What's new in the game?

New music

The Lemony Bard stroke again, with a new piece inspired by the Video Game Sage:

It also seems that we did not have a video of the last music, Fusolis by Lemony Bard, ready for the latest release note. Here it is:

Note that you can find all Super Tilt Bro.'s original music videos in the dedicated YouTube Playlist.

Story

The layout of the first "Break The Target" stage has been changed. The idea is to make it easier, it is still the beginning of the game but already forced the player to triple-jump above the void and attack in the air after a jump with a super strict timing. All this has been simplified or at least made more secure.

Kiki

Kiki's wall-jump and parachute ability have been buffed to help her recover from low positions. She can now land on platform after a wall-jump, make her the only character with this option.

Sunny

Sunny got a lot of small buffs to make her combos more reliable. It was frustrating to play a combo-oriented character that had no true combos. Here's the list of changes:

Aerial side startup decrease

Aerial side hitbox now sends the opponent away

Jab: second and third hit connect more easily

Down tilt: increased inflicted hitstun

Uptilt: decreased hitlag

Aerial down: increased last hitbox power

What's new under the hood?

Improved netcode

Launching then maintaining a game require to focus on the most impacting parts to keep a healthy rhythm. Now that Super Tilt Bro. development found its cruising speed, there is some time to work on technicalities and, as a result, the netcode is now more resilient to bad connections.

The focus was on better handling of packet loss. That is, when the NES sends a message to the server, but it never arrives, being lost on the internet. It happens from times to times, notably for players too far from their Wi-Fi hotspot.

First of all, players inputs are sent regularly. Originally it happened only when the player pressed or released a button. You can imagine how catastrophic it is to lose the message to stop running at the hedge of a cliff. It also has a side effect of helping both NES to keep in sync by technically forcing a resync regularly. We have yet to see if it helps emulators with unstable framerate to stay in a reasonable time windows with the other NES.

A common problem in lagging environment was that a player saw the game as finished while the other found a way to avoid losing at the very last moment. To avoid that, the NES now waits for a confirmation by the server that the game is really over before proceeding to show a winner.

A less common problem was losing the message that starts the game. You go to matchmaking, the server finds an opponent for you, a message is sent to you and your opponent telling to start the game, both NES start a countdown and launch the game. If this message was lost for a player, the other would be alone in the game. To remedy that, the message is now sent three times during the countdown, so missing one or two is still OK. Also, the message contains the countdown value, even without missing any it helps time synchronization as the NES uses the one which took the less time transiting in the network.

Not due to the lag nor missing packets, a problem that often happened when two players tried to play with each other was "ghost connections." In Super Tilt Bro.'s protocol someone in the matchmaking queue has to regularly send a message to the server to stay in queue. After five seconds without such message, the player is removed from matchmaking, it ensures peoples rapidly go out of the queue even if their connection cut abruptly. Explicitly leaving the queue used the same system. It was often enough but sometimes a player leaved the queue and their friend joined less than five seconds later, starting a game with only one player actually playing. There is now a dedicated message in the protocol for leaving the queue immediately, which should avoid most cases of ghost connections.