Was thinking about this last night for a bit and went hunting google images for some pictures to illustrate what I was thinking about.
GT6 operates online in either a Star (Fixed Host) or Mesh (Non Fixed Host) network. It doesn't matter whether it's friends only or not. I'm uncertain why, once racers are connected to each other, a PSN connection is required, but it apparently is.
The star network looks like this.
This is only with 6 drivers in the room. It is dependent more on the host's bandwidth and connection reliability. Double the peers and you double the load on the host's connection. From a network standpoint, so long as the host has a huge and reliable network pipe, this is probably the best. The problem with it, and why we don't use it for SNAIL races is, if the host gets DCed from PSN or their internet connection fails, the room disappears entirely and has to be rebuilt. Imagine getting to the end of a race and the host gets dced, just before or even after everyone has crossed the finish line. The results would be dependent on the memories of the drivers in the race, and no replays would be available for review and there would be nothing to pull from for our data collection efforts.
The mesh network, which looks like this, and is how I imagined it in my head,
If someone want's to, they can count all those lines. If they really want to go all out, add 7 more peers and connect lines from each of those 7 to all the others. It won't just add 7 more lines.
The only real advantage this has over the star topology is the room not disappearing if the host gets disconnected from either the PSN or the internet. Instead, hosting responsibilities get passed to the next peer that connected initially.
From a networking standpoint, this topology relies on everyone having a stable connection that's up to the task of passing data to each and every other peer, simultaneously with all other peers doing the same. If any one connection can't carry the load of all of it, the room as a whole will suffer. It won't matter much if one connection has astronomical rates to a single ping or packet loss testing server, what matters here is that every connection is reliable to the other. If even one punks out, every other connection will notice and be affected to one degree or another. Something else to keep in mind, every one of those lines between peers will have in the neighborhood of 30 or more physical devices, routers, switches and modems, between them.
The fragility of the mesh was evident last night in D3. JLBowler has one of the strongest connections in the league according to his pingtest.net and speedtest.net results. I'm not sure what Rednose58's test results are, but I noticed a catastrophic lag event during a race and it recorded it for the replay. Shortly after that event, JLBowler's car started doing the lag dance, jumping around on track and smoking tires where he wouldn't normally be. I suspect the only reason JLBowler didn't experience something catastrophic is because of his beefy connection rates. The fact that our host was about as geographically distant from JL and still be in the same country, as he was, exacerbated the problem. It's also entirely possible that my own connection contributed to what I witnessed during the race. I wasn't the only one who noticed it however. It was also evident, the farther away from Rednose he got, the more stable he appeared on screen. This basically tells me GT6's extrapolation coding required less and less data from Rednose's PS3 as their distance increased.
It still boggles me why a PSN connection has to be maintained, once all the peers are connected, but it appears it must, at least at the moment.
It behooves every SNAIL to make sure your connection to everyone else in your division is as stable and large as you can possibly make it. A good result from a testing site to a server that is only 50 miles away, does not mean it's a good connection for GT6 gaming. If we all really wanted to be sure about our connections, we would test to the nearest server to each of our division mates.
I know there are folks in SNAIL that know more about networking than I, @
dabneyd , @
ExoSphere64 and probably several others, and can either explain better or poke holes in what I'm trying to get across here. I hope.
Food for thought folks.