Sup people. I just played Capcom vs SNK 2 on xbox live a few weeks ago and while it was cool to be able to find human competition at any time of the day what irked me about playing the game online was the latency. You see, street fighter and most other traditional fighting games are designed around precise timing on the part of the player, super fast gameplay, and almost instant reaction times for your character. This is perfect when playing some one right next to you but breaks down on the net. The gameplay system of traditional fighting games arent designed to handle latency in player controls. My question to you is: How can you design a fighting gameplay system that doesnt require precise timing and yet still remains deep, competitive for the players, and fast?

Well there is always going to be some latency since its online. But I can''t imagine that a fighting game would have noticable lag. Afterall in theory all you need to do is transmit which buttons are pressed as they are pressed to the other machine. I couldn''t imagine that amounting to more then a few bytes of data.

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Writer, Programer, Cook, I''m a Jack of all Trades
Current Design project
Chaos Factor Design Document

One Must Fall: Battlegrounds is an online fighting game. didnt try it tho.

Wow, such an intriguing question.

Unfortunately, all the solutions I''m coming up with end up less like fighting games and more like the battle systems of RPG''s.

The typical way to reduce the effect of latency on design is to have the player input higher level concepts, and let the AI choose the specific course of action.

So something like choosing advance vs. retreat, starting range (throw, punch, kick -- short ranges have longer combos with more damage, longer ranges preempt shorter ones), block vs. evade vs. attack.

I can''t picture this looking anything like a fighting game. It''s probably be more like a simple turn based strategy.