Connection issues with 2 people in the same LAN

[egamruf]

Trying to troubleshoot some issues with connections for FAF.

The standard "two people behind a LAN trying to make it work" guff.

Port forwarding has been turned on directing relevant ports to each of us, but there remain problems connecting - we can join lobbies easily enough, but immediately lose connection on loading the map. This is a very recent issue - the game was letting us play on the same connection, with port forwarding, only about a fortnight ago.

Anyway - trying to figure out if it was a problem with the forwarding, I'm producing logs saying I'm connecting to a UDP port *precisely* one number higher than what I have it set at. It seems to be irrelevant *which* number I set the port to in the FAF client, it's consistently displayed in the log as one higher.

Example:

"info: GPGNET: setting nat handler to 0x11599004
info: LOBBY: Game port 7003[UDP] opened.
info: LOBBY: starting with local uid of 179041 [egamruf]"

The port currently set (and forwarded) is '7002'.

Is this a bug in the way the logs are drawn, am I looking for the relevant port in the wrong part of the log, or is it *actually* indicating my port forwarding isn't working?

[nine2]

for me I had to have one computer on a VPN

[Geosearchef]

There used to be a GPGNet server to which the game connects and which is capable of controlling e.g. Lobby settings. GPG shut down and FAF is now hosting this server to control what the game does, connect it to other players,... on your local machine via the client on the port one above the lobby port. So in your case the game still uses 7002 to connect to other players, 7003 is used for local communication between game and client.

To solve this kind of problem FAF has been working on an ICE adapter for the past 2 years which is nearly production ready. If you wanna help by joining test games head over to the #ice-testing channel on the FAF discord server. We hope to deploy soon.

You could also use the ice test client to play with your friend/family member/... but you won't be able to play with people not using the test client until production deployment.

[egamruf]

@Anihilnine

Yeah - we had it sort of working for quite a while, using a perverse combination of port forwarding, manually forcing ports to remain open on local systems, and DMZ on router. Then it stopped working after a router firmware update, and never came back.

Temporary solution is Nord VPN, but that's inconvenient since I (and a housemate) are the ones with the problem, but I only have a subscription to PIA, not Nord, and FAF won't work with PIA. So I've had to borrow someone's Nord credentials *just* for FAF.

@Geosearchef

How good is the ICE test client? The games we're playing are pretty much exclusively played with one group, though the FAF frontend for mods is pretty necessary, so inherently using that client wouldn't be a major issue as long as the games don't DC etc.

[Apenguinsh]

@Anihilnine

Yeah - we had it sort of working for quite a while, using a perverse combination of port forwarding, manually forcing ports to remain open on local systems, and DMZ on router. Then it stopped working after a router firmware update, and never came back.

Temporary solution is Nord VPN, but that's inconvenient since I (and a housemate) are the ones with the problem, but I only have a subscription to PIA, not Nord, and FAF won't work with PIA. So I've had to borrow someone's Nord credentials *just* for FAF.

@Geosearchef

How good is the ICE test client? The games we're playing are pretty much exclusively played with one group, though the FAF frontend for mods is pretty necessary, so inherently using that client wouldn't be a major issue as long as the games don't DC etc.

Wow, that sucks. Glad that NordVPN works though. It supports up to 6 devices so you could share one account with your friend. For example, here's a pretty good deal https://nordvpn.com/coupon/1y/?coupon=usenord60, 60 bucks for a year so it would be 30 bucks each with your friend. Maybe it could be a solution?

[egamruf]

I'm loathe to do that since my subscription for PIA is annual, and it has another 220 days to run. Buying a second VPN just for FAF seems... ... silly.

[Geosearchef]

How good is the ICE test client? The games we're playing are pretty much exclusively played with one group, though the FAF frontend for mods is pretty necessary, so inherently using that client wouldn't be a major issue as long as the games don't DC etc.

I currently see no remaining issues with it. (ICE itself)
If you use it I'd also be happy if you could give me some feedback as this will hopefully be deployed on the production server soon. (we're currently still running test games)

On the java test server, the map/mod vault is empty, but you can upload maps/mods one of you has downloaded or all just download them on the normal server and then play on the test server. The newest test client can be found here: https://geosearchef.de/javaIceTest.exe (to uninstall and reinstall the old version of downlords client you need to delete the client.prefs file)
Keep in mind this is a test server, there might be changes to it, the client will probably give you some errors but it should work. You can login using any pw, the user you choose will be created on the first login attempt automatically.

You have to host your game on FAFDevelop as a featured mod.

[egamruf]

The newest test client can be found here: https://geosearchef.de/javaIceTest.exe (to uninstall and reinstall the old version of downlords client you need to delete the client.prefs file)
Keep in mind this is a test server, there might be changes to it, the client will probably give you some errors but it should work. You can login using any pw, the user you choose will be created on the first login attempt automatically.

You have to host your game on FAFDevelop as a featured mod.

That link doesn't seem to work for me...

[Geosearchef]

We moved the test server. The file is currently located at https://geosearchef.de/javaIceTestOLD.exe . You will have to change the server settings on the login page by double clicking the faf logo till I create a new build, we're currently testing the python client.
Change server port from 18001 - > 8001, remove the port from the last link (API) and change it from http - > https.

Instead you can also try the python client release https://github.com/muellni/client/releases .

[egamruf]

Thanks for the quick update - I'll see if I can convince the rest in the group to pick it up.