Gaming Lan Advice And Help

[MaiPenLai]

Like many people I have multiple computers at home on a LAN. The LAN has 3 desktops and a laptop. The three desktops are wired through a SMC Barricade ADSL/modem/router and the laptop connects through wifi with 100% strength and 100% link quality ( It's 3 feet away )

The games we play on the LAN are mostly C&C stuff... Generals, Yuri's revenge, Generals Zero Hour with a little Counter Strike thrown in for good measure.

All the computers far exceed the listed games requirements. RAM, Video, and CPU far surpass the requirements on all machines. No cheap hardware, all machines but the laptop have a dedicated HD for the OS on a 78GB very fast HD.

All hardware drivers and software updates are current including Bios, video, SMC.....all.

No cheap LAN cables, no long runs.

When LAN games are played all unnecessary software is disabled: Anti virus, Firewalls both hardware (Barricade) and software are dropped, all utility programs are halted in an effort to make lean machines to handle the games run better. The internet is disabled fro LAN play.

THE PROBLEM: As we progress in the games the games either slow down dramatically and are unplayable or they halt due to data mismatches. I have tried removing the laptop from the LAN but the problem still exists. I have tried every combination of computers on the LAN but the problem remains. Even with just 2 computers running the LAN game in Generals Zero hour, as we build forces the games starts to crawl.

So I did some reading on the net and I thought I had discovered the problem. IPX is supposed to be a "weaker" protocol than TCP/IP. I went in an assigned hard IP's to each machine and adjusted the router accordingly. Tested the network and all working fine for internet and normal data transfer across the network.

The problem still exists.

I downloaded a program called Network Magic and ran it looking for bottlenecks and possible problems. Other than reporting slow internet connections ( common to Thailand and even more common as a frequent point of frustration on TV ) the program found no flaws. I am not a newbie with computers or games as a stand alone FPS player but I am a newbie at optimizing LAN games!!

Can anyone offer a further suggestion as to how I might determine the problem? The games seem to generate tremendous amounts of data but this must be doable as LAN parties are common everywhere and internet cafe's accomplish this routinely.

At this point I am eying my SMC combo box as the culprit ? I was thinking about buying a nice 8 port switch with lots of memory and reconfiguring the network. Like all computer geeks I don't want to waste money on hardware that is unnecessary.

One footnote: While using the software Network Magic a suggestion was offered by the software to change the wifi channel to channel 6 as this would be optimum. IF YOU USE..... TRUE wifi I would strongly suggest that you do not do this. I use several True wifi accounts to supplement my hard line internet and as a back up to the TOT phone line. After changing the SMC to channel 6 I was unable to connect to True wifi at all. IT MAY just be an anomaly but it took me a few days to figure this out. As you can imagine with all the changes across all the machines I just missed it at first. After changing the SMC back to channel 11 on the SMC, All is well in wifi land! and each computer can connect with True wifi easily if wanted or needed. I think there was some kind of conflict as a result of changing the wifi channel on the SMC to channel 6.

Thank you in advance for any suggestions.

Infrequent poster but daily reader of TV.

MPL

[Prasert]

Can you tell what kind of traffic the games use? I'm not a gamer so I wouldn't know, but I'll take a shot at what could be the problem.

On a network there's two kinds of traffic: unicast and broadcast (and multicast which I'll leave out for now).

Unicast traffic is aimed directly at a destination host, and on a LAN only that host will reply to that data traffic.

Broadcast traffic is aimed at all hosts in the same LAN, and every host will reply to that data traffic.

A switch keeps a mac - port table in order to send unicast traffic directly to the right port, which makes the LAN faster. Broadcasts however, are sent out over all ports and then the switch does not perform much better than a hub.

A WLAN always performs like a hub, and is slow compared to a wired LAN since it can only send or receive at the same time. If several hosts on the WLAN network are broadcasting a lot, the performance will degrade rapidly.

If the games use broadcasts to find other hosts, or to update the game status to all the other hosts, it could lead to a broadcast storm, which rapidly floods your network taking up all available bandwidth. I don't know if the games would do it, but this was a known problem with several NetWare servers in a LAN running IPX.

Managed switches are capable of detecting and stopping broadcast storms. But there's a price tag to those as well. A cheaper solution is to start testing by connecting each host to the switch by UTP. On a direct switch connection, the port can be set to full-duplex, enabling both ports (host and switch) to send and receive at the same time.

[H3Digital]

We play Cnc Generals over our work LAN if we ever get any spare time.

First of all, mismatches are often down to people with different software versions, so make sure everyone is on the same patch etc...

Secondly I'd suggest having fixed IP's on your network if possible, Sometimes DHCP issues can slow games down or cause disconnects. We had one PC that would disconnect every time the DHCP server tried to renew their IP.

Generals is still fairly resource heavy, even though its an old game - The networked game will only run as fast as the slowest/weakest computer so make sure all graphics are turned way down on any pre 6600GT, P4 type PC's.

Also make sure to Refresh NAT on all the PC's before a game, this may help.

[Guest Reimar]

Network Games will use broadcast traffic or even multicast.

To use Network Games i the same Network, the available bandwidth will be used instantly. So the computers connected should use an Memory tool for to freeup used resources as fast as possible.

One other solution is to use a Gigabit Network but that would require new NIC's, new Switch and new cable, quite expensive!

I don't know anything about that kind of games because I play F-Sim's only, even online. But keep in mind that the "normal" networks just having bandwidth of 100 Mbps which is a max of 12.5 MBytes/s and that can for sure not enough for to play the game with 3/4 computers on the same network. And if you use an WiFi Modem/Router (combi) the speed of the WiFi will mainly just 54 Mbps (6.x MBytes/s).

Cheers.

[MaiPenLai]

Prasert, H3Digital, Reimar, Thank YOU all!

I am seriously thinking about the gigabit solution as I would only need the switch and cables as all my NIC's are gigabit already. Now if I can just find a PCMCIA gigabit adapter for the laptop............

Thank you again for your time and ideas.

MPL

[H3Digital]

Hi,

Not sure what the other guys are on about, you can play Generals (and ANY computer games) at full speed over the internet at 250-500Kbps.

Even with 4 computers on a normal 100mb switch you will be using significantly less than 1% of the bandwidth, Absolutely no need for Gigabit hardware.