive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7bM9DpmVXOA