Brawlback Progress Report #3

2023 was a fruitful year for Brawlback, and as the year comes to a close I want to take a moment to look back on the progress made between now and the last report in April. This progress report will be split-up into sections; one for each major active feature of Brawlback.

Matchmaking

Since our last update in April, the transition from the Dolphin pane to an in-game menu has been going smoothly; the bulk of the work is finished with some remaining items needing to be wrapped up, as well as a general sweep for code quality and efficiency still needing to take place before release.

WhiteTPoison has been hard at work reworking the WIFI menus for randomized matchmaking purposes, with the current workflow being visible here.

The remaining items include:

• Fixing a bug that prevents matchmaking from proceeding intermittently, causing the player to be stuck in the training room until closing out of the game.
• Hooking up the "direct connect" workflow, allowing for connection to your friends instead of random other Lylat users.
• Hookup end of game reporting.
• General code cleanliness and workflow efficiency improvements.

Rollback

WhiteTPoison has spent the previous few months making general improvements to the input system, as rollback in its current state had a few glaring issues in this department: pausing didn't work as intended, shielding would cause desyncs, and the player 2's shield would also trigger player 1's shield. All of these problems have been fixed, as input detection and handling was moved to the moment the controller button is pressed, instead of at the beginning of the frame increment.

After moving input handling, however, rollbacks have started crashing and desyncing the game in relation to the savestate again in niche situations, such as turnarounds and while in landing lag.

The remaining items include:

• Fix the remaining savestate bugs.
• Add desync detection and handling for instances where a desync is still present after rolling back.
• General code cleanliness and workflow efficiency improvements.

Conclusion

While we have made vast strides towards our goal, 2024 will be a period of further growth for the project, as we wrap-up development on rollback and matchmaking. I want to continue to give thanks to our Patrons and the broader Brawl and modded Brawl communities, as well as anyone who contributed to the project this year, even in an advisory role, including Sammi Huski, Kapedani, Fudgepop01, Motobug, Bird, blasphemous, Believer, and Rapito.

Thanks for reading and happy new year,

WhiteTPoison and the rest of the Brawlback team