I’ve been playing Super Smash Bros. Melee online cause I’m a dweeb and it’s the only fighting-adjacent game I’ve ever been decent at.
The netcode in the Dolphin emulator used to be delay-based but someone in the Melee community (who had previously worked on a replay and real-time stat tracking system for Melee tournaments) quit his job and starting working on rollback netcode for Melee in Dolphin full time.
7 months later (last week) he finally finished the thing, and it’s pretty incredible. Before, if you didn’t have like 20 ping the game played considerably slower than it did locally, but now you can play at CRT-levels of delay (2 frames) at up to ~110 ping with only minor visual rollbacks. This dude gave a nearly 20 year old game better net code than the most recent Smash has.
The other really neat thing is that he implemented matchmaking directly in the game itself. It’s no longer necessary to use some third party site or tool to find people to play against. You literally just launch dolphin, select “Online” from the menu, select your character, and press start to start matchmaking.
I think this might single-handedly rejuvenate the Melee scene, which was floundering a bit due to social distancing. There are still things that need implemented (like a ranking system, so new players don’t just get destroyed), but I’m kind of in awe how well this is implemented, especially because I didn’t think this was even possible from an engineering perspective.