Optimising for LAN

[znôrt]

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.

ot but this has nothing to do with the number of star systems. also, bgs and trade data (and even star data) are not relevant here since they are relatively static information. the realtime update of rapidly state changing elements (players and maybe npc depending on how deterministic they are) is the bulk of the network traffic and, since it is p2p, it increases geometrically with every additional client in the instance.

the trick you mention could indeed work if it causes peers to handshake through the same server (?) so they have a better chance to instance together, but that's not what op is trying to do, which is: once in the same instance getting the traffic between those peers to route locally since all are connected to the same router, and not through the internet.

 

[Asp Explorer]

that's not what op is trying to do, which is: once in the same instance getting the traffic between those peers to route locally since all are connected to the same router, and not through the internet.

Yup - once the connections are established to each other, the router won't have much to do at all apart from parse significant events from each client back and forth to the game backend - the intraclient transfers won't even get past the switching fabric.

Now - where that gets complicated is where "other" players either own instances that "local" players jump into, or perhaps worse for the "other" player jumping into a "local" based instance. The sudden wave of separate-but-not-really connections incoming can look quite suspicious and set off a panic. Some potato routers will simply give up, cry a bit, and shut off.

 

[digitalblade]

This is turning in network lessons what does that mean in game I see one 1/2 and an other 2/2 how many actual player are involved 3? It seems to me 2/2 are marked as connection to the ED server? Means online connected throw P2P right? For me this means the original host is the 1/2 in lan and the other 2 are connected to him throw outside the lan. Or maybe the P2P host is not counted and he has one lan and 2 P2P connected to him.

 

[Asp Explorer]

All clients, wether LAN or WAN and IPV6 or V4 over whatever connectivity methods you can come up with that will actually make a instanceable connection that FD's matchmaking servers can propagate and call valid, are peers.

Also - the networking lessons are no bad thing - you have many actual, real, past or present professional network engineers participating in these forums.

 

[Cpt Spam]

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

This is great - thank you for you efforts on this, it's very much appreciated. Have a virtual beer on me:

Thanks to everyone else who commented so far as well. The port forwarding trick we've used over the internet before, but never thought to try it locally, so that's the first thing we'll do. We'll also look at the connection statistics as above and see what it looks like. Sadly, though, my ISP and router is not playing with IPv6 as yet
As has been mentioned, I always thought the connections to AWS were just for authentication, account syncing, etc and that the vast majority of traffic was p2p when instancing with others, so the fact that LAN connections are part of the stats is encouraging.

 

[Muzz UK]

Not that I'd recommend it but just turn off any bloody firewalls, forward ports and check uPnP settings willing to bet you'll have no issues as long as you have a good connection. I doubt the Russians or Chinese are interested in your Elite or Facebook accounts anyway :-D

 

[B1rdy]

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?

Do that and manually add port corresponding forwardings to your router's NAT firewall.

 

[Asp Explorer]

Update us on how your LAN event goes

 

[Crimson Kaim]

I'd do a simple test to determine if your local network setup has actually any influence at all by tracing the packages to your target IPs/destinations. Using a traceroute command/script this easily shows all the hops between you and your destinations. In this case, if it is more than 3 hops (you, switch, destination) or 5 (you, switch, router, switch, destination) then it's definately not local (assuming this setup). It will most likely be the latter (for Elite) as you need a constant connection to the FDev servers all the time even in Solo Play, meaning there is absolutely no chance to play local in the first place.
Ofcourse, you traceroute will not show the current path that the ED client uses as it's a seperate package but it's always good to know if your setup is configured properly before trying to draw conclusions. Furthermore you can monitor all of your connections using thrid party tools like wireshark etc. Useful tools to pin down and connection and debug it.