It’s been a long time coming, but Iron Galaxy’s planned title update for Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike Online Edition is nearing completion. Iron Galaxy added a post to its development blog with up-to-date information on the patch. The update has been sent to Capcom for Q&A testing, after which it will be submitted to Microsoft and Sony for certification.

Iron Galaxy showed off some of the changes in a recent stream (at around 35 minutes), but you can find details on the changes below.

We have successfully migrated all the netcode improvements from MvCO and Darkstalkers to 3SOE, and in our tests the game behaves identical to those in the wild.

We replaced ping colors with numbers (in milliseconds).

Added filters for region (your current region, or all), opponent skill, and ping. It’s worth noting that the game will still return you matches that don’t match this criteria if none matching your criteria are found.

When creating a lobby you can make it so only people in your region can join.

Fixed the problem with the order of the lobby getting jumbled when people ready up.

Can “Mute All” on PS3 now.

Rank should, in theory, never get reset to 0. If your rank is currently 0 you will be stuck that way, however.

Moved ready/unready to separate buttons.

Leaderboards get updated faster/more reliably on PS3.

YouTube uploads on 360 will now be at 360p.

Defaulted Gill to “banned” in Player Match. These fixes aren’t online specific, but these are on the list because they were either relatively easy to implement or things we deemed “must fixes” (like the super art meter length). Super Art bars are now the correct length.

Can now turn off the Challenge bars on the in-game UI.

Added “Disable Stun” to training options.

We now remember the super art selected in player select, and default to that selection when you return to player select. It doesn’t auto-pick it, just highlights it.

Difficulty now affects Arcade Mode.

Fixed visual glitch in Remy’s Stage with scan lines on.

Fixed color for Urien’s Reflector (P2).

Fixed color for Poison (P2).

Made some changes to how Ryu’s bag falls over.

Fixed some random locks/hangs.

Added color bars by the character portraits on the UI that match the major colors selected by the player.

Iron Galaxy also posted notes on the bug that caused EX moves to drop. This is actually a bug also present in the arcade version, and thus has been left in its original state.

Thanks to some help by telesniper707 we were able to reproduce the “Dropped EX” bug reliably. Here’s the details as he relayed it in his email: “Easy to confirm/reproduce: Load up training mode with obvious parameters, pick Ken or Ryu, or any character that has an EX move that’s simple, but also doesn’t overlap another move that uses the same input, but an opposite button… (example, Dudley, both Back Swing Blow and Cross Counter have the same input direction wise, so it’s more difficult to reproduce moves of these types), now start normal training. Hold down a normal button that’s of the opposite type than that of the EX, ie. hold down Short if you are going to do an EX Fireball. Input the motion, then release the held button and press the 2 buttons (or 3 button macro) 1 frame later. If inputted correctly, no EX will come out. I guess people experience this effect with cancelling a normal to special, but timing it awkwardly…” The rub with this is that this repro works on our Arcade unit as well, so we’re not addressing it as it’s in the original version. Mystery solved.

While the exact timing of release is still undetermined, look foward to this long-awaited update in the relatively near feature.

Source: Iron Galaxy