Moved to Australia. Is it still possible to play?
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Hang in there! While Australian internet is pretty bad by global standards, you should be OK once you get out of the hotel with its crappy guest WiFi. Typical Australian fixed line NBN connections are usually 25 or 50mbit. 100 is common as well. So from that perspective FAF will be OK as log as you can survive your stint in quarantine!
Latency-wise the only thing I can add is that you will want to be aware of what your ISP is doing when you sign up for a plan. Some Australian ISPs including my own use Carrier-Grade NAT (CG-NAT) which can affect peer to peer games. My ISP allows users to opt out of CG-NAT if they have a valid reason - and gaming is definitely something they list as a valid reason. That said, this may not matter much once Geosearchef's mentioned fixes are in place.
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Guys. thank you so much for the help. The posts have answered pretty much every question i had and a lot that I didn't.
I will do some research into Carrier Grade NAT. I think my old UK mobile phone used this technology.
4 days down, 10 days left till I'm living with the wife's parents and complaining about their internet instead.
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Have a friend in aus that I play with often. He had similar issues due to GC-NAT and had to ask/demand he not have it applied to his connection.
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From looking at this a bit more, I think that as Geosearchef said, FAF uses about 20Kb a second per user, but if there are 12 players on Dual Gap then that means 240Kb a second, with max units I think it is even more. The problem comes that other things use background bandwidth and a 4Mb connection is tiny, so it doesn't take a lot to max it out and push the latency up while it waits for the rest of the packets. 4Mb is also a best case scenario, which means I'm probably actually only getting about 300Kb a second. In short, 4Mb means i cant play on Dual Gap. 8Mb seems fine. The issue with the server being in Nuremeberg also makes sense and just means i cant play against anyone is southeast asia.
Do you have any idea when the fix would be released?
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@geosearchef Awesome work with the ICE adaptor, you breathed new life into FAF!!
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By moving to Australia you trade -300 rating for +300 ping
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I rarely get any lag in game but you will be kicked from public lobbies a lot. Use 1v1 / 2v2 matchmaker or host your own matches and this isn't a problem.
Although your internet is particularly bad (I'm on 50/20).
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Yeah. I go into lobbies and the first thing people say is "No Australians". I don't blame them. I just hope Geosearchef fixes the relay issue soon.
Even if I use a local VPN to get a public IP address (none GC-NAT), so I don't use the FAF Relay server in Nuremberg, there's almost always someone else using GC-NAT and they go through the Nuremburg server. Their extra delay adds to mine and FAF is unplayable over 400ms.
I tried replacing the faf-ice-adapter.jar with the one above, but the system hangs and doesn't load. I ended up replacing the original file.
Unfortunately, I don't know Java. I know a few other languages, otherwise I would volunteer my time to write the code.
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@YouTheNoob We have a relay in Sydney thanks to the amazing PaulWay (and some solid help from the FAF team), and games on the ANZ Discord just about every night. And like Rezy said, not much lag except for the odd individual with issues on their end. We've also got a few regulars from overseas that play just fine with us.
https://discord.gg/6E2sAHt - If you're interested.
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Yet again, thanks for all the help guys. I did some tests for jitter. It's absolutely terrible here. My ping to the UK goes from 300ms to 450ms, so the jitter is making this absolutely unplayable. I will have to wait till I'm out of quarantine before I try again.
So the things that make FAF unplayable here in quarantine are:
- 4Mb wifi connection (run out of bandwidth) on large maps with lots of units. Once a certain threshold is hit, other players have to wait for all the info before each tick can continue.
- Terrible jitter (200ms+). The connection is unstable. Pings to the UK go from 300ms to 450ms+
- Global Carrier NAT, meaning that connections go via the relay (adding even more latency to an already slow connection).
I was actually wondering whether it was worth writing a tutorial on diagnosing networking issues for the next person that comes across this.
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Fix is not released yet but in the works, faforever.com seems to respond to ICMP echo again though. I guess a server admin changed something.
So the old ice adapter should work normal again.
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I'm an Aussie and have had little to no issue with overseas games whilst streaming up until about 1month ago (guessing that's when the changes happened) What I've been able to do was use a VPN to resolve most the issues but still not as good as its was. ANZ is currently the largest FAF clan and very active every night and still growing, to the point world players come to our server, it would be a pity if we can't connect to the world.
