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.

I really need to get in contact with Brutus and get some more information on this. I was trying to write some software to diagnose these issues.

So here is my understanding of what could cause the issues you are experiencing:

• The pipe is too small. If someone is playing with a connection that is too slow (Mbs per second), the data will basically queue up until the other data is transmitted. Think of it like waiting it a queue of traffic. In my own testing a connection of 6Mb up and down the is minimum needed. Other people here that made the adapters say it will work with less but in my own testing 6Mb is the minimum. Even with 6Mb, if the person is doing something else like watching youtube, youtube will send micro bursts, which coupled with a poor router will increase ping times until the data is sent. In the UK I had a 300Mb connection and had no issues, but when trying with a 4Mb connection I could not play gap. Even if the speed test works great, well some ISPs do a thing called "traffic shaping". They degrade certain connections to prevent people using up too much of their network. I need to emphasis that the upload and download speed are both important. In Australia the connection speeds are awful. I'm currently limited to a 40Mb connection.

• Ports. Everyone connects using a thing called NAT. NAT means a public IP address is shared by multiple PCs. Think of it like having an apartment block. Your public IP address is the street address, then you will have an address in your building. Some cheaper ISPs (and Russians) use a thing called Global Carrier NAT. It means that the ISP is also using NAT. When you connect using FAF, the ports should get opened, but that is not always the case. Re FAF'ing means the ports are normally opened from the previous attempt.

It is also possible that another service is using those ports, hence why the relay is used. Check to see whether the ISP uses GC NAT. I may be wrong but if GC NAT is used, the connection will go via Nuremberg as GC NAT IP addresses are not strictly Australian ones, so it doesn't register the IP address as being Australian. I believe that if you speak to your ISP you may be able to get GC-NAT disabled.

https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/help-centre/nbn/tech-support/cg-nat/

• Firewalls. There are loads of things that can block the ports. Antivirus comes with firewalls, as does windows. Either one of those can interfere. This is similar to the above NAT. It is possible to try disabling the firewall completely, then try. If it fixes the problem, you can add exceptions to your firewall.

• Wifi. If the signal gets interfered with, then the device will need to resend the information. Depending on what is around the device will mean that it might take a few hundred ms to get the information through. Make sure you only play games on ethernet.

• To the chap that said his BBC ping was okay but others were peaking, well a thing called "Quality Of Service" will prioritise the ICMP packet (ping request), so if you connection is maxed out as you download your strange porn, the Ping should come back without the delay.

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)

No offence to the guys at the ISP, but they just go through a checklist. They literally, don't have a clue. Anyone with any real knowledge of networking probably wouldn't be working in a call centre for an ISP. A good networking engineer could earn $800(US) a day, so no way are they going to sit in a call centre.

Things I would do:

• Step one: work out if the ISP is using Global Carrier NAT. Check your router IP address to the ISP. You can get this by login into the router. To log into the router, go into command prompt and type "ipconfig". The default gateway is the address of your router on your network. Load up a browser and go to http://<the IP address> (might be https). Check to see what your public IP address is. Using that you should be able to see if you are using Global Carrier NAT.

• Check the ISPs website to see if GC-NAT is used. It might not be.

• Go to https://whatismyipaddress.com/ and get your public IP address. See if you can ping the address. it might be that your ISP doesn't respond to ICMP (ping requests) for security. Go into your router and try and enable ICMP requests under security settings. I'm not sure how the FAF adapter decides whether or not to use the relay.

• Configure the DMZ of your router. This is a security risk. ALL TRAFFIC THAT GOES TO YOUR EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS WILL BE SENT TO THE DMZ ADDRESS! A DMZ stands for Demilitarized Zone. Any traffic that reaches your public IP address will be sent to this IP address. This means any vulnerabilities on your PC will be vulnerable, as it will be public-facing. Worth trying as a quick check though. It will guarantee that the router isn't the issue.

• Check to see if your router has any built-in firewalls that are stopping services. I once had to disable a setting to allow VPNs.

• Try pinging each others home IP addresses. There is a (small) chance that the ISP has some really bad routes to get from one Australian address to another. A few months ago, I was staying in a hotel and all the data was going via their HQ in Asia before it went a few km down the road. It's possible that the ISP has bad BGP routes. if you go into command prompt (cmd) type "tracert <destination IP address>" and it will show the route your traffic is taking.

These are my thoughts off the top of my head.

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.

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.

No offence to the guys at the ISP, but they just go through a checklist. They literally, don't have a clue. Anyone with any real knowledge of networking probably wouldn't be working in a call centre for an ISP. A good networking engineer could earn $800(US) a day, so no way are they going to sit in a call centre.

Things I would do:

• Step one: work out if the ISP is using Global Carrier NAT. Check your router IP address to the ISP. You can get this by login into the router. To log into the router, go into command prompt and type "ipconfig". The default gateway is the address of your router on your network. Load up a browser and go to http://<the IP address> (might be https). Check to see what your public IP address is. Using that you should be able to see if you are using Global Carrier NAT.

• Check the ISPs website to see if GC-NAT is used. It might not be.

• Go to https://whatismyipaddress.com/ and get your public IP address. See if you can ping the address. it might be that your ISP doesn't respond to ICMP (ping requests) for security. Go into your router and try and enable ICMP requests under security settings. I'm not sure how the FAF adapter decides whether or not to use the relay.

• Configure the DMZ of your router. This is a security risk. ALL TRAFFIC THAT GOES TO YOUR EXTERNAL IP ADDRESS WILL BE SENT TO THE DMZ ADDRESS! A DMZ stands for Demilitarized Zone. Any traffic that reaches your public IP address will be sent to this IP address. This means any vulnerabilities on your PC will be vulnerable, as it will be public-facing. Worth trying as a quick check though. It will guarantee that the router isn't the issue.

• Check to see if your router has any built-in firewalls that are stopping services. I once had to disable a setting to allow VPNs.

• Try pinging each others home IP addresses. There is a (small) chance that the ISP has some really bad routes to get from one Australian address to another. A few months ago, I was staying in a hotel and all the data was going via their HQ in Asia before it went a few km down the road. It's possible that the ISP has bad BGP routes. if you go into command prompt (cmd) type "tracert <destination IP address>" and it will show the route your traffic is taking.

These are my thoughts off the top of my head.

An easier way is to download the newest drivers. They don't experience the issue

I really need to get in contact with Brutus and get some more information on this. I was trying to write some software to diagnose these issues.

So here is my understanding of what could cause the issues you are experiencing:

• The pipe is too small. If someone is playing with a connection that is too slow (Mbs per second), the data will basically queue up until the other data is transmitted. Think of it like waiting it a queue of traffic. In my own testing a connection of 6Mb up and down the is minimum needed. Other people here that made the adapters say it will work with less but in my own testing 6Mb is the minimum. Even with 6Mb, if the person is doing something else like watching youtube, youtube will send micro bursts, which coupled with a poor router will increase ping times until the data is sent. In the UK I had a 300Mb connection and had no issues, but when trying with a 4Mb connection I could not play gap. Even if the speed test works great, well some ISPs do a thing called "traffic shaping". They degrade certain connections to prevent people using up too much of their network. I need to emphasis that the upload and download speed are both important. In Australia the connection speeds are awful. I'm currently limited to a 40Mb connection.

• Ports. Everyone connects using a thing called NAT. NAT means a public IP address is shared by multiple PCs. Think of it like having an apartment block. Your public IP address is the street address, then you will have an address in your building. Some cheaper ISPs (and Russians) use a thing called Global Carrier NAT. It means that the ISP is also using NAT. When you connect using FAF, the ports should get opened, but that is not always the case. Re FAF'ing means the ports are normally opened from the previous attempt.

It is also possible that another service is using those ports, hence why the relay is used. Check to see whether the ISP uses GC NAT. I may be wrong but if GC NAT is used, the connection will go via Nuremberg as GC NAT IP addresses are not strictly Australian ones, so it doesn't register the IP address as being Australian. I believe that if you speak to your ISP you may be able to get GC-NAT disabled.

https://www.aussiebroadband.com.au/help-centre/nbn/tech-support/cg-nat/

• Firewalls. There are loads of things that can block the ports. Antivirus comes with firewalls, as does windows. Either one of those can interfere. This is similar to the above NAT. It is possible to try disabling the firewall completely, then try. If it fixes the problem, you can add exceptions to your firewall.

• Wifi. If the signal gets interfered with, then the device will need to resend the information. Depending on what is around the device will mean that it might take a few hundred ms to get the information through. Make sure you only play games on ethernet.

• To the chap that said his BBC ping was okay but others were peaking, well a thing called "Quality Of Service" will prioritise the ICMP packet (ping request), so if you connection is maxed out as you download your strange porn, the Ping should come back without the delay.

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.