Our ReVolt Pub

This bug report is mostly addressed to huki.

We've been forced to use -nop2p in the races recently since most of the time there are some people who experience problems.

The problem is that some racers can only see the host. All the others are not moving, standing around inanimate at the starting line.
And people with that problem can not be seen by the majority of racers, either.

I'm not sure what it is in their network configuration that causes this. What I do know is that they won't be able to do anything about it. This happens even if they opened all crucial ports (even if they shouldn't have to).
As far as I'm concerned, there are at least 3 active racers who have this problem

Is there any hack around this? Maybe a hybrid form of p2p and server-client? This needs to be resolved since we're not using P2P in the races at all right now. I would really like P2P to become the standard since it offers a much better performance.

while p2p may increase performance it's known to cause lag in a environment where everyone is connected via p2p even the host. even one lagged player lags the overall game.

Given how international we are it would be best to just depend on a server, sure do p2p if the ping is lower than 200ms for example, and discard p2p if no connection can be made which explains why some players only see the host moving and such.

Marv I don't know who was the host.

I host almost everyday in P2P and usually it's 2 to 3 players who have trouble synching and usually always the same, to some others it doesn't happen a single time so I wonder if this is somehow user related.

Indeed, this does seem to happen to specific players. However, it does not make it any less of an issue. A solution needs to be found, whether it be through an RVGL patch or by troubleshooting via the players who have the issue. To my knowledge, no attempts have been made to find a solution through either option.

First thing would be to troubleshoot their settings for router, compatibility/administration rights, firewall and anti-virus, experience says it's always the user .

Are these troubles related to a specific OS, Windows 10 maybe?

Shouldn't we write a guide for the above ?

Just my 5 cents

It's mostly a connectivity issue.
They range from firewall to ISP blocking ports.
But, yes, the implementation needs a revision definitely.

this happens to me somewhat often...and i don't think it's my connection, my settings have been stable for years.

i'll join a race of say 8 racers and half of them don't move and remain flashing on and off at the start line. sometimes i can chat with the host, other times not, but only to players that are active to me. Sometimes i can disconnect and reconnect and it fixes itself. other times reconnecting fixes some players cars, but not all cars, and sometime it does fix all cars.

this happened just this past weekend. i was hosting a room and had good connections to all cars, but then my room ended and i connected to another players room (mostly the same players) and half the cars were inactive. i disconnected and reconnected two times and it did not solve the issue

once this happens, it consistently happens race after race, the sync for each new track does not affect it, the same cars that are inactive will always remain that way.

I had the ports open in that video, but i could not see them all. Only the host it's racing

[youtube][/youtube]

your ports open does not always mean their ports are open too

I'll give another look at the P2P implementation, but I think I know what the problem could be. This applies to players who have their ports opened properly, and still could not connect. If you're unable to open ports through your router page and depend entirely on RVGL's hole punching trick, this may not apply to you.

The problem with the current implementation is that players other than the host are allocated a random port. These are the ports you can see in your re-volt.log for each player trying to connect to you. Only the host uses port 2310. This means unless you're the host, the port your game is using is always likely to be closed, and you're always depending on the hole punching trick to get you through. Clients currently don't have the choice to select their own port and open it manually.

It explains why players like SCracer are able to host (after opening port 2310) but still have these connectivity issues as a client.

The reason why a random port was used was to allow any number of clients from the same local network to connect online in P2P without needing any configuration (assuming hole punching works for them). As we've seen, hole punching works 97% of the time, but when it fails, clients will need to configure a port of their choice and open it manually. In the next release I'm going to add a configuration option in the ini that will let you select the client port. This will hopefully resolve the connectivity issues for good.

Of course, this is assuming those 3-4 players with the problem are able to open ports in their router (for example, they're able to host). Can they do that?

Note: this condition, also, commonly happens, and is used, in BitTorrent and P2P programs. (and those are uPnP-complaint which makes things easier with automatic forwarding)
Either a fallback port or using uPnP would solve this for good.
Thanks Huki for the provided solution through!