Optimising for LAN

Cpt Spam

Cpt Spam
Does anyone know if there are ways to optimise the networking/instancing, for when multiple clients connect to the same 1Gb switch?

I've had friends over in the past for LAN parties, and we've never noticed any real improvement on instancing, lag, rubber banding etc, even though being peer-2-peer you would have thought the clients would work much better over LAN?
 

Cpt Spam

Cpt Spam

Morbad

Morbad
Cpt Spam said:
Does anyone know if there are ways to optimise the networking/instancing, for when multiple clients connect to the same 1Gb switch?

I've had friends over in the past for LAN parties, and we've never noticed any real improvement on instancing, lag, rubber banding etc, even though being peer-2-peer you would have thought the clients would work much better over LAN?
Click to expand...

Tried making sure that every client has manually selected a different port? E.g. 5100 for the first one, 5101 for the second, and so on?
 

Muzz UK

Muzz UK
Connection speed and quality are a big factor.

My friend had 40mb virgin but it was awful with packet loss and disconnections but speed was fine. He moved flats went onto a slower but more stable BT and never had instancing problems with me again.

Try opening ports on router and playing with DMZ and Upnp settings... obviously DMZing can be a security risk though you could speak to Frontier support about your problems.

You should easily be able to find port/Elite guides online to do this.
 

Achibot

A
It is highly unlikely that the netcode for this game has any concept of local networking. As such the IP targeting will always involve using an internet facing IP as opposed to a local network one as the game would have no concept/visibility of this. Depending on how this is then handled by your router/ISP (and maybe even Frontier's network) it might actually be worse to have multiple clients playing from the same IP.

It's honestly impossible to say without investigating the packets themselves as they are generated to see exactly what's being sent where. In an ideal situation your router would realise it's targeting a local address and send the relevant packet back to the switch but some ISPs issue very stupid routers or have weird network configurations etc. Selecting manual static ports as suggested by Morbad *might* help though.
 

Dural

Dural
I'd imagine you're all connecting to the same instance out there in AWS land just via the same LAN and internet connection. There has to be some mechanism to report what your client is doing back to the other people in the instance which is possibly why you're still getting rubberbanding etc. Not sure how much of it is p2p - that might even be limited messages and voice comms only. If it's P2P for everything, all clients might have to "wait" for other nearby clients to report their activities to everyone so slow connections might affect everyone nearby in the instance. Who knows.

On the bright side, at least you can throw things at each other when someone does something daft.

This is how it was all architected in 2015 and may or may not explain how clients interact, I'm not spending 51 minutes watching a video just so I can try and be helpful, no offence intended :) https://youtu.be/EvJPyjmfdz0
 

Muzz UK

Muzz UK
Achibot said:
It is highly unlikely that the netcode for this game has any concept of local networking. As such the IP targeting will always involve using an internet facing IP as opposed to a local network one as the game would have no concept/visibility of this. Depending on how this is then handled by your router/ISP (and maybe even Frontier's network) it might actually be worse to have multiple clients playing from the same IP.

It's honestly impossible to say without investigating the packets themselves as they are generated to see exactly what's being sent where. In an ideal situation your router would realise it's targeting a local address and send the relevant packet back to the switch but some ISPs issue very stupid routers or have weird network configurations etc. Selecting manual static ports as suggested by Morbad *might* help though.
Click to expand...

Harsh and a bit unfair on Frontier but I do believe they underestimated a little the networking performance and hardware needed to sustain so many instances within 400 billion star systems. I mean even if an instance isn't there the game still needs to be throwing so much data around.... players, NPC's, BGS and trade data. Technical achievement in my opinion if a little flakey! I honesty believe its gotten so much better since Wings were introduced.

OP a little trick is make sure you all connect and login at the same time not sure if its real but I read a while ago the game tries to instance you with people on your friends list that login and play around the same time.
 

Cpt Spam

Cpt Spam
Many thanks for your replies. Some good suggestions here. We're doing a LAN party again this weekend, hence the post, so we'll try all this out, and I'll report back on what seems to work best o7
 

c00ky1970

c00ky1970
Cpt Spam said:
Does anyone know if there are ways to optimise the networking/instancing, for when multiple clients connect to the same 1Gb switch?

I've had friends over in the past for LAN parties, and we've never noticed any real improvement on instancing, lag, rubber banding etc, even though being peer-2-peer you would have thought the clients would work much better over LAN?
Click to expand...

I would definitely set the port forwarding on each LAN connected PC and have a unique number each.

The reason being is that your internet router will set up a unique mapping for each player IP that communicates with FDEv, having all the clients use a unique connection port will simplify the routers port mapping operation.

The peer to peer connection will still have to go via your WAN router, it should detect that your PC's are trying to connect to something locally on the LAN and rewrite the packet accordingly, but ifg you are all connecting at 1GB and the router is too, it should be fine.

If you can perform a wireshark capture on one of your PC's when you are all in an instanxce and you should see all traffic from each PC being sent out to the Interent address of your WAN router, but coming back being re-written as coming from the internet router but to the destination PC's address.
 

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
As a test, set your clients for IPV6 and disable IPV4, launch Elite on them, go to Settings / Network game menu and see how many Local V6 connections have been established.
 

dubsdj

dubsdj
Achibot said:
It is highly unlikely that the netcode for this game has any concept of local networking. As such the IP targeting will always involve using an internet facing IP as opposed to a local network one as the game would have no concept/visibility of this. Depending on how this is then handled by your router/ISP (and maybe even Frontier's network) it might actually be worse to have multiple clients playing from the same IP.

It's honestly impossible to say without investigating the packets themselves as they are generated to see exactly what's being sent where. In an ideal situation your router would realise it's targeting a local address and send the relevant packet back to the switch but some ISPs issue very stupid routers or have weird network configurations etc. Selecting manual static ports as suggested by Morbad *might* help though.
Click to expand...

He is right about that.
 

dubsdj

dubsdj
Well I suppose if you are close enough to FD's datacenter you could run a cat6 through the open window and into their switch, then you would be laughing :)

until of course somebody noticed.
 

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
Ok - after entirely far too much faffing about with remote desktop, #'ing out hosts files, disabling NIC's and reconfiguring half my infrastructure for a silly screenshot (GF is using the only other machine which would have made this a piece of cake) here's that screenie :D

iplocal.png
 

digitalblade

D
So there are only 2 slots per type of connection that is weird. I didn't even new there are any lan connections possible. I wonder if Direct connections even work and how :)
 

Asp Explorer

Asp Explorer
Oh - they are not really slots - if I take you to mean available openings for players. It's just a number of connections / attempts per protocol achieved or lost.

You can be on my lan on IPV4, but the other machines only have IPV6 enabled - and you'll show as a IPV4 TURN connection. Set up as V6 and you'll show as a direct. We'll all be able to instance and if we are in Open, we'll be able to see everyone else in the instance.

It sounds far more complicated than it is :D Try enabling IPv6 if your modem and ISP supports it, and the Elite clients and matchmaker "ought" to be able to sort it all out and your LAN will do what it does best. Switch where it can and route where it must :D

As Morbad said above, if for whatever reason IPV6 doesn't work for you - definitely go for manually assigning separate ports for each individual client. I'm not been in that situation for a long time, and maybe it's changed - but back in the early days there were some absolutely hilarious shenanigans to do with that :D
 
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