

#STONEHEARTH GAME IDEAS SOFTWARE#
That brings us to today: About 1.5 years ago, they both quit excellent jobs as senior software engineers at Silicon Valley darling VMWare to pursue their dream of making their own game, Stonehearth. The technology alone is such a big deal to the hardcore players that it’s even called out in promotional game trailers, and had fans making their own “GGPO” t-shirts - not something you usually see with an arcane piece of technical middleware. Home-brewed but technologically sophisticated, GGPO became so popular that it was eventually licensed and implemented by traditional game developers, including Iron Galaxy, Skullgirls, and even Capcom itself.

GGPO however was an instant hit with players worldwide, who boggled at their arcade-like game quality even with opponents across the country or around the world. Even when this works at all, it still sucks. Usually you have to relearn your timing for slower online speeds, and even that’s not really a solution as connection speeds are variable, so you have to learn many multiples of things and then gauge the speed you’re actually playing at for each connection. Rather than taking the previously standard brute force approach of peer-to-peer packets, by understanding the core of fighting games deeply, Tony was able to hide online latency within what are called “fixed frames” within the game, doing subtle one-frame fast forwards or rewinds of your game state to keep both players in sync with a centralized clock, and preserving the all-important feel of immediacy and allowing players’ carefully honed muscle memory to actually work consistently.
#STONEHEARTH GAME IDEAS PC#
He created a piece of online middleware called GGPO (short for “Good Game, Peace Out”) for free, compatible with emulated games on PC (which are legal so long as the player owns a legit copy of the game as well). Disappointed with the situation, Tony Cannon decided to solve the problem that had eluded major studios himself. Even ports of older fighters that did have online play were so laggy that they were virtually unplayable. They organised the first large-scale fighting game tournaments (in 1996), went on to found fighting game supersite emerged to recent notoriety).Ģ006. In the fighting game world, they are not unknowns, and are universally recognised as founding fathers. I met Tony after Tom, but they are a pretty amazing pair (and I refer to them together because they are identical twins, and have always worked together at the same companies and lived close together). I’ve known Tom for 20 years and he’s become one of my best friends. Remember when all of a sudden playing a fighting game online wasn’t a horribly laggy experience? The Cannon-created GGPO middleware was to thank for that.īut, you should really listen to Seth Killian, developer at Sony Santa Monica and a legendary fighting games icon in his own right talk about the Cannon Bros. Ever visited Shoryuken, the leading website for fans of that genre? It’s another brainchild of theirs. Heard of EVO, the world-renowned fighting game tournament? They started it with their friends. You almost certainly know of what they’ve done, though.
