Connection issues playing on a LAN

[[email protected]]

I am running a D&D 5e PotA campaign with FG. I have an ultimate license, and I have 1 player who has an ultimate license and 2 other players with free licenses. We are all playing on laptops sitting at the same table and are communicating via a dedicated wireless access point... all 4 laptops are in the same subnet, no router between them. I originally tried running the game without Internet access, but apparently Internet access is required for license verification. The only modules that I am sharing are:


DD Basic Rules - Player
DD Character Customization Pack
DD PHB Class Pack - Cleric
DD PHB Class Pack - Fighter
DD PHB Class Pack - Ranger
DD PHB Class Pack - Rogue


We are having a few random and quite frustrating issues. One client in particular disconnects from me frequently, and frequently has issues with maps and images not loading and/or not updating. Also, there is substantial lag when they roll. A second client also has occasional map loading/syncing issues, but not as often. The third client is 100% rock steady, no disconnection issues, no map issues. The funny part is that this player has the oldest laptop of the group.

Since there is no router between us, it shouldn't be a port/firewall issue. I have verified that everyone has disabled their Windows firewalls and that they don't have any other software firewalls running.

What else can we try? I hate to waste any of our game time troubleshooting, but I am about to the point of starting Wireshark during a session and seeing what is going on.



Thanks in advance for any suggestions,

Sam

[Andraax]

Buy a cheap switch and put it under the table, and have everyone wired into the switch.

[dulux-oz]

Your issue, Sam, is too many connections on the Wireless LAN - in detail, Wireless is a Half-Duplex and collision prone technology which means that only one PC can talk to the others at the same time (in layman's terms).

The solution is to put everyone on a wired switch - a switch is Full-Duplex and collision free, meaning that the throughput is way, way higher.

So do as Andraxx suggested and grab a cheap 100Mb or 1,000Mb Switch and some 6 foot (2 meter) cat 6 ethernet cables.

Cheers

[[email protected]]

Hmmmm.... We are using an 802.11ac WAP which supports MU-MIMO so in theory we should be fine since MU-MIMO supports up to 4 simultaneous downlinks... albeit, still half-duplex but a significantly reduced collision domain. This, of course requires that all clients also have MIMO-capable AC wireless interfaces, which I know the 2 that are having the most significant issues do.

All that said, the next logical step does seem to go wired and see if that helps. I'll have to make sure all my players' laptops have Ethernet ports, or that they have USB 3.0 adapters handy.

Thanks for the quick replies and valuable input. I'll reply back after our next session with the results.


Sam

[Bidmaron]

The other easy thing to do is disconnect all other computers and connect them one at a time to see if they behave fine by themselves (turn off wireless on all but DM and one player).

[damned]

Make sure that your LAN players are connecting to your LAN/Internal address and not connecting to you WAN/External IP Address or your Alias.
Once your initial download is done Wifi connectivity will be less of an issue.

If you are connecting to a GM across the internet you should use Alias or External IP address
If you are connecting to a GM on a LAN you should use the Internal IP Address
If you are connecting to a GM with a player instance on the same computer you should use localhost

[[email protected]]

We are using internal IP address. Thanks for the suggestion though.

[damned]

Have the one player nuke their cache and then connect before all the other players.
Have them activate their modules and wait until they are fully downloaded.
If that doesnt work the player may have a less efficient network connection and you will have to go wired at least for them...

[Willot]

Id just like to add to this the simplist solution is most often the correct one, so yeah wired switch.

Mind you I dont know why you arent using the new Quantium Entanglement Wireless Router (with beam through, the new 1256GHz freq are great!)

Wait? what year is it? ..2017? ....OH wait sorry crap I thought Id come through to 2217!
SOrry! forget evey thing I just said otherwise you may be edited out of the timeline to preserve the integrity.
Back to half-Duplex!

But on a side note things obvoiusy get better! (cept for the cats rising up and taking over)
<Willots voice becomes a little louder as he stands up straight>
"HOWEVER I FOR ONE WELCOME OUR FELINE OVERLORDS!!!!"


Shhhhhhhhh The're always listening..... ;)

[dulux-oz]

@Willit => Dude, you need to get a life!

(And for Bast's sake, shut your mouth!)

[Willot]

@Willit => Dude, you need to get a life!

(And for Bast's sake, shut your mouth!)
o7 "Your will emperor!" (wait did the Dulux wars happen yet?)

[[email protected]]

We had our first "wired" session last night and it was flawless. No disconnects, no slow map loads, no roll lags. This is mostly good news because now we have a working solution for our games.

However, I feel that this is going to be more and more of an issue for FG users in the future who wish to use FG in this manner, that is all sitting in one room rather than across the Internet. Very few laptops now come with an Ethernet port. Perhaps the much anticipated "Unity version" will be more friendly to clients within a wireless LAN network.

Many thanks to the thoughtful (and helpful) responses to my original post, as well as the bit of humor injected by others. ;-)



Sam

[Andraax]

In reality, putting the GM's system on a direct wire to the router, then having all the others wireless might work as well.

And I have yet to see a laptop (except a Mac) *without* an ethernet port. Sometimes they're hidden behind a flip down plastic tab. Even cheap Chromebooks come with ethernet ports. (Most wireless chips support ethernet internally, so it pretty much doesn't cost the manufacturer anything to put in a port, just the cost of the port itself.)

[damned]

I believe that barring -

* any misbehaving wifi interfaces
* any devices having poor connections
* not too much other high bandwidth traffic on the same wifi network
that this would fine providing you -
* dont connect all players at the same time
* you preshare the PHB before game time and ensure all players cache it before game time
* any maps bigger than 1mb are preshared

Its when you get contention on a wifi network that things go downhill fast. And contention creates more contention if the traffic does not pause.

[Bidmaron]

Sam, look at my post earlier. I gave you a workable solution that would be purely wireless. What Andraax said is almost certainly true as well.

[Bidmaron]

I am surprised this does not come up more often, but contention, as damned points out, is not guaranteed. Perhaps we need a new sticky in the Help that discusses the problem and how to deal with it because I do believe the OP is right and we are bound to see this again.

[[email protected]]

And I have yet to see a laptop (except a Mac) *without* an ethernet port. Sometimes they're hidden behind a flip down plastic tab. Even cheap Chromebooks come with ethernet ports. (Most wireless chips support ethernet internally, so it pretty much doesn't cost the manufacturer anything to put in a port, just the cost of the port itself.)

I can personally show you well over 1800 Dell XPS 15 laptops as well as 6250 Lenovo N22 Chromebooks in my organization and NONE of them have Ethernet ports. Look at the specs of any newer business class laptop and you'll see the same. The Ethernet port is dead. You can order an optional USB-C Ethernet adapter but there is no longer on-board Ethernet.

[[email protected]]

I believe that barring -

* any misbehaving wifi interfaces
* any devices having poor connections
* not too much other high bandwidth traffic on the same wifi network
that this would fine providing you -
* dont connect all players at the same time
* you preshare the PHB before game time and ensure all players cache it before game time
* any maps bigger than 1mb are preshared

Its when you get contention on a wifi network that things go downhill fast. And contention creates more contention if the traffic does not pause.

Just for the sake of discussion, my line of work is enterprise networking. I manage the WAN for a K-12 school district with 62 seperate buildings with over 46,000 users and 26,000+ active wireless clients on any given day. These days most users carry 2+ wireless devices at any given time and they all want them on my network instead of using their precious cellular data plan!

I say that to simply communicate that I fully understand networking and specifically wireless networking. At work we are slowly converting all of our schools to 802.11ac Wave 2 access points and encouraging the purchase of wireless devices that support 802.11ac. At home, for our gaming room I have an 802.11ac Wave 2 wireless access point attached to a dedicated 30meg Internet connection. Addressing your list above:

* The only clients that attach to this wireless network are our gaming laptops. I encourage my players to limit their web activity while we game, but naturally there is a bit of Googling, etc during our sessions, but nothing of consequence. The bulk of the network traffic is FG related.

* All players except 1 are co-workers who are equally proficient in networking and understand how to diagnose and fine tune network interfaces.

* In the Modules section of the FG Library on my (DM) machine I have the PHB "open book" icon, and "green check marked". If that is what you mean by pre-shared, then I'm good.

* I click the "cobweb" icon on every map/image before I share it which I believe pre-shares them.


The bottom line is that I am confident that my wireless LAN is not deficient in any way, I am comfortable that the wireless interfaces on the laptops are OK and I have observed that switching to a wired connection SIGNIFICANTLY improved our experience. For us, that is the answer. It is not an issue to stick with the wired infrastructure. However, I think this is going to increasingly become an issue as more and more laptops shed the Ethernet ports and the average consumer does not purchase an optional USB Ethernet adapter and dedicated Ethernet switches.

Thanks again for all the attention to my issue,


Sam

[Bidmaron]

Sam, you cannot expect SW to fix an architectural problem with wireless LANs. That is not SW's fault.

I hope they don't abandon the server concept in use as we move on to Unity. As it is, we have the comfort of knowing that even if SW were ever to go away, we could still play FG because it doesn't rely upon a central server.

[[email protected]]

Sam, you cannot expect SW to fix an architectural problem with wireless LANs. That is not SW's fault.

I hope they don't abandon the server concept in use as we move on to Unity. As it is, we have the comfort of knowing that even if SW were ever to go away, we could still play FG because it doesn't rely upon a central server.

Simply not true. Software engineers are constantly making improvements with the way their software interacts with the network. Granted, this is not something that SmiteWorks can necessarily change with their coding, it is an underlying issue with the framework they are currently using. It is my hope that the Unity engine will be more efficient.

Please understand that I have no complaints whatsoever at this point. I have a viable, acceptable working solution that works perfectly for me. I am just simply stating that this is going to come to the forefront more in the future. Or maybe it wont.


Sam

[Trenloe]

Granted, this is not something that SmiteWorks can necessarily change with their coding, it is an underlying issue with the framework they are currently using. It is my hope that the Unity engine will be more efficient.
Yep, Smiteworks do admit that the current network stack is not that great at handling multiple connections and re-tries during communication. This is exacerbated with the transfer of large files - e.g. when players first connect and when large files are transferred at once - e.g. pre-sharing a lot of images at once. This gets better over time as the player side caches data and so reduces future downloads (doesn't download what it has already downloaded).

Hopefully the more recent (and multi-threaded) Unity architecture will make big improvements around network communication. A bad WiFi connection will still cause issues, but that doesn't sound like what you have in your setup Sam.

Glad you got going and can now play without disconnection interruptions.

[damned]

Hi Sam,

Next time the players are together have a look at the cache directory size on one of the players computers - not on your GM computer. If the game is fairly new then the bulk of that file size was shared in one go. But it wasnt shared once it was shared four times. Contention on wifi networks has an amplification effect and the FG clients are still sending/resending in response to the lost packets due to contention which keeps the issue going longer. Despite having 26,000 wifi devices on your network it is unlikely you have too many servers serving data on wifi connections.

FG is using an older game engine and the size of resources being shared today are vastly bigger than they were even several years ago.

EDIT: Ninja'd by 14 hours... doh.