3 ms·

I found RTS3 had a lot more network issues than AoE2. It would more consistently fail to hole punch (fail to join a lobby game with certain people for no discer

I found RTS3 had a lot more network issues than AoE2. It would more consistently fail to hole punch (fail to join a lobby game with certain people for no discernible rhyme or reason) and/or drop connection during play. I could play RTS3 with most people around the world, it seemed, except a few of my best friends. They could individually play with random people all over the world, but not each other or myself, depending on the day of the week or something like that. Perhaps their decision to move away from DirectPlay was a mistake or premature optimization!

Agentlien 5y ago
For anyone wondering, RTS3 refers to Age of Mythology from 2002.
- aetherspawn 5y ago
  Ah, I thought they meant AoE 3. My bad.
jeroenhd 5y ago
Age of Mythology always worked for me on LAN and usually WAN without too much port forwarding. AoE (both 1 and 2) never seemed to work well over the internet for me without loads of manually forwarded ports. The rewrites/updates have definitely helped in this situation but I think the AoM code was built for and tested on networking hardware that was a lot more error prone than modern routers are, which in turn affects how it behaves even today. Clever NAT bypasses definitely work better now than they did fifteen or twenty years ago, but they're definitely not guaranteed to work still. The rise in CGNAT usage also paints a grim picture for anyone playing video games together. I've also had my fair share of peering issues between ISPs. At one point I discovered that I could send UDP packets to my friend, but my friend could not send UDP packets to me, no matter the port forwards and even after forcing the modem into bridge mode. TCP worked fine in both directions, though. Something upstream seemed to filter the packets out, I'm guessing to prevent DDoS attacks, so whenever we played P2P games one of us needed to run some kind of VPN. IPv6 can solve many of the problems I remember having to deal with setting up games back in the day, but most games have become cloud-only anyway. The age of custom servers and P2P gaming is over, killed by lootboxes and shitty NAT implementations.

Agentlien 5y ago

For anyone wondering, RTS3 refers to Age of Mythology from 2002.

aetherspawn 5y ago
Ah, I thought they meant AoE 3. My bad.

jeroenhd 5y ago

Age of Mythology always worked for me on LAN and usually WAN without too much port forwarding. AoE (both 1 and 2) never seemed to work well over the internet for me without loads of manually forwarded ports. The rewrites/updates have definitely helped in this situation but I think the AoM code was built for and tested on networking hardware that was a lot more error prone than modern routers are, which in turn affects how it behaves even today. Clever NAT bypasses definitely work better now than they did fifteen or twenty years ago, but they're definitely not guaranteed to work still. The rise in CGNAT usage also paints a grim picture for anyone playing video games together. I've also had my fair share of peering issues between ISPs. At one point I discovered that I could send UDP packets to my friend, but my friend could not send UDP packets to me, no matter the port forwards and even after forcing the modem into bridge mode. TCP worked fine in both directions, though. Something upstream seemed to filter the packets out, I'm guessing to prevent DDoS attacks, so whenever we played P2P games one of us needed to run some kind of VPN. IPv6 can solve many of the problems I remember having to deal with setting up games back in the day, but most games have become cloud-only anyway. The age of custom servers and P2P gaming is over, killed by lootboxes and shitty NAT implementations.