Hey everyone, sorry for making yet another ShieldBattery-related thread, but this update deserves it imo. Considered a holy grail in competitive online games by many, especially in fighting games communities, rollback netcode basically eliminates the lagg and latency issues in majority of cases. You can now finally experience a true TR24 Low (or even lower!) latency against Koreans!
How it all works is a bit complicated (but not that much really), which is why we also produced this explainer video that goes into details a bit more for those who are interested:
Some TLDR notes on what rollback netcode gives you: - Your commands respond immediately (even if the opponent is lagging) - In a lot of games this means you get single-player latency, which is even lower than TR24 Low - If your opponent is very laggy you might see their units "teleport" a little bit - Even when playing with laggy opponents, you don't feel their lagg when controlling your own units
Anyway, give it a try at let us know what you think
This is huge. Cuz this open to port to be able to play vs chinese players and koreans on a really good latency. Now you can do showmatches that is not breaking heads for everyone.
What do you mean by units teleporting tho ?
Sometimes in my games my hydra is running at a crazy speed all of sudden. Is it something similar ?
On October 09 2026 21:50 Dakota_Fanning wrote: The title is a bit misleading, I thought you reverted to an old code version due to issues with the new one
Awesome job as always!
if you're involved with the Fighting game scene in anyway the mere mention of rollback netcode is like witnessing god come down from the heavens.
On October 09 2026 21:47 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote: This is huge. Cuz this open to port to be able to play vs chinese players and koreans on a really good latency. Now you can do showmatches that is not breaking heads for everyone.
What do you mean by units teleporting tho ?
Sometimes in my games my hydra is running at a crazy speed all of sudden. Is it something similar ?
Without in-depth technical knowledge, from what I understood, rollback technologies depend on prediction. This means, if the actual action and the prediction stray too far appart and the lag is big, i.e. the time between alignment of reality and prediction becomes too long, it may cause units to teleport because their predicted position and their actual position are different by the time the alignment happens. I hope I explained this at least somewhat correctly. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
What you are describing is somewhat is what the new netcode tries to circumvent. The fast stuttering units occur due to package loss/lag I think. The new netcode tries to fill these gaps with predicted positions.
crazy... wish people (including myself sadly) would finally switch all over the SB. But even with this crazy update, it will be hard to motivate players to switch over. I will post this on the Fastest League page, but I doubt they will change over in massive waves
anyhow very impressive work. Do you think it is possible to create a launcher that does this on original Bnet Servers? I guess its not possible, but maybe you can think about this?
On October 09 2026 21:47 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote: This is huge. Cuz this open to port to be able to play vs chinese players and koreans on a really good latency. Now you can do showmatches that is not breaking heads for everyone.
What do you mean by units teleporting tho ?
Sometimes in my games my hydra is running at a crazy speed all of sudden. Is it something similar ?
No, that's a different thing.
Here units might literally teleport from one place to another, but there's a lot of stuff that has to go wrong for this to happen, and even more stuff that has to go wrong for you to notice this: - Connection has to be pretty bad - You have to look at enemy's units - The enemy has to move those units exactly when you were looking at them
And even in majority of those cases, the teleporting will only be a few pixels which you might not even notice. Also your own units will never teleport and they will respond immediately.
And if all of that isn't enough, we added an advanced setting which allows you to configure how much delay vs teleporting you prefer. It's better not to change this setting for now and just play and see how it feels for you. Most of the people that we had testing this said they didn't notice any issues and didn't have to change any settings.
Oh btw. I think stormgate tried to replicate this rollback system. But is very heavy for your processor. What are the minimum requirements now to get this working on shield battery ?
On October 09 2026 22:40 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote: Oh btw. I think stormgate tried to replicate this rollback system. But is very heavy for your processor. What are the minimum requirements now to get this working on shield battery ?
Its a multiple of how slow the game engine itself is usually; Probably like watching a bw replay at 8x at worst case scenario (which shouldnt lag at all on any computer from recent 10-20 years ..)
Yes, Stormgate was the first game that added rollback to RTS games afaik. But their game was much different than BW I imagine (I don't know how they did it either). Minimum requirements to play on SB have not changed. We optimized our rollback code quite a bit, so you shouldn't notice any difference (but please report any issues if you do).
On October 09 2026 22:40 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote: Oh btw. I think stormgate tried to replicate this rollback system. But is very heavy for your processor. What are the minimum requirements now to get this working on shield battery ?
Its a multiple of how slow the game engine itself is usually; Probably like watching a bw replay at 8x at worst case scenario (which shouldnt lag at all on any computer from recent 10-20 years ..)
On October 09 2026 21:47 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote: This is huge. Cuz this open to port to be able to play vs chinese players and koreans on a really good latency. Now you can do showmatches that is not breaking heads for everyone.
What do you mean by units teleporting tho ?
Sometimes in my games my hydra is running at a crazy speed all of sudden. Is it something similar ?
Without in-depth technical knowledge, from what I understood, rollback technologies depend on prediction. This means, if the actual action and the prediction stray too far appart and the lag is big, i.e. the time between alignment of reality and prediction becomes too long, it may cause units to teleport because their predicted position and their actual position are different by the time the alignment happens. I hope I explained this at least somewhat correctly. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
What you are describing is somewhat is what the new netcode tries to circumvent. The fast stuttering units occur due to package loss/lag I think. The new netcode tries to fill these gaps with predicted positions.
In fighting games, it is probably easier to predict the next button press if the server has received 6 inputs out of a 7 input combo. No idea how Netcode Rollback can predict future moves in an RTS game though.
Constantly make an SCV every 12 seconds even if the input has not arrived yet?
On October 09 2026 21:47 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote: This is huge. Cuz this open to port to be able to play vs chinese players and koreans on a really good latency. Now you can do showmatches that is not breaking heads for everyone.
What do you mean by units teleporting tho ?
Sometimes in my games my hydra is running at a crazy speed all of sudden. Is it something similar ?
Without in-depth technical knowledge, from what I understood, rollback technologies depend on prediction. This means, if the actual action and the prediction stray too far appart and the lag is big, i.e. the time between alignment of reality and prediction becomes too long, it may cause units to teleport because their predicted position and their actual position are different by the time the alignment happens. I hope I explained this at least somewhat correctly. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
What you are describing is somewhat is what the new netcode tries to circumvent. The fast stuttering units occur due to package loss/lag I think. The new netcode tries to fill these gaps with predicted positions.
In fighting games, it is probably easier to predict the next button press if the server has received 6 inputs out of a 7 input combo. No idea how Netcode Rollback can predict future moves in an RTS game though.
Constantly make an SCV every 12 seconds even if the input has not arrived yet?
Is the prediction algorithm published?
There is no 'prediction' you just rollback every action
On October 09 2026 21:47 [sc1f]eonzerg wrote: This is huge. Cuz this open to port to be able to play vs chinese players and koreans on a really good latency. Now you can do showmatches that is not breaking heads for everyone.
What do you mean by units teleporting tho ?
Sometimes in my games my hydra is running at a crazy speed all of sudden. Is it something similar ?
Without in-depth technical knowledge, from what I understood, rollback technologies depend on prediction. This means, if the actual action and the prediction stray too far appart and the lag is big, i.e. the time between alignment of reality and prediction becomes too long, it may cause units to teleport because their predicted position and their actual position are different by the time the alignment happens. I hope I explained this at least somewhat correctly. Please correct me, if I'm wrong.
What you are describing is somewhat is what the new netcode tries to circumvent. The fast stuttering units occur due to package loss/lag I think. The new netcode tries to fill these gaps with predicted positions.
In fighting games, it is probably easier to predict the next button press if the server has received 6 inputs out of a 7 input combo. No idea how Netcode Rollback can predict future moves in an RTS game though.
Constantly make an SCV every 12 seconds even if the input has not arrived yet?
Is the prediction algorithm published?
You should watch our explainer video ^^
The prediction algorithm is: we predict nothing has changed since the previous frame.
I tried a 2v2 and it was really good. From time to time u feel a litle something. I would say specifically at the start of the game but maybe i just lock in later on and forgot about it. Need further testing. But it would be ideal to match someone that lives in Korea. China etc.
to be honest is day and night. Cuz i remember playing 2v2 on shield battery when it was first released and usually it was always with very high latency.
EPT
![[image loading]](https://cdn.shieldbattery.net/news-images/JD/uJ/JDuJFKUKHC8j_uODL2dDj_0.5x.jpeg)
