LanCache.NET support
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Hi team, long time player and host of many LAN's involving FAF...
Any thoughts on supporting LanCache.NET?
...specifically for reducing ongoing bandwidth costs on FAF servers (*.content.faforever.com)
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What exactly does "support" mean and is it necessary? This looks like a transparent caching mechanism on DNS level that you can just put in between anything and it will cache any URLS that you configure it to chache.
Except it does not support HTTPS but you could probably just modify the client yourself to use HTTP to the proxy if you need this. But at the end of the day, i don't think that LAN parties make up any significant part of the bandwidth of FAF server.
And it would definitely not be a good idea to disable HTTPS for the client by default since it downloads executable.
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I checked this and all urls to the content server are generated server side. You can't flip over to a different server in the client.
hosts file is your friend I guess
He said, "I've been to the year 3000
Not much has changed, but they live underwater
And your great-great-great-granddaughter
Is playin' FAF, playin' FAF" -
You don't need to change the server URLs, this cache will intercept DNS resolution and put itself into a proxy position for all configured domains. Except it cannot do that for HTTPS request without the client noticing because it doesn't have the cert.
The only important thing is if the client uses HTTPS for content fetching.
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I think in theory ICE is supposed to be able to discover when you’re playing on LAN and connect directly. Not sure if it actually works though because I haven’t had any luck with it. @Geosearchef would know more about that.
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Askaholic I think this is more about getting content from the server like maps, replays, updates ect. Not as much about player connections.
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Not sure what you really gain by intercepting requests to the content server though.
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Oh yea if you want to cache the maps I guess. I don’t see why FAF would have to change anything in order for you to set that up on your own network
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@askaholic said in LanCache.NET support:
I think in theory ICE is supposed to be able to discover when you’re playing on LAN and connect directly. Not sure if it actually works though because I haven’t had any luck with it. @Geosearchef would know more about that.
ICE will connect directly in a local network, yes, but this is about caching content requests to the server. I do not really see the point about that though, given the amount of data to be shipped as well as the issue with https encryption.
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@sheikah Yip, exactly that, maps / updates take AGES to download. I'm pretty confident its server side throttling or bandwidth limits, as i'm on 1Gbps connection here in New Zealand.
Guess if we are not comfortable allowing http for some of the content then its moot. In saying that, i think the point has been missed, as Epic Games / Steam all allow http to save money and speed up content delivery.
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Does downloadable content within the client need to use https? mabe there could be a setting that allows you to chose to use http for downloadable content, that way the content can be cached.
Steam and epic now use http for downloadable game content. -
@brutus5000 said in LanCache.NET support:
You can't flip over to a different server in the client.
This includes switching protocols. It's not designed like that.
Also please don't compare us to Steam. We have more maps than we have ANZ players. The probability that a faf map is in your providers cache tends to 0%. -
What we would need is a regional loadbalancer. But that's not some simple software you get as open source.
The enterprise way us throwing shittons of money to CDN like cloudflare (yes it has a free tier but only for tiny websites / files < 100kb)
