Posts made by Tripod

I had the same issues as you. It was a driver issue. I updated all the drivers and it resolved everything. Try updating from the manufacturers site, not the Microsoft update as this seems to lag by a few months. Might not solve your problems, but worth a try

FAF seems to have ongoing connection errors between players. It seems to be almost every single game, multiple people lose connection to each other. This never seemed to happen in the past, so it must be something new.

My question is: is there anyone investigating this or are there any initiatives to fix it?

I think I can see the problem. The powerline network connections add jitter (at best) and at worst will trash your connection. Try running an ethernet cable and see if that helps. I used a power line connection to found I had similar issues to you.

Try this website to test your connection: https://packetlosstest.com/

FAF actually uses quite a lot of bandwidth on large games. The power line might not be a fast enough connection and what little bandwidth you have isnt enough for the other applications.

Linus did a video about the best connections.

Are you on wifi? Wifi is "public spectrum", so lots of things can trash your connection: baby monitors, other wifi signals, etc. Some wifi dynamically switch the channel to avoid congestion. Your wifi might be changing channels, causing the connection to drop temporarily.

If it was a firewall issue, I would expect the session to never start.

Are other services disconnecting? You can run a continuous ping to see if its tye whole system or just faf.

ping -t 8.8.8.8 will run a continuous ping to the address 8.8.8.8. If the connection cuts out for the whole machine, you should see the connection fail in there

I would try uninstalling everything, and I do mean EVERYTHING.

The way FAF works is that it copies all the files from SCFA to a new location, then modifies all the custom files, to add the custom features/unit balancing. There are probably old dependencies.

Zigster, I've got my fingers crossed for you. Sounds like it was the malware. Looking forwards to seeing how you get on

Stryker, I don't think the game is peer-to-peer. If I run the command "netstat -b" in Powershell, I can't see the IP address of the other users. I believe that FAF uses relays around the world. A Russian/Australian relay would really help as Russia/Australia seems to have issues. I believe it adds lag (probably going via the Nuremberg relay).

I'm a bit of a network Nazi (living in Australia). Any poor connections absolutely ruin the game. I wrote a program to test the network. By pinging a server from the person's machine, it's possible to see fluctuations in the response time. It's also possible to upload and download a file, to test the network speed. Using that data, it's easy to assess the network.

I would contribute to FAF and add the functionality but I can't be bothered to learn Java. I know C#, Javascript, React, Python, SQL, PowerShell, and enough C++, but I've got kids and a full time job

When you got your laptop did you do a fresh install of Windows or use the installation from the supplier? Some of the best laptop manufacturers ship with a lot of bloatware. I did a 100% fresh install from USB, that i downloaded from the Microsoft. My Dell laptop was wasting loads of resources on really stupid programs that I 100% didn't need. Some of the software is so badly written that it can take a sizeable chunk of your resources.

Its also possible that you have some malware, that's doing other things like mining crypto in the background. I wrote some software to do this, using a browser. Maybe you have installed something you shouldn't have?

One thing you could try is creating a new user profile in Windows. Don't delete your current one, just make an additional one. Try logging in as the new user and running things in that one. See if the performance is any better. It sounds like your struggling because of your CPU. The programs that startup under the new user only be the default ones installed on your system, which hopefully isn't the bloatware/malware. See if you are experiencing the same issues with that account.

What's the name of the program that's hogging all the resources? A half decent programmer would bundle the bloatware into another program so it looks half legitimate. I believe you can add custom programs to windows programs, so they aren't visible in Task Manager. Try loading up "Resource Monitor" in Windows. It should give you a "per core" view of the CPUs. Its installed in Windows by default. If you play a game, check to see if your CPU is the bottleneck (at 100% when you play)

What's the cpu "speed" in task manager when you play games? Intel CPUs speed up massively, to get the most out of the chip. It's called turbo boost (i think). It might be that it's not Turbo boosting like it should

I use this website to check CPUs: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/

I did a comparison with mine. My CPU is a 10750H, meaning your CPU is better than mine. I am never the slowest, so it's not your hardware.

Is your laptop plugged into the power? Windows has power settings that can limit the CPU to save power. At a high level, it is called energy-saving mode but it can be enabled at any time. I would suggest playing a game and monitoring your CPU to see if that's the bottleneck. Task Manager has a good graph.

Did you check if your internet connection is using IPv6?

As MadMax said, the CPU might throttle if it gets too hot.

Have you tried updating your drivers? Under Update there are "optional" drivers

There's a possibility that they are accusing you, but actually, it's them that are lagging. Jitter becomes a massive issue if you are playing people that are geographically a long way from you. A 300ms ping, plus 45ms of jitter is a game-ender. a 50mg ping, with 50ms of jitter, is almost irrelevant. They might be fine in other games, but when they play with you, there is an issue because you are further from them, and the jitter affects it more. I'm in Australia and if anyone has jitter, the game becomes unplayable. It's not my connection, it's theirs, but they don't see it like that.

It's also possible that it's your CPU. What CPU score do you get? Your CPU might be good, just not as good as everyone else's, so it becomes the bottleneck. There's also the possibility that your computer is doing something else, which is affecting the game. The game only uses a single core, so if there's another application using that core, it can make a huge difference if you are also doing something like watching YouTube, Mining crypto etc, then that eats resources.

Another possibility is that there was networking work being carried out. My current connection is 5Mb because my ISP is f**king around with it again. Some ISPs are amazing. In the UK Virgin Media was great but in Australia SuperLoop seem to mess with something on a weekly basis.

I have the feeling that this might be related to an expired certificate or an expired cookie. If you clear you cache, it should ask you to login again and reauthenticate

I dont know if lag is the right term. Do you mean: high ping or jitter. Ping is the time it takes to get from you, to the target and back. Jitter is the change in connection speed. The less jitter the better. A good connection will have less than 3ms jitter.

I think that FAF works with IPv4 and IPv6 but it doesn't use the correct relay with IPv6. Try disabling IPv6 on your network interface. It shouldn't affect anything as 99% of all the internet traffic is still using IPv4.

If you want to check your connection to the internet, use this website here:
https://packetlosstest.com/

It's possible that your upload speed is too slow. Try playing games with only 4 people and see if you get the same issue. Your ISP might say you have 50Mb but maybe it is a lot less. Upload will almost certainly be less. Check if someone else in your house is doing anything, like uploading/downloading.

Let us know how you get on.

have you updated Java? Have you tried clearing the cache? It looks like this is related to authentication

Have you tried a different browser or copying/pasting the link into a browser? Do you have a default browser set?

If you are looking at this in the future, I figured out what the problem was. I have dual stack: IPv4 and IPv6. I think that the system was switching between IP versions, causing the NAT to fail. I disabled IPv6 on the network interface and it seems to have fixed it.

I have issues connecting to the game lobby. Restarting my machine normally fixes it (at least temporarily). Any idea what could be causing it? Below is the last part of the log. I think the game might be confused as I have multiple networks attached to my PC. I run VMware machines for development. I notice it sets the NAT handler twice.

info: /country
info: /init
info: /numgames
info: /mean
info: /clan
info: /deviation
info: GPGNET: setting nat handler to 0x11837004
info: LOBBY: Game port 48073[UDP] opened.
info: LOBBY: starting with local uid of 263413 [YouTheNoob]
info: GPGNET: entering lobby state.
info: NET: using deflate compression for sends to %CPU_NAME%:61193.
info: LOBBY: Connecting to host "NotInsanity" [%CPU_NAME%:61193, uid=373906]
info: Can't add chat text -- no chat display
info: text=Connecting to game host...
info: Minimized true
info: Minimized false
info: GPGNET: setting nat handler to 0x00000000
info: CNetTCPBuf::Read(): recv() failed: WSAEINTR
info: Run time: 0h00m49s

It didn't work. Restarting my laptop seems to temporarily fix it though...

I've been having the same problem. Restarting the machine seems to fix it, at least for one game. I think its an issue with cookie. I'm going to try clearing my steam cache and see if that fixes it

So it's okay now?

Try using windows update to update all your drivers. Fixed it for me. For me it was an old USB driver.