A request to all IL2 server operators

[kennel]

This request goes out mainly to full real server operators. Can you all please increase your ping limit to 500.

I live in Western Australia & cant fly on the good European servers due to your ping limit of 300. Yes thats you Aces over Europe. This policy is crazy considering hyperlobby is almost dead.

I have was a regular on spits vs 109s a few years ago & would like to get back into full real flying on a good full real server using HSFX but blow me down I live to far away because of the dreaded ping kick.

So what do you thing guys?

[K_Freddie]

The problem is that the players in more modern (or closer) country's is that they don't have to learn how to fly the game with lag and understandably get upset when 'far away' player needles them (every millisecond counts in combat).

The thing is that they don't know you have lag, but you know and play that to your advantage - which sort of makes it a bit unfair.

But non-the-less there are admins more accepting of this, for the games sake, and this we can be thankful for.
;)

[kennel]

I can understand the lag issue however by having ping restictions you lower your overall player base. IL2 is a world wide game with limmited or a dedicated few. The great thing about warbirds of prey servers was their ping kick was set at 500. So people like myself & others in the Southern hemisphere could mix it up with people from Europe, the Americas (both North & South) Asia & Africa.

Currently some of the European servers are using HSFX 4.11.1 & even expert mode which is great, more people are flying on these servers, but with a ping limit of 300 it excludes alot of the world, which is a real shame.

[K_Freddie]

Yup.. I know - I'm also in the Southern Half.

I used to get a min ping of 350mS, but since we've got some new cables I'm getting a min of about 160mS to some EU servers. I'm surprised that WA has such lousy pings, even to the US.

What you should do (as what I did) is find out who controls the fibre links to US or the shortest route to the EU (this might be via India), and then change your ISP (network provider) to the one that has a 'direct' connection to these people.
As you might find that some ISP's are 2 or 3 levels down (sub-letting) on the connection hierarchy and have shitty ping rates.

Also some ISPs have fast (priority/non 'throttled') links specifically for gaming, you might want to find out about this in your area.
;)

[RPS69]

Lag is bad on both ways.
But is worst for the plane with the more miliseconds behind.
He will be shooting ghosts, and all of his maneuvers will be a bit too late.

[K_Freddie]

We must differentiate between Lag and Ping.

In either case it does not effect the player doing the shooting as all the calculations and hits, are done on this players computer, then passed to the server , then onto your computer - where you suddenly find pieces falling off your plane when your attacker is, according to you, off target. This happens because you are, according to the attacker, in his sights.
The Ping factor is the major cause of this feature.

Lag is network packet loss, that has the effect of making your's or other aircraft to fly funny - wierd rotations, fly underground, beam into outer space. And when the connection with the server is re-established cause that plane, or all others to teleport to their real positions - A sight to behold. :grin:

[310_Podrs]

Hello everyone,
Aces Over Europe running currently on HSFX6.0.12 has recently increased ping kick limit to 450ms.

At this moment, we do not expect to raise it anymore further because of the mentioned above.

Hope it will help some more Australian players to join, there are two of them which already were seen on the server. :)

With regards,
310_Podrs
admin of the AoE DF server

[kennel]

Hello everyone,
Aces Over Europe running currently on HSFX6.0.12 has recently increased ping kick limit to 450ms.

At this moment, we do not expect to raise it anymore further because of the mentioned above.

Hope it will help some more Australian players to join, there are two of them which already were seen on the server. :)

With regards,
310_Podrs
admin of the AoE DF server

Thankyou very much sir, it is very appreciated

Kennel

[K_Freddie]

Hello everyone,
Aces Over Europe running currently on HSFX6.0.12 has recently increased ping kick limit to 450ms.


Nice ... I was sitting at 200-230mS on this server.. any ping spikes and I was a gonna. :grin:

[jermin]

High ping doesn't necessarily cause warping. A player with a relatively low ping might be more likely to warp than one with a high ping. It is players' packet loss rate that server admins should keep an eye on. Fortunately, IL2 has a built-in function to monitor players' packet loss, of which the threshold is configurable in server config file under section [MaxLag]. It can be configured to an extent that one tiny ping spike would throw you out of the server.

Unlike most First Person Shooters, IL2 was designed with high-ping gaming in mind. In IL2, hit registration is done on the client side, not server side. As long as your see your weapons impact an enemy aircraft on your screen, the server will gladly recognize it. But you have to transfer this result (we can think it as a snapshot of everything happened in your game, including your air speed/direction/altitude/aircraft status/weapon status and many other things) to the server so that it can reach the enemy player in order to implement the impact you just did on his aircraft. If the snapshot which contains hit registration data is corrupted, the enemy player will not receive any damage, as if you have missed the shot. That's why packet loss should be efectively avoided.

Of course, the communication between client side and server side is much more complex than this. Between two consecutive snapshots, your position is extrapolated through analyzing previously received data. This is done on the client side. Without this kind of extrapolation, every other player's aircraft in the server will be jumping along its path in the air instead of flying smoothly on your screen.

The extrapolation is quite accurate as long as all snapshots are continuously received. However, if you fail to transfer several consecutive snapshots to the server due to packet loss, your aircraft position in the last snapshot received will shift drastically in the incoming snapshot, causing inaccurate extrapolation on other client sides. This is visualized as aircraft warping/jittering in the air. If your connection is totally lost, other players in the server will see your aircraft flying like a stone towards the direction the interpreted from the last snapshot received and at the speed, you guessed it, obtained from the very same snapshot.

If packet loss exceeding the threshold of the anti-lag settings is detected by the server, server will send out warning messages to all players in the server and then kicked the problematic player out, which all of you should be quite familiar with:

XXX has been idle for too long and is kicked.
Cheating has been detected.

The second one is actually generated by the game's anti-cheat mechanism, which was added in AEP (or PF?) to prevent an exploit by misrepresenting (accelerating) in-game time on the client side (so that planes would fly faster than it should). The mechanism works by comparing the change of in-game time between two consecutive snapshots the server received from a client. Its settings can be adjust through following lines in the config file under [NET] sections:

checkServerTimeSpeed=0
checkClientTimeSpeed=0
checkTimeSpeedDifferense=0.04
checkTimeSpeedInterval=4

Thus, if your packet loss is severe to an extent that it triggers the anti-cheat mechanism, you will be labeled as a cheater and kicked out of the server.

In conclusion, as long as there is no packet loss, high-ping players can play harmoniously together with low-ping players. Several years ago when my squadron was still operating, I once witnessed a teammate with a ping over 900 playing quite naturally with another teammate with average ping in a duel in a crowded training server.

The only downside when playing with a high-ping player is that due to the delay in transferring snapshots (which equals sum of your ping and his ping in millisecond), his aircraft position displayed on your screen is that exact amount of time behind its position on his own screen. So if you have a high-ping player on your six in a lag pursuit, don't be tempted to believe that he doesn't hold a shot. But then again, if you have a bandit that close on your tail, it won't make much of a difference whether his position is delayed or not when you are struggling to shake it off.

After typing out this post, I really miss those days when online play was not yet ruined by mods and the astonishing amount of veteran virtual pilots competing in high-quality full real servers on hyperlobby. Sadly HL is filled with noob quake fliers nowadays.

[K_Freddie]

I really miss those days when online play was not yet ruined by mods and the astonishing amount of veteran virtual pilots competing in high-quality full real servers on hyperlobby. Sadly HL is filled with noob quake fliers nowadays.
Yup... but some of us ;) are still around.

More noobs = more cannon fodder, well we all started somewhere - maybe a new generation of good fliers will emerge ?

TD might take this game engine beyond CLOD.. it looks like it has so much potential at the moment.
It might be a good idea for the guys that were working on CLOD to come back and improve on the IL2 engine with concepts from CLOD
:)