Getting the netcode to work reliably in a peer to peer multiplayer title is tricky. Every peer must be able to quickly and reliably send and receive packets with every other peer, or the whole thing falls apart. Also, if any machine runs a turn slower than expected for any reason, the entire system will hitch while waiting for the slow peer to catch up. DE constantly monitors the pings and framerates of all connections and machines in a MP game, but it can only compensate so much for bad connections.
In DE's game lobby there's a 2D matrix of blocks that shows the systemwide roundtrip latencies between all players (circled in red):
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Once you're in a lobby, the game's peer to peer multiplayer code (parts of which date back to the original game) is active, and your machine is actively communicating with all the other machines. Every 4 seconds your machine pings all the other clients, the results are sent to the host, and every few seconds the host then sends the entire matrix to all peers.
For each row of this matrix, the latency to all the other players is visualized. So the first block on row 2 represents the latency from player 2 to player 1, and the third block on row 2 is the latency from player 2 to player 3, etc. Grey means no response (yet), green is <200ms ping, yellow is <=400ms, and red is >400ms. The game won't start if there are any grey blocks (even in "dedicated server" mode). The ping matrix is not necessarily symmetrical, but usually is.
If a block has a thin blue rectangle around it, that means that client has to use a TURN server relay to get its packets to the other client due to NAT traversal issues. This means extra overhead.
The latencies visualized here are low pass filtered over approx. 8 pings.
The "Ping" column shows the local roundtrip latencies to the other clients. Each player will have its own unique column of values. Apart from maybe the host, I think this column is kind of useless, because it's only showing local latencies. It would have been better if it displayed each player's worst latency.
This matrix is used to compute the turntimes used during the actual game. I believe all peer to peer titles should display something like this, to help players quickly see at a glance how healthy the connections are between peers.
In DE's game lobby there's a 2D matrix of blocks that shows the systemwide roundtrip latencies between all players (circled in red):
Once you're in a lobby, the game's peer to peer multiplayer code (parts of which date back to the original game) is active, and your machine is actively communicating with all the other machines. Every 4 seconds your machine pings all the other clients, the results are sent to the host, and every few seconds the host then sends the entire matrix to all peers.
For each row of this matrix, the latency to all the other players is visualized. So the first block on row 2 represents the latency from player 2 to player 1, and the third block on row 2 is the latency from player 2 to player 3, etc. Grey means no response (yet), green is <200ms ping, yellow is <=400ms, and red is >400ms. The game won't start if there are any grey blocks (even in "dedicated server" mode). The ping matrix is not necessarily symmetrical, but usually is.
If a block has a thin blue rectangle around it, that means that client has to use a TURN server relay to get its packets to the other client due to NAT traversal issues. This means extra overhead.
The latencies visualized here are low pass filtered over approx. 8 pings.
The "Ping" column shows the local roundtrip latencies to the other clients. Each player will have its own unique column of values. Apart from maybe the host, I think this column is kind of useless, because it's only showing local latencies. It would have been better if it displayed each player's worst latency.
This matrix is used to compute the turntimes used during the actual game. I believe all peer to peer titles should display something like this, to help players quickly see at a glance how healthy the connections are between peers.