GT4 playable online via Xlink!

[otherbrother]

Abman, what occurs during heavy lag. Can you drive through it, or do cars appear/re-appear all over the place and in front of you? Do you hit objects(cars) solidly or can you pass through them?

I never asked this or saw it posted anywhere . . Can you turn off the collision in multiplayer, meaning passing through cars as if they were ghosts. Doubtful such a feature exists in GT, but I’d like to know.

 

[abman]

no, there's no ghosts or re-appearances of cars... this is all synchronised, if 1 person is suffering a slow connection, so will the other. meaning everybody will share the same lag.

with slow lag, when you drive, your car is just jerking forward and the driving looks slower. same with the other car infront, the car will be just jerking along with you, some times the response of the car can come slow, e.g late braking, or even miss-shifts.

i raced with 3 players everyone within 40ms, suprisingly it was slightly less lag than having 2 player. But i dont believe this is always the case, i might have just gotten lucky. i think i need someone with 20ms to experience smooth play.

 

[otherbrother]

So what you are saying is if there is one week connection to the host, everyone in the room will experience lag from each other? Lag should only appear to exist between players with poor connections only. If the host establishes a fast connection between 4 players and a 5th player enters with a slower connection speed, the initial 4 should see player 5 to be lagging only. The other players in the room should have no troubles. Player 5 will see everyone in the room lagging as well.
This is how I understand online play. . this may not be the case for GT4 tho. .

Can a player enter a race after it starts? Is there a practice session before the race, or do you go directly to race?

 

[abman]

Remember, GT4 is not recognising this as "online play", it still thinks it's LAN.

and it's not everyone in the room, it's to whomever you play with.

you cant enter after a race starts, the host sets an exact number of players to join in... the first people to connect are in... maximum 6 players.

 

[otherbrother]

Ok then, what happens if one player is disconnected in the middle of a race. how will that effect the other participants?

 

[CMe]

no, there's no ghosts or re-appearances of cars... this is all synchronised, if 1 person is suffering a slow connection, so will the other. meaning everybody will share the same lag.

with slow lag, when you drive, your car is just jerking forward and the driving looks slower. same with the other car infront, the car will be just jerking along with you, some times the response of the car can come slow, e.g late braking, or even miss-shifts.

i raced with 3 players everyone within 40ms, suprisingly it was slightly less lag than having 2 player. But i dont believe this is always the case, i might have just gotten lucky. i think i need someone with 20ms to experience smooth play.

abman,

Thanks for the information - as I was curious about this stuff too.

Do you recall the connection speed of those 40ms players. Or do you know if everybody had a broadband connection (no dialups)?

The ping value reflects the amount of time limited data (size of ping packet is unknown to me for xLink) takes to travel between Source -and- Destination over the network.

So I wonder if one of the participants had insuffient bandwidth to handle the significant increase in the amount of data traveling over the network during game play.

 

[SaintKamus]

So what you are saying is if there is one week connection to the host, everyone in the room will experience lag from each other? Lag should only appear to exist between players with poor connections only. If the host establishes a fast connection between 4 players and a 5th player enters with a slower connection speed, the initial 4 should see player 5 to be lagging only. The other players in the room should have no troubles. Player 5 will see everyone in the room lagging as well.
This is how I understand online play. . this may not be the case for GT4 tho. .

Can a player enter a race after it starts? Is there a practice session before the race, or do you go directly to race?

read the entire thread before you post, i allready said that the game is in sync, NO LAG TOLERANCE PERIOD.

this is not internet code. i'ts totaly 100% lag free LAN code.

 

[abman]

sync means it happens at the same time, so if 1 person gets disconnected...well you can do the math from there.

the people i raced with at 40ms or less, all have broadband with 512kb upload or some with more bandwidth. i have 256kb upload with 1.5mb down. and it was very nearly acceptional for me.

the only logical way of improving a ping would be to improve your bb connection, not by a tiny bit, it has to be by a big margin of change to notice the difference... e.g someone upgrade from 1mb to 50mb connection.... changing from 1mb to 2mb... you would witness little change.

if PD ever release an online mode, my GUESS would be about 150-200ms to be enough for smooth play, because it's lan, 40ms is really high for lan mode, real lan setups (within the same room) would average maximum 15ms.

most Japanese have 50mb connections. Yes a crazy speed and to top it off they all live in the same country.... (lucky b****ds) but just be a bit patient and kai will soon be flooded of local users after the end of feb.

 

[BAZZ]

Hmm. So forget about playing US from Eur and vice versa then huh? :/
Oh well we got bandwith enough (100mb@home) here and so have norway (correct?) and some more countries in europe. Bah i want 10Mbit+ worldwide. Right now.

 

[otherbrother]

Thanks abman, I was searching for the practical effects that actually take place when latency is high. This is not the preferred LAN connection. I picture the tunneling program being used in wide area network where data packets vary in dimension compared to LAN mode( over short distances). Although “synced” which is an ambiguous term being used here, you can obviously get your game on with a fairly decent connection within your local and neighboring networks. GT4 online will play best with only 2 players involved.
I find somewhat difficult to visualize what is essentially taking place because I’m not very familiar with the program architecture being used.

 

[SaintKamus]

sync means it happens at the same time, so if 1 person gets disconnected...well you can do the math from there.

the people i raced with at 40ms or less, all have broadband with 512kb upload or some with more bandwidth. i have 256kb upload with 1.5mb down. and it was very nearly acceptional for me.

the only logical way of improving a ping would be to improve your bb connection, not by a tiny bit, it has to be by a big margin of change to notice the difference... e.g someone upgrade from 1mb to 50mb connection.... changing from 1mb to 2mb... you would witness little change.

if PD ever release an online mode, my GUESS would be about 150-200ms to be enough for smooth play, because it's lan, 40ms is really high for lan mode, real lan setups (within the same room) would average maximum 15ms.

most Japanese have 50mb connections. Yes a crazy speed and to top it off they all live in the same country.... (lucky b****ds) but just be a bit patient and kai will soon be flooded of local users after the end of feb.

real LANs are usually <1 MS if the LAN is setup in a reasonably close area.

 

[SaintKamus]

Hmm. So forget about playing US from Eur and vice versa then huh? :/
Oh well we got bandwith enough (100mb@home) here and so have norway (correct?) and some more countries in europe. Bah i want 10Mbit+ worldwide. Right now.

10 mbit world wide doesn't change the fact that data still travels at light speed, wich means, there's no way to get such low pings with some one in another continent, this is not a bandwidth issue, it's a ping issue, we still don't even know just how much bandwidth GT4 is using. for all we know it's 10 kbps or less.

 

[BAZZ]

I am fully aware of that it has to do with pingtime aswell, but if you aint got enough bandwith you will still get lag (heard of D-Sync?) even if you got a 3ms pingtime. And i have asked about it before but here i go again. "Anyone monitored how much bandwith thats used?" Dont know how but id like to know what it takes over LAN, not Kai.
Surely people have played it online without lag, right? Outside Japan that is.

 

[CMe]

Yes, let's not forget the network overhead from XLink Kai.

Maybe some xLink Aficionado can School us or their network protocol and infrastructure. Who knows...there might be alternate configurations or optimizations within xLink to improve network performance. 💡

EDIT: What if we connected to the same Orbital Server?

 

[yesterdaylight]

Hey, ithis thread sort of disappeard for a while but i am about to bump it back up to the top heh. I've gotten my xlink connection up and my GT4 has sucessfully connected to the network once now all i need are people in the New York area with GT4 on xlink. we can get some races going. i will be free tomorrow and monday. but i have midterms this week. then i'm off friday saturday and sunday so i will have unlimited time to wait around for people on xlink just lettin people know. hope we can get something going. later,
-Ian

 

[SaintKamus]

Yes, let's not forget the network overhead from XLink Kai.

Maybe some xLink Aficionado can School us or their network protocol and infrastructure. Who knows...there might be alternate configurations or optimizations within xLink to improve network performance. 💡

EDIT: What if we connected to the same Orbital Server?

exactly what good would it do to have the same orbital server, other than nothing?

all xlink does is make sure players hook up directly, once you are playing the orbital server isn't doing much, it's peer to peer. meaning, the performance relies solely on the clients ping to each other.

 

[CMe]

exactly what good would it do to have the same orbital server, other than nothing?

all xlink does is make sure players hook up directly, once you are playing the orbital server isn't doing much, it's peer to peer. meaning, the performance relies solely on the clients ping to each other.

Okay, so here's my educated guess/thoughts on this.

Since the xLink GT4 network play operates in LAN mode - I would expect the GT4 software to issue & listen for ICMP or other network broadcast packets to find the IP address of PS2 consoles on the same subnet (eg: 192.168.1.xxx).

This is where xLink comes into play. And if what you're saying is true - then I suspect that each PC running xLink is performing Network Aaddress Translation (NAT) for the PS2 Consoles. This is in addition to other things like their online chat (which by the way is much easier than chatting w/PS2 interface).

And if all this is true, even partially - my experience has proven that there is almost allways more that can be done to further optimize (optimization includes but is not limited to "network performance").

I also wonder if xLink is implementing a form of network tunneling. If so, then there are multiple avenues the xLink developers can take to optimize network performance (packet size, protocol design, etc).

Yes, I am very curious about this subject because I want the best possible GT4 Online experience and my background is somewhat technical. Thanks for the information exchange.

 

[CMe]

10 mbit world wide doesn't change the fact that data still travels at light speed, wich means, there's no way to get such low pings with some one in another continent, this is not a bandwidth issue, it's a ping issue, we still don't even know just how much bandwidth GT4 is using. for all we know it's 10 kbps or less.

...come on man
"ping" time and "bandwidth" are related. If you increase the ping packet size with insufficent bandwidth you will increase the "ping" time.

EDIT: btw light speed is only possible with fibre optic network connections which is way faster than 10mbits

EDIT.2: if 10mbits is light speed (it's not); this would imply that 100mbits (100 baseT) is 10 times the speed of light. NOT

But, I do agree that we still don't know how much bandwidth GT4 is using.
I'm probably going to do some analysis on my own when my GT4 finally arrives; that is - if I can pull myself away from the logitech wheel

 

[SaintKamus]

...come on man
"ping" time and "bandwidth" are related. If you increase the ping packet size with insufficent bandwidth you will increase the "ping" time.

EDIT: btw light speed is only possible with fibre optic network connections which is way faster than 10mbits

But, I do agree that we still don't know how much bandwidth GT4 is using.
I'm probably going to do some analysis on my own when my GT4 finally arrives; that is - if I can pull myself away from the logitech wheel

you got this all wrong, at what speed do you think data travels on a regular cable? sound speed? it's light speed, fiber optics uses a BEAM of light itself to carry the data, that's the difference. this doesn't improve the speed at wich data travels directly, what it does is increase the amount of data that can be shoved trough it.. (read, bandwidth.) of course, light speed is not mantained from end to end for various reasons, such as the amount of hops it takes for the data to get somewhere, network overhead, and any problem one of the hops could encounter in a server that is just being used to pass the data trough, such as packet loss, or an overcrowded network, etc.

so while it's defenetly slower than light speed because of this problems, the data still moves at that speed. from server to server once it's sent.

 

[CMe]

you got this all wrong, at what speed do you think data travels on a regular cable? sound speed? it's light speed, fiber optics uses a BEAM of light itself to carry the data, that's the difference. this doesn't improve the speed at wich data travels directly, what it does is increase the amount of data that can be shoved trough it.. (read, bandwidth.) of course, light speed is not mantained from end to end for various reasons, such as the amount of hops it takes for the data to get somewhere, network overhead, and any problem one of the hops could encounter in a server that is just being used to pass the data trough, such as packet loss, or an overcrowded network, etc.

so while it's defenetly slower than light speed because of this problems, the data still moves at that speed. from server to server once it's sent.

Using a wired network -- the speed of electricity is less than fibre optic. Remember that the wire in a wired network will impede the speed of the electric current.

 

[otherbrother]

Hey, ithis thread sort of disappeard for a while but i am about to bump it back up to the top heh. I've gotten my xlink connection up and my GT4 has sucessfully connected to the network once now all i need are people in the New York area with GT4 on xlink. we can get some races going. i will be free tomorrow and monday. but i have midterms this week. then i'm off friday saturday and sunday so i will have unlimited time to wait around for people on xlink just lettin people know. hope we can get something going. later,
-Ian

Hey , I’m in Westchester not too far from you. I have every intention of trying GT4 online when I gets a copy I see quite a few folks at Xlink we might be able to connect with. What’s your ISP yo?

In the mean time, let us know how it works out for ya

 

[CMe]

Hey , I’m in Westchester not too far from you. I have every intention of trying GT4 online when I gets a copy I see quite a few folks at Xlink we might be able to connect with. What’s your ISP yo?

In the mean time, let us know how it works out for ya

Sup - yesterdaylight, otherbrother, and everybodyelse in or around NY - my ISP is Verizon DSL. See ya when GT4 drops.

 

[yesterdaylight]

My ISP is cablevision Optimum Online. pretty decent, but I haven't been able to play with anyone online yet bcause no one in the area has been on.. people in europe are giving me 100ms pings, and people in Japan are a little over 200ms which is even more horrible. I've only encountered 2 or 3 people on xlink who speak english fluently and one spanish speaking person. The rest are Japanese, and i can't read the text because its some weird computer language. Hopefully some people in NY will get their GT4 so we can play. I don't know if this has been answered, but is it possible to play with people with a different region version of GT4 ? i think most of the people on xlink are running the Japanese version... I am too, and was able to enter a race so i assume the host was using a Japanese version too. because if so, to people who have not yet gotten gt4 and are planning to import, to insure compatibility you should get the Japanese version. unless this isn't an issue. regards,
-Ian

 

[DevilGTx]

It might turn out that you'll never get better ping than that no matter what.
What other games are you playing via XLink, and what ping can they get?

 

[CMe]

It might turn out that you'll never get better ping than that no matter what.
What other games are you playing via XLink, and what ping can they get?

Hello DevilGTx, if you read thru this thread you'll see that better pings are indeed possible. I have played socomII using xLink where the pings ranged from 40s to 100s.

 

[otherbrother]

Hang in there yesterday, I’m sure you’ll find a group soon My ISP is also Optimum Online

 

[yesterdaylight]

rock on, can't wait to see you on, otherbrother. and CMe is right about that. It depends on how close you live to another person on xlink. every person has a different ping time to every other person on xlink. The people in japan were giving me around 200, some over 200, some in the high 190's... it's all relative to where you are in relation. (einsten?) but if i am online with say.. otherbrother, i will see his ping as maybe.. 15 or 20, and he will see mine as being the same. see ? laterz-

 

[ferret-turbo]

sorry...but this thread is so long
does anyone have a link or guide to what I need to use x-link to play online ?
I currently have a PAL PS2 (UK) with modchip, thinking about importing the Japanese version
thanks

 

[BloodyBooger]

everything you need to know is on their site:

www.teamxlink.co.uk

 

[ferret-turbo]

thankyou booger