Hardware & Technical central server - lag issues?

[sulrich]

Hi,

Any thoughts as there could be lag/latency issues if people are running off one server, presumably located in Europe? What would this mean for people in Australia for example? It would be dissapointing given people have committed alot to this game on kickstarter, and find themselves not being able to play the game as they are being milked due to server lag?

Cheers

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

Part of the game will include P2P connections to reduce lag. (I can see now the support calls as people are unclear how to setup their router to accept inbound connections on a particular port )

Depending upon how things go you may be best grouping with people from a similar geographic region. (Helps with time difference too )

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

The issue is that you wont be able to please everyone. If Frontier set up a server in Australia how many people would be on that server? Impossible to know at the moment, but I am guessing not many.

So you either connect to here and put up with the lag or there is a server local to yourself with no-one on it, kinda pointless having a local server.

At some point hopefully there will be enough players in Australia to justify it (maybe there already is).

 

[Brett C]

Part of the game will include P2P connections to reduce lag. (I can see now the support calls as people are unclear how to setup their router to accept inbound connections on a particular port )

Depending upon how things go you may be best grouping with people from a similar geographic region. (Helps with time difference too )

A lot of routers these days have a neat little daemon running on it named UPnP. It's a great little thing to have enabled, however it has its ups and downs. Auto port forwarding is pretty much what it does in a nutshell.

 

[Aewarin Jameson]

A lot of routers these days have a neat little daemon running on it named UPnP. It's a great little thing to have enabled, however it has its ups and downs. Auto port forwarding is pretty much what it does in a nutshell.

Agreed - though I am of the manual setting kind of guy - I don't trust automatic settings

 

[bodshal]

There'll be a bit of suck-it-and-see during the alpha and beta at a guess, and there'll be work if the intention is a one-universe feel but localised servers to handle regional sets of players.

 

[OriginalBadBoy]

A lot of routers these days have a neat little daemon running on it named UPnP. It's a great little thing to have enabled, however it has its ups and downs. Auto port forwarding is pretty much what it does in a nutshell.

UPNP is evil ... It gets turned off straight away on any router I have ever used. Causes too many NAT problems with XBL / PSN.

 

[bodshal]

NAT is evil. No NAT on my network!

On which note, I hope we have IPv6 support off the bat.

 

[Brett C]

UPNP is evil ... It gets turned off straight away on any router I have ever used. Causes too many NAT problems with XBL / PSN.

UPNP has its uses, not going to lie there. However, it does seem to cause problems from time to time on port forwarding.

NAT is evil. No NAT on my network!

On which note, I hope we have IPv6 support off the bat.

Would be a good idea to suggest it in the current sticky thread.

 

[sulrich]

A lot of routers these days have a neat little daemon running on it named UPnP. It's a great little thing to have enabled, however it has its ups and downs. Auto port forwarding is pretty much what it does in a nutshell.

I didnt realise that Upnp helped with latency/number of hops route to the server?
I always though it simply handled port forwarding autometically, allowing apps to use whatever ports they requested so no user intervention was required.

 

[Kipper]

As I understand it - the instancing will use P2P connections and therefore will try to put you in places with people that have a low ping to you, to keep it smooth for everyone.

The central server will come into play in stations / on bases for trading and bulleting board etc, where a few milliseconds of lag aren't going to be an issue.

 

[Brett C]

I didnt realise that Upnp helped with latency/number of hops route to the server?
I always though it simply handled port forwarding autometically, allowing apps to use whatever ports they requested no no user intervention was required.

As for routing, that's an entirely different egg to crack open. You're at the wit of your ISP and the ISP's peering routes to have a good ping / low latency / low[no] packet loss and low jitter.

Much of the time, international routes (now a days from what I have seen) are now taking "the quickest route" via going from one side of the continent to the other. This was seen a few months back when i used my server in AUS with mtr trace to my server in the NL. It completely jumped over the USA, as in - went from San Jose, CA to New York, NY right over to London, UK to the NL server. Back in the day, it hit every server route known to man in the states! Regardless, the technology is improving, so we'll see what Frontier decides in the coming months.

 

[Memnoch]

A lot of routers these days have a neat little daemon running on it named UPnP. It's a great little thing to have enabled, however it has its ups and downs. Auto port forwarding is pretty much what it does in a nutshell.

If you are using a proper stateful firewall none of this should be necessary. If you can avoid UPnP like the plague. In fact, for security reasons you really should have this service disabled.

 

[Cairo]

The central server will come into play in stations / on bases for trading and bulleting board etc, where a few milliseconds of lag aren't going to be an issue.

I imagine the central server (or multiple regional nodes, connected to each other) would also handle a universal messaging system. Granted - I might've been reading too far between the lines, but in one of the KS videos DB mentioned you could for instance contact a friend, agree to meet them at a certain station in five minutes and find them there. I understood he was talking about two things:

1) unified messaging, where as long as you're online you can always send messages to other people, even if they're currently in a different instance / group (even if you can't see everyone at the same time, everyone still exists in the same universe)

2) switching groups on the fly (perhaps limited to certain situations to prevent misuse, such as while being docked or in hyperspace but not during active combat), where the two of you might be in different groups when agreeing to meet somewhere but could switch your groups to something you both share once you get there, resulting in you seeing one another

 

[Commander Clarke]

Like everything with gaming machines - the higher spec the better generally -that will be the same with the networks in people's homes playing this...

NAT for many is a requirement as they don't have multiple public address (i.e. one for each of the hosts behind our router) and routers today are designed to cope with that. With the IPv4 space being what it is NAT is a great benefit - most router out of the box NAT all outbound traffic behind a single IP public IP

UPnP I prefer not to use as it can introduce security issues - instead if you configure NAT inbound or PAT (port address translation) for very specific functions you know it will work and just open what is required to the single machine you require it too

On of the biggest issues people will face I feel is not the central systems - but if no QoS is configured to protect your game traffic then someone else on your network could use all the bandwidth available downloading music/movie - whatever - I would recommend that people protect themselves in some way from that
Cheers
Nik