Hi everyone,
A quick update from Howard Chalkley all about IPv6! He says it best... so here it is in his own words:
-----------------------------------------------------------------
We are pleased to announce that we are running a trial of IPv6 support during the v2.3 beta (and if the trial goes well, we expect to continue IPv6 support when 2.3 releases to production)
What is IPv6?
IPv6 is the new protocol for addressing computers on the internet. It uses a 128-bit address to identify a machine, rather than the 32-bit address IPv4 you may be used to. Adoption of IPv6 is growing around the world, and now that it's supported by our cloud provider, we can start allowing its use in the game. The big benefit of IPv6 is that it directly addresses all machines, without using NAT address conversions, which cause a lot of peer-to-peer connectivity problems.
For more technical information about IPv6, there's a good intro document here:
https://communities.bmc.com/docs/DOC-19235
Most people who have an IPv6 connection will also be able to connect to the internet over IPv4: this is called 'Dual-Stack'. In some cases, the ISP will provide a reduced-functionality IPv4 connection, where a single IPv4 address is shared by multiple customers, this is known as 'DS-lite'
How does this work in Elite: Dangerous?
If your ISP provides an IPv6 connection, and the game wants to connect you to another player who also has an IPv6 address, it will try to use IPv6 first. If this should fail, it will fall back to using the IPv4 addressing we use currently.
Players without an IPv6 connection should see no difference in the way the game works: if you connect to a player who has Dual-stack IPv6 and IPv4, we'll try to use their IPv4 address.
We're providing a way to disable the IPv4 connection, so that all traffic is sent over IPv6, as an experimental or diagnostic tool. We think it's best for players who have a dual-stack connection to keep them both enabled. If you are running IPv6-only, then connections to IPv4-only players will go via a TURN relay server - but this will increase the ping times.
Connections from the game to the matchmaking server will continue to use IPv4 where players have a dual-stack connection. This allows us to keep the IPv4 link open and continually refreshed, for when you need to connect to another player over IPv4. Without this, your router might switch to using a different NAT port mapping from the one we were expecting.
New Network Settings Dialog
There's a new network settings dialog, accessed via the Main Menu's Options.
View attachment 114977
This allows you to enable or disable network logging; You can see your IPv4 and IPv6 addresses, and enable/disable them, or set up a specific port number if required.
(You might need to specify a port number for IPv6 if you need to manually override firewall settings, we think this should not be necessary for most users)
It will show whether your router allows UPNP control over port mapping for IPv4.
It shows some general statistics about your connection: the MTU is the Maximum transport Unit, or the largest packet you can send and receive, the ping time is the average time to send a packet and receive a reply, and it also shows the average packet loss rate.
The Connection Statistics show the number of times the game tries to connect to another machine via different mechanisms: these are shown as Successes / Attempts, so it might show (for example)
IPv4 Direct: 3 / 4
IPv4 via Turn: 1 / 1
In this case, one 'direct' connection failed, so we tried to connect via the Turn server instead.
View attachment 114978
Any changes made to network settings in this dialog are written out to the file “AppconfigLocal.xml” which overrides any settings defined in the standard “Appconfig.xml”
