Gaming Consoles and IPv4

Mon Sep 28 19:30:38 UTC 2020

Delay, or “lag” in gamer parlance is everything. Have too much lag 
and you are dead without realizing you are dead. Lag frustrates gamers 
enormously and is probably one of the main drivers of NOC calls.

It seems to me that a purely client/server model will inherently have 
more lag issues than a peer-to-peer game.

Not to mention cost… if you are the game publisher suddenly you’re 
faced with maintaining a global footprint of servers with all that 
implies.

/Carlos

On 28 Sep 2020, at 11:21, Tom Beecher wrote:

> >
>> Why stray away from how PC games were 20 years ago where there was a
>> dedicated server and clients just spoke to servers?
>
>
> Much cheaper to just let all the game clients talk peer to peer than 
> it is
> to maintain regional dedicated server infrastructure.
>
> On Mon, Sep 28, 2020 at 8:35 AM Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> wrote:
>
>> Why stray away from how PC games were 20 years ago where there was a
>> dedicated server and clients just spoke to servers?
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> Mike Hammett
>> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL>
>> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb>
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions>
>> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
>> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix>
>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange>
>> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
>> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
>> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
>> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
>> ------------------------------
>> *From: *"Justin Wilson (Lists)" <lists at mtin.net>
>> *To: *"North American Network Operators' Group" <nanog at nanog.org>
>> *Sent: *Monday, September 28, 2020 7:22:28 AM
>> *Subject: *Re: Gaming Consoles and IPv4
>>
>> There are many things going on with gaming that makes natted IPv4 an 
>> issue
>> when it comes to consoles and gaming in general.   When you break it 
>> down
>> it makes sense.
>>
>> -You have voice chat
>> -You are receiving data from servers about other people in the game
>> -You are sending data to servers about yourself
>> -If you are using certain features where you are “the host” then 
>> you are
>> serving content from your gaming console.  This is not much different 
>> than
>> a customer running a web server.  You can’t have more than one 
>> customer
>> running a port 80 web-server behind nat.
>> -Streaming to services like Twitch or YouTube
>>
>> All of these take up standard, agreed upon ports. It’s really only
>> prevalent on gaming consoles because they are doing many functions.  
>> Look
>> at it another way.  You have a customer doing the following.
>>
>> -Making a VOIP call
>> -Streaming a movie
>> -Running a web server
>> -Running bittorrent on a single port
>> -Having a camera folks need to access from the outside world
>>
>> This is why platforms like Xbox developed things like Teredo.
>>
>> Justin Wilson
>> j2sw at mtin.net
>>
>> —
>> https://j2sw.com - All things jsw (AS209109)
>> https://blog.j2sw.com - Podcast and Blog
>>
>> On Sep 27, 2020, at 9:33 PM, Daniel Sterling 
>> <sterling.daniel at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>> Matt Hoppes raises an interesting question,
>>
>> At the risk of this being off-topic, in the latest call of duty games 
>> I've
>> played, their UDP-NAT-breaking algorithm seems to work rather well 
>> and
>> should function fine even behind CGNAT. Ironically turning on upnp 
>> makes
>> this *worse*, because when their algorithm probes to see what ports 
>> to use,
>> upnp sends all traffic from the "magical xbox port" to one box 
>> instead of
>> letting NAT control the ports. This does cause problems when multiple
>> xboxes are behind one NAT doing upnp. If upnp is on and both xboxes 
>> are
>> fully powered off and then turned on one at a time, things do work. 
>> But
>> when upnp is off everything works w/o having to do that.
>>
>> There are many other games and many CPE NAT boxes that may do 
>> horrible
>> things, but CGNAT by itself shouldn't cause problems for any recent 
>> device
>> / gaming system.
>>
>> It is true that I've yet to see any FPS game use ipv6. I assume 
>> that's cuz
>> they can't count on users having v6, so they have to support v4, and 
>> it
>> wouldn't be worth their while to have their gaming host support 
>> dual-stack.
>> just a guess there
>>
>> -- Dan
>>
>>
>>
>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 7:29 PM Mike Hammett <nanog at ics-il.net> 
>> wrote:
>>
>>> Actually, uPNP is the only way to get two devices to work behind one
>>> public IP, at least with XBox 360s. I haven't kept up in that realm.
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>> -----
>>> Mike Hammett
>>> Intelligent Computing Solutions <http://www.ics-il.com/>
>>> <https://www.facebook.com/ICSIL>
>>> <https://plus.google.com/+IntelligentComputingSolutionsDeKalb>
>>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/intelligent-computing-solutions>
>>> <https://twitter.com/ICSIL>
>>> Midwest Internet Exchange <http://www.midwest-ix.com/>
>>> <https://www.facebook.com/mdwestix>
>>> <https://www.linkedin.com/company/midwest-internet-exchange>
>>> <https://twitter.com/mdwestix>
>>> The Brothers WISP <http://www.thebrotherswisp.com/>
>>> <https://www.facebook.com/thebrotherswisp>
>>> <https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCXSdfxQv7SpoRQYNyLwntZg>
>>> ------------------------------
>>> *From: *"Matt Hoppes" <mattlists at rivervalleyinternet.net>
>>> *To: *"Darin Steffl" <darin.steffl at mnwifi.com>
>>> *Cc: *"North American Network Operators' Group" <nanog at nanog.org>
>>> *Sent: *Sunday, September 27, 2020 1:22:51 PM
>>> *Subject: *Re: Gaming Consoles and IPv4
>>>
>>> I understand that. But there’s a host of reasons why that night 
>>> not work
>>> - two devices trying to use UPNP behind the same PAT device, an 
>>> apartment
>>> complex or hotel WiFi system, etc.
>>>
>>> On Sep 27, 2020, at 2:17 PM, Darin Steffl <darin.steffl at mnwifi.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>> 
>>> This isn't rocket science.
>>>
>>> Give each customer their own ipv4 IP address and turn on upnp, then 
>>> they
>>> will have open NAT to play their game and host.
>>>
>>> On Sun, Sep 27, 2020, 12:50 PM Matt Hoppes <
>>> mattlists at rivervalleyinternet.net> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know the solution is always “IPv6”, but I’m curious if 
>>>> anyone here
>>>> knows why gaming consoles are so stupid when it comes to IPv4?
>>>>
>>>> We have VoIP and video systems that work fine through multiple 
>>>> layers of
>>>> PAT and NAT. Why do we still have gaming consoles, in 2020, that 
>>>> can’t find
>>>> their way through a PAT system with STUN or other methods?
>>>>
>>>> It seems like this should be a simple solution, why are we still 
>>>> opening
>>>> ports or having systems that don’t work?
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>

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