So my takeaway from this:

• Yes it's worth me doing, even if it isn't in Java.
• It would be much much better if I did it in Java. If I did it in Java it could be incorporated into the client.
• People have already been looking at in-game networking tools and changing networking settings to improve performance, but there doesn't appear to have been a lot that has been implemented or is available for "non-techies".

Thanks for the help guys. I'm semi-tempted to learn Java just to help with FAF. I've spent literally thousands of hours playing it (i'm still not any good) and I haven't paid a penny, so a bit of my spare time to help seems like the least I could give.

The recent video on Linux tech tips has a huge background for Forged Alliance, then if you look really really close you can see FAF on the desktop!

YouTube (7:11)

Famous last words... "it will take me a few days"....

To make sure people don't think that I've just forgotten about this, I'm still working on this but as a small project, it's actually a bit more complicated than I first thought. I am continuing with this but it's going to take me a bit longer to make something worthwhile.

FYI on the on challenges:

Checking for network jitter

• Creating a program to send out multiple pings a second to multiple IP addresses is actually a bit more complicated than I first thought. Sending a single ping is easy, sending 15 a second, to each hop, to a distant address, is far more complicated. It involves using multiple threads and then ensuring the task is disposed of after it has been run, otherwise, the program uses increasing resources. I understand why there are 0 freely available tools to diagnose this stuff, since it's not a 5-minute job.

Baby steps, the current target is to just ping the local gateway and a remote IP address 10 times a second, this should give a good indication of network jitter.

Driver Check

• So my code runs a windows WMI query to get driver details by searching for "Nvidia" but there are also audio drivers so working out which one is the graphics card is still something im pondering. I personally know my model so I can easily see it, however making sure this works with every Nvidia graphics card is something I still need to work out.

Realtime reporting

• I looked at having a small panel that would overlay the active game, showing network performance but this means that DirectX needs to be used directly, instead of using a simple Winform as Forged Alliance overrides the display to show the game.

Wifi or Cable

• Even this isn't a simple task. This involves more than a few things to get right. It's not as easy as just checking a network interface status, since you can have wifi and cables both connected. I have to write some code to look at the windows routing table to work out which interface is being used when both interfaces are on the same network.

So as a little project, this is still ongoing. The amount of time that it is taking, I might just learn Java.

Does anyone know how an easy way to get the other players IP address? I was looking at pinging the other player's IP addresses to confirm if they are still reachable.

As mac said:

• check the HDMI specs on your monitor and on the laptop. It will drop down to the lower spec. There is limited bandwidth and 144Mhz is a huge amount of data on that resolution. It might be that the laptop or the monitor doesn't support that refresh rate and that resolution for that HDMI spec. The Mhz means that 144 screens are sent every single second. Dropping it to 60Mhz is not noticeable unless you are playing twitch games.

The cable thing might not be an issue in other games since they are probably overriding the default refresh rate to whatever they can manage.

• Are you using the correct graphics drivers? Old drivers massively dropped the performance. The new ones have since fixed it. I believe the way to check for this would be to go into console ( ' ), then type d3d_WindowsCursor (Press enter). This will turn off the thing that was causing the performance hit.

• Another option could be enabling compatibility mode on your games. This should drop the system down to an older standard when playing the game. Be aware that Forged Alliance changed the settings after it closes. To get around this, I made a file that changed the compatibility settings before I run FAF.

Think you should just stop being a snowflake and man up. I don't think someone making a flippant threat is such as issue. It would be different if the person had shown actual intent to do something, then it's clearly breaking the law of whatever jurisdiction they are in, and from a personal standpoint, the person is showing themselves to be a morally dubious person but taking action when someone makes idle threats, to me strikes of coming across like a young child. There used to be a phrase for situations like this: "sticks and stones"

.... just my personal opinion.

I recently moved from the UK to Australia. Since I've been here Downunder I've become acutely aware of minor networking issues that have been ruining my games. I already work in software development and networking, and am now wondering whether it is worth my time (perhaps a day to two) to write some software to test/record the network performance.

So before I start investing/wasting too much time on this I thought i would get your opinions. The things I was looking at testing were:

• Ping times to the local gateway, to see if there is jitter (caused by the wifi/bad cabling/s**t router).
• Ping times to a distant IP address to see if there are ISP issues
• iPerf (bandwidth tester), to see the max bandwidth the user has
• The bandwidth used during gameplay, to see if something else is taking all of it (vs total bandwidth).
• Nvidia driver version (to test for the old driver issue)
• Whether the user is using Global Carrier NAT; games get routed through a relay and ping times are added.

Unfortunately, I only know C# and a little python, so I can't contribute to the FAF client. I was looking at writing it in .Net Core so it should run on Linux and windows.

So still working on this. Wife isn't too happy because I get a bit obsessive and spend longer on these things than I really should.

So some technical questions:

• How does FAF decide whether to use a relay or a direct connection to the other users? Eg does it do it on ping responses? Is there a response from the client that is expected?
• If it is down to a response from the client, what is the best way to get a list of all the other IP addresses of the other users/how are the connections managed?
• Is there any documentation on how the FAF client/Ice adapter works? Apologies but I don't know Java and even if I did, looking through the whole project for find these facts might not be the most time-efficient.
• What is the best way to speak to someone involved in the actual project? I can see the Discord group has a list of developers and I get the feeling that I will have a lot more questions, at the same time I don't want to bother anyone by constantly asking questions, hence why I'm asking here.

The reason I need this information is I want my program to be able to advise the user on how to modify their system so the relay isn't needed (direct connection) and how to improve jitter. Living in Australia a user using the relay can add a lot of latency.

Glad its all working Honestly, if the game says its working at the refresh rate and resolution that you want, there's no reason to swap cables or get an adapter (that I can think of, off the top of my head).

C:\Program Files\Downlord's FAF Client

Is the other part of where the client is stored. Try deleting that folder

Your antivirus might be blocking it. It's not well-known software so it might think its iffy. Check the settings in that. If that doesn't work checking the windows event viewer to see what happens when you try to launch it.

C:\ProgramData\FAForever
C:\Program Files (x86)\Steam\steamapps\common\Supreme Commander Forged Alliance\

FAF makes a copy of the original game with different values to balance things. I think you need to delete both folders and then reinstall.

Use windows update to automatically update the drivers. There is a drop-down of optional drivers, don't forget to check them too (I missed them). I had an issue with my USB drivers that caused my game to crash after about 40 minutes. Automatically updating the drivers fixed it.

As mac said:

• check the HDMI specs on your monitor and on the laptop. It will drop down to the lower spec. There is limited bandwidth and 144Mhz is a huge amount of data on that resolution. It might be that the laptop or the monitor doesn't support that refresh rate and that resolution for that HDMI spec. The Mhz means that 144 screens are sent every single second. Dropping it to 60Mhz is not noticeable unless you are playing twitch games.

The cable thing might not be an issue in other games since they are probably overriding the default refresh rate to whatever they can manage.

• Are you using the correct graphics drivers? Old drivers massively dropped the performance. The new ones have since fixed it. I believe the way to check for this would be to go into console ( ' ), then type d3d_WindowsCursor (Press enter). This will turn off the thing that was causing the performance hit.

• Another option could be enabling compatibility mode on your games. This should drop the system down to an older standard when playing the game. Be aware that Forged Alliance changed the settings after it closes. To get around this, I made a file that changed the compatibility settings before I run FAF.

So still working on this. Wife isn't too happy because I get a bit obsessive and spend longer on these things than I really should.

So some technical questions:

• How does FAF decide whether to use a relay or a direct connection to the other users? Eg does it do it on ping responses? Is there a response from the client that is expected?
• If it is down to a response from the client, what is the best way to get a list of all the other IP addresses of the other users/how are the connections managed?
• Is there any documentation on how the FAF client/Ice adapter works? Apologies but I don't know Java and even if I did, looking through the whole project for find these facts might not be the most time-efficient.
• What is the best way to speak to someone involved in the actual project? I can see the Discord group has a list of developers and I get the feeling that I will have a lot more questions, at the same time I don't want to bother anyone by constantly asking questions, hence why I'm asking here.

The reason I need this information is I want my program to be able to advise the user on how to modify their system so the relay isn't needed (direct connection) and how to improve jitter. Living in Australia a user using the relay can add a lot of latency.

Is it Supreme Commander or FAF that's crashing? FAF was down for maintenance work so that might have been it.

@valki You are a genius. Sounds like a great workaround to me.

@askaholic Thanks for the info. I won't bore you with all the details but there are lots of little things that make this a bit more complicated.

C# has async methods too. They return an object called a Task, which creates a new thread for the method but I need to manually dispose of them due to hundreds of pings running at the same time and all returning a value after different timespans. In C# the issue becomes one of disposing of the task once itself has finished (received the ICMP response). What makes this more complicated is

• ensuring that a ping is sent every 100ms (no time drift)
• resources are cleared up
• ping responses are stored in an array with the correct position (accounts for misordered responses).
• Writes to disk the result once all the pings have been received or timed out.

Microsoft has some basic info here but the problem with these examples is that the tasks are done once. My tasks need to repeat without knowing when the response will be finished.
https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/dotnet/csharp/programming-guide/concepts/async/

I think the way I will do this, is that I will have to stagger the tasks so that there are three threads doing this. One will be pinging, one will be waiting and one will be writing to disk and clearing up resources.

There might be a much much easier way to do this and I'm not seeing the wood for the forest.