Yeah, same here... 2 years, at least. I had given up on wings but now I'm looking forward to trying it out again.
Instancing works with VPN, not without.
- Thread starter Soopyyy
- Start date
Yeah, same here... 2 years, at least. I had given up on wings but now I'm looking forward to trying it out again.
Try the VPN I mentioned earlier.. You get a good amount of data for free.
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There are multiple factors here that can explain this behavior.
But these kind of problems always incorporate the hideous feature called NAT.
The way NAT works is that all traffic you initiate (like going to a web-page) the router/firewall knows about who initated the traffic and thus know where to deliver the return traffic, but if another computer wants to iniatate traffic against you, then the router/firewall have no idea where to send that traffic. To solve this problem we can make a configuration in the router/firewall to do what is called port forwarding, to tell your router firewall that traffic that arrives on this port goes to this computer, and UPNP is just a fancy wrapper to allow your computer to tell the router that you want port X forwarded to your computer, and once you are done, it removes the forwarding untill you start the program next time.
Why do we have NAT? becuase we still use TCP IP version 4, and we have a finite number of addresses, and sadly, way over there, Australia, Asia etc, have ALOT less IPv4 addresses than what some corporations/universities have in USA! so ISP need to get creative to conserve what few IP addresses they have, and one such thing is to hide all their users behind different levels of NAT, so many users share single public IP-address. Or in layman terms, this breaks most/all P2P networking implementations. And Elite instancing is P2P networking...
So what are some common causes
1. Your router/firewall is not UPNP compliant, which means Elite is having problem recieve incomming traffic. Not a big deal if all the other in the same instance have working incomming traffic. There are a few remedies to this, perhaps there is a new firmware for your router/firewall that adds/fixes UPNP support? (not always an option if this is the box supplied by your ISP). Manually configure port forwarding in your router/firewall and configure Elite to use a static port (great fun that each patch overwrite this configuration.... so you need to reapply it, over and over).
2. Your ISP is not having enough public IP's so they use fancy NAT (see above), so you are forced behind a NAT, nowdays we have carrier grade NAT, an expecially nasty form of NAT that ISP uses to put more users behind a single IP-address and if makes it impossible for users to use any kind of portforwarding. Or as other have suggested, your ISP might have done some other trickery to make P2P not working as intended, by other means availble to them.
As you are in Australia, I believe that #2 might the be big issue here.
Now why might a VPN service work? Many are located in regions with lots of public IP's, they could also be alot more forgiving to support techniques that is tailored to allow a server to act as an intermediatry to allow you to forma P2P connection to another user behind a NAT, things that an ISP might try to stop in different ways, both deliberate or in some cases by misstake. So even if your VPN gives you a private IP, they might have a full support for UPNP, which is great for Elite, and short of blocking access to your VPN provider, there is nothing much your ISP can do stop you from using it (well they can also be jerks and limit your bandwidth to them).
So if IPv4 is running out of IP addresses, why do we not expand it? Well we have, we have a spanking new implementaiton, called version 6, and it is completely incompatible with version 4.... well not so new, been availble quite some time now. So guess what, all stuff that an only talk IPv4 must be updated to support IPv6.... Yay! and why bother if you are located in a country with LOTS of spare IPv4 addresses? Guess why IPv6 implementation is taking so much time, and we get stuck with NAT all over the place nowdays. And Elite are working on IPv6 support, YAY, not so much yay, when you consider how very few ISPs in USA/Europe have implemented IPv6 for their customers! I can't get IPv6 as a private person in Sweden (we still have ALOT of IPv4 addresses too).
So if ISPs and other related entities would get their head out of the dark ages and acutally started to implement IPv6, ALOT these problems could be a thing of the past, as IPv6 does not really need any NAT to happen. So P2P programs like Elite would work alot better! But at the rate we are going the moment, I would not hold my breath. As ISPs are getting more and more creative with NAT, even the idiotic Carrier grade NAT is a result of this...
I want to point out that I have made quite a few simplifications here, so stuff might not be 100% accurate if you start to nitpick.
A sidenote on the netcode in Elite favors to instance you with other CMDRs close you, that is for Open, and the random encounters, so the theory is that it would be preferred that you got put into an instace with other players from your area, like Australia, instead of random players from Sweden... And they are true that if you use an USA/Canada VPN service, then you would get random encounters with Americans/CAnadians players. But here is the elephant in the room, you try to play with a FRIEND, this overrides this. now it is down to establish a direct connection between you and your friend that you have winged up with, this means that Elite should put you in the same instance, and this requires a direct connection between you and your friend, if this fails, you get separate instances... You shoudl in theory be able to enter the same instace as any player by just wing up and go someplace and you would be in the same instance, if it wasn't for this pesky direct connection issues we could have between you and your fellow CMDRs in the Wing....