Ping Test tool on lobby

[Gilobot]

Hello.
How feasible is it to have a tool in lobby (so pre game) to test the ping with all the players. When in lobby the IPs that will be used are available if I am not wrong.

I know there are tools online to test pings, but those are not reliable enough for this situation.

The ping value in lobby doesn't help with possible loss packets on one route to one of the player, or bottlenecking or wtv.
A simulation of what would happen in game would give reliable results if using the actual players IPs.

[Exotic_Retard]

the lobby already has a ping test to all players, its also how it determines if you need to use the proxy or not. the ping bar appears for any players who have a high ping, if its normal ping then the bar is hidden so its not always obvious this feature is at work.

on top of that, if some players connection is unstable it cant be hard to tell in the lobby since time is needed. also the player could be lagging due to the sim speed which is denoted by their cpu score instead, or could have a case of stuttering in which case their cpu score doesnt reflect that either.

in short, ping is not a super reliable way to tell if someone will lag or not, and at the end of the day it requires dev time to implement, something we have a clear deficit of.

hope this helps

[Viba]

It is clear the lobby isn't properly detecting packet loss. A simple packet loss test would indeed be nice and prevent many unnecessary game starts with people who lag hard. It has been stated that the lobbys ping test detects packet loss, but from my experience clearly not too well.

[Gilobot]

Yes what Viba said.

Isn't it possible to simulate random packets that would be sent/received when the actual game would start ?

And from there, detect bottlenecking ?

Usually my connection is fine, but lately my ISP has been playing tricks on me, and it's annoying to make people rehost games.
But so far my (and others) only way is to try it out in game .

[Viba]

In your case, before wanting to play. I recommend running a tracert or using this simple yet effective tool http://winmtr.net/download-winmtr/

Test to a few different servers, if you have bad packet loss just don't play.

Another problem I had was the FAF client acting up somehow, causing lag issues ever now and then that look like packet loss, but that's another story.

[BenDover]

Also it would be handy to know if any player has over 500 ping to another because this more than often is the cause of a lag and as host you can't see that. And why was the message 'xx connected through faf proxy' removed, this was very useful to kick players that are going to disconnect mid game anyway because faf proxy is broken.

[biass]

We dont use proxy anymore, it's improved ping by so much but instead people have to leave and rejoin games to connect

[BenDover]

And 99% of the time those that had to refaf to connect lose connection anyway, be it random or because one player timed out for 5 seconds and connected to everyone except the dude he had problems with in the first place. So how exactly does that work?

[RoLa]

What about introducing a proxy (SOCKS?), which prevents disconnects when router wan ip address changes. So basically your local proxy is informed if any ip change by other players, so that FA stops just for a moment and continues.

Maybe we could use this one as basis:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/z3APA ... vel/README
https://3proxy.ru/howtoe.asp#CHAIN


- UDP and bind support for SOCKSv5 (fully compatible with
SocksCAP/FreeCAP for UDP)
- HTTPS/SOCKS4/SOCKS5 and redirection parent support
- Chain building (multihop proxing)

[Sheeo]

What about introducing a proxy (SOCKS?), which prevents disconnects when router wan ip address changes. So basically your local proxy is informed if any ip change by other players, so that FA stops just for a moment and continues.

Maybe we could use this one as basis:
https://raw.githubusercontent.com/z3APA ... vel/README
https://3proxy.ru/howtoe.asp#CHAIN


- UDP and bind support for SOCKSv5 (fully compatible with
SocksCAP/FreeCAP for UDP)
- HTTPS/SOCKS4/SOCKS5 and redirection parent support
- Chain building (multihop proxing)

Using a SOCKS proxy for the sole purpose of preventing disconnects during IP-changes imposes a _lot_ of overhead for just that benefit.

We're implementing reconnect in the ICE-relay anyway; that prevents this.