Dolphin, the GameCube and Wii emulator - Forums

With first Wii saves and now Wiimotes being disabled in netplay, it seems Wii Netplay is pretty much being abandoned.
Which I find very disappointing. To me it seems to be the most meaningful feature left to complete on Dolphin.

Plus, apart from using multiple extensions, both Wii saves and Wiimotes were actually working in netplay previously.
I have played New Super Mario Bros in full on netplay, over the course of multiple days, saving, loading, not a single desynch. With 2 others, one of them across the sea. The game even endured some heavy packet loss freezes fine.

Once figured out, it's really not much trouble at all. For anyone interested, we played on 4.0-5809; you make a portable folder, there's pretty much nothing to set up from default options, in fact I don't think there is anything at all. You then simply zip your Cache and Wii folders and share them. And to be sure, have everyone disable wiimote extensions on all 4 controllers, not sure if required.

The one thing that is kinda hard to figure out and I have never seen anyone mention, is that to make wiimote netplay work, you need to start up with a high enough ping, about 10 should do but no reason not to put some really high number to be sure, and after the intro screens you can reduce back to your regular number.
It's like the game needs some time to set shit up at the start or something and if it doesn't have enough time it'll desynch and give you an error indicating that.
I really hope the "Worse yet, when going back through to test it recently, absolutely no one could get Wiimote Netplay working at all." doesn't refer to just this.

EDIT: Also, by completely disabling these features, which I don't quite understand the reasoning for, you're blocking off other games that work perfectly well with one wiimote like Dokapon Kingdom which only needs a wiimote input to start the game, or mario kart wii which I like to play with wiimote controls. And of course I just don't understand why saves were blocked at all. Was it required to start working on netplay from scratch? But you're not working on Wii netplay either way, so eh. "Some people can't figure out how to use this feature" is no reason to completely remove it. Anyway, just consider that people are still hopeful to get this shit worked on.

Wii Netplay wasn't really "abandoned" per se...

From what I've heard it was broken in the latest dev builds. It was just removed because the devs didn't want to have a broken feature in the 5.0 release. After 5.0 comes out anyone is free to reimplement the feature if they can get it working.

Right now though... I don't think anyone knows what broke it in the first place...

I'm not a dev though so if anyone knows more about this than me, please correct me!

(03-13-2016, 04:34 AM)Invader Wrote: [ -> ]Wii Netplay wasn't really "abandoned" per se...

From what I've heard it was broken in the latest dev builds. It was just removed because the devs didn't want to have a broken feature in the 5.0 release. After 5.0 comes out anyone is free to reimplement the feature if they can get it working.

Right now though... I don't think anyone knows what broke it in the first place...

I'm not a dev though so if anyone knows more about this than me, please correct me!

But is it so broken, though? From what I can tell, everything's been working in the same conditional state until it got disabled. A state that allows you to play a range of games in netplay perfectly fine. If there was some technical reason to remove this stuff, fine, but I don't understand how the 5.0 release is any reason by itself.

(03-13-2016, 04:41 AM)tamix Wrote: [ -> ]But is it so broken, though? From what I can tell, everything's been working in the same conditional state until it got disabled. A state that allows you to play a range of games in netplay perfectly fine. If there was some technical reason to remove this stuff, fine, but I don't understand how the 5.0 release is any reason by itself.

Yeah, I don't really know... I haven't ever used netplay with Wiimotes before, so I have no idea how broken it was...

Wiimotes are flat out broken in netplay. GC controllers work fine. This won't change until somebody who likes pain comes by and overhauls the nightmare that is the netplay code.


Save the users, kill the wiimotes.

A feature that requires a perfect synchronization of every config file, controller profile, and custom hidden settings to work (and even then, to not be guaranteed to be working, with plenty of desyncs) doesn’t really count as a feature. It’s misleading at best.

The Wiimote support was removed because it was causing issues even for people who don’t use wiimotes at all, hence considering it broken is not much of an overstatement. When people tried to use wiimotes, it was even worse and having 5 minutes without a desync was already a miracle.

When making things work requires some black magic, and when nobody who initially did the work is willing to update the situation, it’s better to remove the feature in order to have a clean slate. That being said, netplay wiimotes are not abandoned, but nobody believes any kind of fix will be going into the 5.0 release, and that’s why it was removed, but it will probably make a comeback afterwards.

Disabling Wii Netplay was necessary. It's a broken implementation and needs to be redone from the ground up. There's a certain point where you simply cannot fix something that's so broken, and it needs to be looked at from another perspective and implemented in a different way.

Even if the feature worked (which, I couldn't get it to work, and I was one of the first people to use Wiimote Netplay back in the early 4.0 days,) it still was incredibly misleading for what it advertised.