Multiplayer debugging

[SmileyDude]

Hello Everyone --

I'm trying to figure out what has changed in regards to multiplayer on my end over the past month or so. I was able to successfully host a game on my computer (2014 15" MacBook Pro, OS X 10.10.1, 16GB RAM, NVIDIA GeForce 750M) through my Airport Extreme over a period of a month prior. My friend is using Windows, but I do not have the details. Sometime around version 0.11.6/0.11.7, we could no longer play games together -- the game would noticeably stutter as we tried to play, making it almost impossible to do anything.

I'm guessing that it's probably a problem on my end somehow, but I don't have a good way of diagnosing what is going on. Is there any debugging information that I can turn on or look at that could tell me what is going on? I don't know if the issue is that packets are being dropped or just arriving slow.

Are there any tools that I could run on my machine and on my friend's machine to see what's happening?

Was there any changes since 0.11.6 that could've affected multiplayer like this? I do realize that multiplayer over the net isn't something that was meant to work, but it was working for at least a little while for us, so it would be nice if I could somehow get back to that at least

Thanks!

[Jaridan]

I don't think it's related, but when playing with my friend(direct connect via IP) we had more lag/stutter when my routerfirewall was on and way less when it was off.

[cube]

There aren't any tools for that yet. Does the game run smoothly for you with only one player connected?

[psihius]

From experiense - check you pings? Latency is not a stable thing and can vary wildly - one day it's fine and steady, the other day it's jumping like crazy.
Also, there are definetly a shedule too, like on Friday evenings with 1 or 2 people of like 5-6 with whoom I'm playing we get like the double latency spikes, probably because on friday there are much more people online in the evenings and our usual 50-60ms ping jumps to like 110-120ms. Probably the reason is that providers on their part just don't have wide enough channels or hardware to handle the traffic.

In that case you need to adjust your latency settigns for the game, settings it 15-20ms above max spikes (well, depends on how wild your spikes get and how often, but if it's under 200ms - definetly just set 10-20ms than your max). To make a more or less correct determination, let the pinging last for 30-40 requests (or a minute: Under windows use in command console "ping -t IP" - the -t flag makes it run untill you quit it manually - to quit press "CTRL + C")).

[SmileyDude]

There aren't any tools for that yet. Does the game run smoothly for you with only one player connected?

Yes, definitely quite smooth on my end. No problem whatsoever until someone connects in multiplayer mode.

From experiense - check you pings?

I did have my friend do a ping and the latency seemed reasonable (I don't have the exact values noted anywhere, otherwise I would post them). I'll have him do it again when we attempt to play again and post up what the actual values are.

[SmileyDude]

I don't think it's related, but when playing with my friend(direct connect via IP) we had more lag/stutter when my routerfirewall was on and way less when it was off.

I'll check with my friend if he has any firewall software running on his machine. Otherwise, it would just be our hardware routers only -- on my end, an Airport Extreme. I don't know the details on his end, but I don't think it's too exotic. I'll see what I can find out.

[cube]

One more idea -- what latency setting do you have for the mp game? Increasing this could help. This value is the lag between pressing a button and actualy performing the action in game, the larger it is, the more time the other client has to get and process the actions, which makes it easier for the game to run smoothly.