[Recap] October-November

Published by
Jon Jon
on November 14, 2021

If you want to see more frequent updates, consider supporting us on Patreon

Introduction

Welcome to the October monthly recap. While not a lot of updates happened, the ones which did were important!

RSS

Small update to the website, we now have an RSS feed for blog posts! Use your favorite reader to keep up to date on all our blog posts

Stability

Both nex-go and nex-protocols-go recieved several stability, code quality, and feature updates. These include, but are not limited to, RMC Request creation, fixing packet fragment IDs not being used, many new types being supported in our StreamIn and StreamOut structs, and a server ping timeout to properly close connections when a client leaves. These all make the network work much better and feel much more cohesive

Where is everyone?

The core of online multiplayer is connecting users together. On the Wii U and 3DS, multiplayer is handled via a p2p (peer-to-peer) connection, where one use is assigned as the "host" allowing other users to directly connect to their game session. The technology behind allowing users to connect to other users using arbitrary ports is called NAT Traversal. Until now, NAT Traversal was not working correctly and clients needed to open all ports to connect. Thanks to developer shutterbug NAT now properly works!

Screenshot of shutterbug showing off NAT traversal using mario kart 7

Rev your engines!

Both Mario Kart 7 and Mario Kart 8 have started going online and can play matches. These games are far from complete but this is a great stepping stone. Patrons can access the beta servers for Mario Kart 8 right now, Mario Kart 7 has no servers available however. CTGP-7 is also confirmed working for Mario Kart 7, and CTGP-Café being planned for testing as well with full integration planned for both

Screenshot of Billy showing off CTGP-7

Hello YouTube!

An unintended side effect of working on Miiverse support in Mario Kart 8 was YouTube uploading being re-enabled! You can now upload race clips from Mario Kart 8 to YouTube again. Patrons who run the Miiverse patch can try this feature out right now

Squid Game

Splatoon multiplayer battles now works! As of now only private friend battles have been tested, but they seem to be working without issue

Friendship is magic

The friends server received some big updates. You can now properly set your privacy settings, add friends, and receive notifications from the server on what your friends are playing