=OFFICIAL COMPSCI.CA STARCRAFT TOPIC=

[Dylan-182]

haha oic kk ty im still fiddling with it right now so ill probly b up all night with it haha but ty again if it works u will b my hero hahah

[[Gandalf]]

Oh, I had a similar problem.

On a 2Ghz+ comp, cable internet, and unblocked ports, nobody ever join my games, since it said "latency is too high". I had no idea why, one or two times, after waiting 4 hours with the game on 1 person joined, but it kept happening. My friend even joined my game once. Anyway, after listening to my detailed explanation, I am happy to say, the problem continues to this day . And the funny (not really) thing is, the game ran on that computer good for a while, then it just stopped. The only explanation is maybe some update messed something up?

I had two other, slower, computers, that ran it just fine - so I stuck with playing on them.

Ya... So, good luck with solving your problem , I spent a long, long time trying to fix the one I had.

[Lazarus]

To open the ports needed for the game, go to start, settings, control panel, windows firewall, click the exceptions tab, click on add port, name it what ever you want, and the ports are listed on the page that you're confused on, make sure you change it to UDP first.

If it was your firewall you wouldn't be able to connect to battlenet at all, not just be able to make a 1vs1 game. So opening ports on your firewall is kinda pointless, although you DO need to do it in order to play in the first place with windows XP anyways.

[Lazarus]

by the way, latince(spelling?) has nothing to do with the speed of your computer, it's the speed of your connection.. This is a common misconception. If you're on dial-up then you will have a high lat, try turing off some internet related programs running (p2p programs for example). Another big thing that slows down your connection is spyware, get rid of all of it, or you will have a high lat rate.

Sorry about the double post.

[md]

Lazerus brings up a good point; so what if you have cable internet, if you've maxed out your total upstream bandwidth then your gonna lag no matter what. Same for down, but that's a bit harder to do...

If your running p2p stuff, or bittorrent stuff make sure you limit the total upload to be small enough not to use up all your upstream bandwidth; with rogers highspeed extreme (800kb/s up) I limit it to 10 or 15 KB/s cause more is to much to even browse to the web at decent speeds.

[[Gandalf]]

Well, I know... The point is, it worked before. If you are talking to me, that is.

I had no spyware, no blocked ports, no programs running in the baground, no bittorrent, I had a more than good enough internet to run much more demanding games, more than good enough computer, experience with the game, and no router at the time. *lets out breath*

Bittorrent is a killer for online playing though, thats more than true enough. I call it the internet "clogger" hehe. When I get a 80 ping normally in ET (check sig) with BT I usually get at least 500, if not 999. To play that game decently with BT on, I have to limit it to ya, 10/20 kbps.

I don't know about web surfing though, if I have a, say, 70kbps download, and 20 kbps upload, I can web browse well enough (and, for me, that's having around 20 tabs open at once )

[md]

Just to give people an idea of how much bandwidth you can use without knowing here's a quick look:

let's go with rogers highspeed since they offer the highest bandwidth in a comsumer level connection; 800kilobits/s == 80 kilobytes/s up. I've done some basic networked game code and the amount of data sent can get quite high, easily 10Kb/s in a busy map. Now factor in bit torrent at another 10Kb/s, plus some overhead if you have a router 1Kb/s; Oh, and don't forget MSN and any other chat programs you have (another 1Kb/s). So now we're at 22Kb/s, now this is only a quater of our total bandwidth, but lets say there is another user now we're at 44Kb/s, just over half our total.

The problem now is that each packet wants to get where it's going as fast as possible, but since a lot of them are release in close proximity, it creates a traffic jam as it were and everything get's slowed down just a bit. The same goes for incoming packets; takes a bit to figure out where their going!

Now let's say your browsing the web instead of playing a game. Firefox and all other browsers work on the principal that fast is best, so they don't limit their usage. Now an http get request isn't that big, but the overhead of establishing a connection can add up when you have to connect to 8 different servers to get all the pictures and adds and content of a particular page. Multiply that by 10 or 20 for all those tabs and it's quite a bit.

When I was at university I didn't have my downlaods of BT capped at all, and my uplaod was about 10Kb/s; on average I used about 35GB of bandwidth a month, and about 50-200Kb/s most of the time. This is a lot of bandwidth, and all I was doing was getting a little music and a few movies!

plus it's important to keep in mind that the more of your bandwidth you use the higher your ping will get, and it get's higher exponentially; so when your playing games, keep background tasks to a minimum for the least lag.

[Notoroge]

Opening the ports is essential to hosting Starcraft, Diablo, or Warcraft III games. Just thought I should point this out. You can join games no problem if you have those ports blocked, but to host it's another problem. It all has to do with the way the protocol is setup. Which is the same reason for why if one person is lagging, everyone else in the game lags. Because the host (game creator), makes sure that all other players are synchronized. Eitherway, yeah... you have to open the Windows XP firewall for these games to work properly.

You initially didn't have to worry about this. But as soon as SP2 came along, this because the issue. Could this by why your Starcraft was working fine but stopped working out of no-where?

[Notoroge]

Cornflake, yes. But it's just plain stupidity to play anything while you have all that stuff running at the same time and expect no lag. It's common sense. I have a 5Mbit connection, and I turn off all file-transfers when playing something like Star-Craft (unless it's single player).

I get around 650Mb/s down and 150Mb/s up on this connection. If that bandwidth is running exclusively for Star-Craft and there's still lag, then your problem is other than the connection speed (or usage thereof). In my case, it was the ports. I fixed them, never had another problem again. Then again, for different people there could be different problems. But usually this is the case.

Try running eMule with the appropriate ports blocked. You'll get really low UIDs, and really shitty connections. Open those ports and watch everything fly. eMule still works, just very poorly. Same goes for Star Craft. It'll still run just fine, but don't expect it to run at it's full potential (or well for that matter).

[[Gandalf]]

First, just to clear this up, I did have the ports open, for battle.net and for Starcraft. Second, something else - later on, quite a bit after nobody could join my games, I stopped being able to join other peoples games. Well, really, I could join them, but I was always the one lagging the other people out. Both times I looked into the problem quite a bit, but even turning off the firewall and unblocking the needed ports on the router didn't help. Most of the time, I even had nothing running in the background, no browser, no BT, no p2p, nothing except task manager.

The problem was not SP2, since this was much before that.

Quote:

Try running eMule with the appropriate ports blocked. You'll get really low UIDs, and really shitty connections. Open those ports and watch everything fly. eMule still works, just very poorly. Same goes for Star Craft. It'll still run just fine, but don't expect it to run at it's full potential (or well for that matter).

Hmm, ya, same thing is true for Shareaza, it works with the ports blocked, but it will run really slowly and take long to connect. From everything, it really does look like the problem was my ports, but I am positive I had everything unblocked.

[Notoroge]

Did you open the ports in both TCP and UDP mode?

[[Gandalf]]

Yup, just to be sure, I opened all the necessary ports in both.

[Notoroge]

Maybe you just have one insane packet loss problem? Did you open them in both the built in WinXP firewall (TCP/UDP) and the router?

[[Gandalf]]

Well, maybe, but this was a strictly starcraft problem. I had the xp firewall disabled at that time, but both my other firewall and the router were unblocked.

[Dylan-182]

hmm its wierd iv done everything that has been posted and nothing is working i think my version of brood war is messed or sumthing damn it all lol wel if anyone comes up with any grand ideas on how 2 make this work lemmie know cause i would like to be able to play with more then one person at a time sometime soon