3-Player LAN Sonic Adventure 2: Battle

[biolizard89]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CA04LW0vqQE

A 3-player LAN match of Sonic Adventure 2: Battle using VECLabs GeckoTunnel Multiplexer.  In theory this should work with no limit on the number of simultaneous players, as long as each player has his/her own console and USB Gecko adapter.  (I only have 3 USB Geckos, so I did 3 players.)  In theory this should work online over UDP/IP as well as LAN, but online multiplexing has not been tested yet.  Each player's console displays the opponent with the nearest XYZ proximity.  This is the first match ever conducted using the Multiplexer, complete with gameplay glitches (the board not disappearing on one Wii, and the crash after ending the level).  As the glitch with the board disappearing shows, GeckoTunnel scripts will need to sync additional variables for multiplexing to work smoothly, which are not necessary in standard gameplay.  The crash at the end of the match is caused by a menu desync, which was primarily a result of operator error (the wrong user tried to use the menus)... this can probably be made more resilient by implementing an interrupt feature in the Multiplexer (planned for the future).  Due to my general lack of competence at video capture (I promise I'll try to do better for the next video!), the bottom two screens appear to lag significantly; this is not present in actual gameplay (no framerate drops or lag was present in actual gameplay).

Multiplexing only took about 2 hours of dev time plus about 3 hours of bug-fixing to get it to this state.  It's not the current focus of my work (most of my dev time is on releasing the new script format so that we can get Super Smash Bros. Melee and other GameCube/Wii games working), but since it's pretty cool in itself, I figure it's a reasonable use of 5 hours.  I do need to fix at least one bug before a release, which will delay the release by a bit (not sure how long that will take).

GeckoTunnel was coded by Jeremy Rand AKA biolizard89.  Big thanks to Sappharad and Fuzziqer Software for the GCNrd Online Tunneler / GCARS-CS scripts for SA2B (a quite nice starting point for the GeckoTunnel SA2B script).  Big thanks to Marty Rand, Ryan Cluck, Bryan Cluck, and Chris Bushee for testing assistance.  And big thanks to my Honors Research advisor, Dr. Deborah Trytten, and an especially big thanks to James Gilchrist for funding the project.