After 12 years, Ultra Street Fighter IV gets not one, but two connection-stabilising rollback netcode mods aaaand they're both made using Claude

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.

The prospect of USFIV being modded to have rollback stapled on should be cause for celebration — as it initially was with a seemingly abandoned mod from a few years ago by Wren theenby — but, as continues to happen with these fanmade mods, remakes, recomps and decomps in the current era, both of the new projects were made with generative AI. I really wish this wasn’t just the way things are now.

Faabi’s ‘SF4Enhanced’ and Kabiefox’s ‘SF4 Ember’, both released in the last few weeks and proudly offer rollback netcode and private rooms, alongside the very appealing element of being coded with the assistance of Anthropic’s Claude. In writing this, I’ve also found that Faabi has abandoned SF4Enhanced entirely, stating that they “don’t have the time to deliver what this community deserves”, and also seemingly finding no irony in admitting they “had barely written any C++ before.” They encourage the community to stick with Ember, as if that isn’t also just as tainted by Claude. Evidently, this hasn’t stopped a lot of people, as both mods seem to be getting a lot of play, but it’s a pretty easy line in the sand for me. I’ll take delay-based netcode over slop.