Question Network problem in COOP Games

[NickCloudAT]

Hey,

I wasn't sure if this is ok to be posted here.. But for me its a Network problem..

So.. It's somewhat complicated for me to explain, also because english is not my native language.. I will try..


Soo.. I recently moved and also got a new internet connection. It's a hybrid connection (DSL+LTE/4G).
Everything worked as expected so I wasn't worried about anything, but today I wanted to play Raft and GTFO with a friend and I had massive Problems..

I will explain it for Raft first (Though its the same in GTFO pretty much):

I joined the world of my friend who is the host, we never had any problems with that before.
Joining the world works without problems and I played a few minutes without any problems.
Then, the game started to act pretty weird:

• The world would not update anymore (raft would not move eg.)
• The Player character of my friend would only update every like 10 seconds or so and lag
• I wasn't able to interact with anything anymore
• I was NEVER kicked from the game or smth like that

As you may see, it's unplayable like that.. In GTFO it was pretty much the same, only that the Player character would move normaly but the world would not update for me (doors would not open until like a minute later eg).

Then I started to suspect my internet (which again works perfectly fine overall, also playing on like a Minecraft server or smth is no problem at all).

I fired up wireshark and found out the following:

While connecting/connected to the world of my friend, I see the following two packages getting send over and over again:

https://imgur.com/a/P5e8jbQ

While everything was lagging, those two packages got sent pretty often (like every second or even more often).. I then tried the same with my mobile phones connection via hotspot and everything worked fine again.. and those two packages were sent in like intervals of 5-10 seconds.

I also already tried to remove the sim-card of my hybrid router so I would only run on DSL.. Did not work.
I also tried to set the firewall on my router to the lowest setting (there is no off)..

Maybe somebody here has another Idea? I already contacted my ISP (which is Drei in my country Austria), but I'm yet awaiting a response.


Thanks.

Nicolas

 

[bill001g]

I am somewhat surprised you can even use a router that has multiple ISP connected. The IP could change constantly as your traffic moves between them. This makes a lot of stuff not work.

I know no details of those games but I suspect it something to do with the NAT or the port forwarding. If the STUN stuff is actually related to your problem that also points to some issue with the ports being used. STUN is mostly used for VoIP application and is used to resolve some of the issues of VoIP using random ports to carry the actual voice data. The game could be using it for voice comms or it can use it for the game traffic since both games you are talking about are not using central servers.

 

[NickCloudAT]

I am somewhat surprised you can even use a router that has multiple ISP connected. The IP could change constantly as your traffic moves between them. This makes a lot of stuff not work.

I know no details of those games but I suspect it something to do with the NAT or the port forwarding. If the STUN stuff is actually related to your problem that also points to some issue with the ports being used. STUN is mostly used for VoIP application and is used to resolve some of the issues of VoIP using random ports to carry the actual voice data. The game could be using it for voice comms or it can use it for the game traffic since both games you are talking about are not using central servers.

Thanks for your reply,

my router is not connected to 2 different ISPs. It uses a Hybrid technology (maybe this technology is not common all around the world?).
Pretty much it uses my DSL connection unless I need more bandwitdh, then it adds the 4G connection to make things faster, but both connections are from the same ISP.

I also still only have 1 IP, not 2. Hybrid somehow connects the two things together pretty okay'ish.

It seems to not happen in all games.. I also tested The Forest, and there it did not happen.. Yet.
I don't know much about networking tbh..

Maybe somebody else has more idead.. otherwise I will probably have to wait for my ISP to respond.

 

[bill001g]

If the same ISP runs both then they can use tricky VPN methods to use just one IP. You get a new problem where the packets now get out of order because the latency is different on the 2 internet connection. Some things are more affected by packets out of order than others.

 

[NickCloudAT]

If the same ISP runs both then they can use tricky VPN methods to use just one IP. You get a new problem where the packets now get out of order because the latency is different on the 2 internet connection. Some things are more affected by packets out of order than others.

As far as I researched, the packets wait for each other and get put together in the correct order again.. Like I said, this hybrid technology normaly works pretty well.

Eg. my DSL only gets like 20 mbit down, with hybrid I get the full 80 and it works flawlessly for, eg, steam downloads.

 

[NickCloudAT]

Fixed it.. My ISP has an option called "Open Internet" which disable me beeing behind 2 NATs.
It works now.

 

[bill001g]

I am glad you found this. What you have is a extremely unusual connection type. It uses a form of vpn to combine the 2 connections and then if you say it fixes the out of order packet issue it is even more complex.

There were so called network accelerators we used to use that did stuff like this. They cost as much as a small car. The key problem was even when the latency was equal you could say load a 1500 byte packet on 1 connection and then send 10 150 byte packets on the other. This makes the packets arrive out of order. Just putting in a buffer does not really solve the problem because everything is now being delayed waiting on the large packet to finish. The way they fix this is to chop all packets into small pieces so they can send partial packets on both links. They then reassemble the data into the correct packets on the far end. Very complex and cpu intensive and not something I have ever heard about being used on a consumer internet connection.