Nintendo has been using the “NEX” multiplayer server system for 18 years, dating back to the Gamecube. It’s an archaic system by now as server-side technology has advanced greatly in that time. Thankfully, it seems Nintendo is finally ditching that system in favor of a new one. This new system is named “NPLN” according to […]
Okay so an important clarification should be made. As far as I understand, games were not hosted on this server centrally, but rather it was used for matchmaking. So if you were playing splatoon or smash ultimate, you talked to this server to get your connection to other players configured. After that, every player in the game is communicating in a peer to peer network and the NEX server isn't involved.
Smash ultimate is slow and laggy because for some reason it still uses delay based netcode (in contrast to melee on slippi, which uses rollback).
I don't know as much about the other games that talk(ed) to NEX, but I assume they're laggy for the same reason (though to be fair, rollback with more than 2 total peers is (from a mathematical/information theoretic perspective)
a wildly more difficult problem than the case where only two machines are communicating).
Okay so an important clarification should be made. As far as I understand, games were not hosted on this server centrally, but rather it was used for matchmaking. So if you were playing splatoon or smash ultimate, you talked to this server to get your connection to other players configured. After that, every player in the game is communicating in a peer to peer network and the NEX server isn't involved.
Smash ultimate is slow and laggy because for some reason it still uses delay based netcode (in contrast to melee on slippi, which uses rollback). I don't know as much about the other games that talk(ed) to NEX, but I assume they're laggy for the same reason (though to be fair, rollback with more than 2 total peers is (from a mathematical/information theoretic perspective) a wildly more difficult problem than the case where only two machines are communicating).