Some questions

[simskunkworks.com]

Hi Peter,
we at VAAFSE still continue to have several problems with JoinFS, not all players can see one each others, often players have erratic behaviour jumping a lot into air, rarely we can see one each other correctly..
Since i know that other users do not report such problems i'm trying to understand what is wrong with us.
Go to explain how we use JoinFS:
- We have a Windows R8 server that is running JoinFS and "create" a network, P3D v3 is running in multiplayer mode (could be an issue ?), in the beginning we used a Traffic Tower as local player, now we are using a Beach Baron, but situation did not change.
- All players connect to server IP using port 5000, all players have that port opened in their router mapping (both UDP and TCP), so no problem of firewall and such
- Server has a wide symmetrical band (100 Mb)
- We have evidence that problems begin with more than 6 players, players local network begin to be clogged, position, speed and attitude of players begin to be erratic.
- simultaneosly the simconnect debugg window, which i use to develop, is clogged with of "Request DataOnSimObject" call, these calls quadratically grow with player numbers.
- you can see the situation in this screenshoot:

Image shows a 8 players connected situation, as you can see the simconnect debug window is full of messages that very rapidly scroll down, obviously disconnecting JoinFS, debug window quiets.
You can see also that my ethernet card is full of bandwidth occupation, on both way, ingoing and outgoing, the problem is outgoing since, my inbound bandwidth can support even more traffic.
Also CPU is almost overwhelmed (41% fast I7 at 4.6 Ghz)
This situation is common to many if not all other players in session.
The result is that we can't use JoinFS during our sessions that is often made of more than 15 players.
We all have done what we consider necessary, scan for models, edit model matching, even tried to set low bandwidth, but no joy.
Update also to latest version 1.1.9
Just a thing that can be of interest, (connecting just 2 players) : into player "Users list" the server is shown but can't be flagged as Ignore and does not shows in "Aircraft list"
Same for server side, into server "Users list" the player is shown but can't be flagged as Ignore and does not shows in "Aircraft list".

Hope you have some clue on this since we consider JoinFS a valuable piece of software that has several great advantages over P3D mp.
/Mario

[Peter]

Hi Mario,

first of all, I definitely recommend that you do not run P3D in multiplayer mode. That's not how JoinFS is intended to be used. You should all be loading up in Free Flight or the P3D single player equivalent.

If your server is using port 5000, you don't need to open that port on any client's router. The port 5000 setting is only for the server's configuration. All other client connecting just need to specify, "<IP address>:5000". By default all the player clients will use port 6112 unless someone changes their JoinFS settings. That is the port that they may need to configure on their routers. So, if they're using the default setting, then set port forwarding on port 6112. Only the server's router should have forwarding set on 5000. And always specify UDP-only when configuring it.

Because JoinFS heavily uses SimConnect, that debug window may possibly be making the situation worse, even though it allows you to see whats going on.

Can I ask, what is your maximum internet bandwidth, for yourself and others?

If the server doesn't have any aircraft loaded then there won't be any entries in the aircraft list for it.

Could you look at the monitor window (View|Monitor) and see if there's anything wrong there. Possibly send me a PM with a recorded log file.

Thanks,
Peter

[Peter]

And, could I just ask if you found 1.1.9 to be worse in terms of the problems that you mentioned?

Although this version is now multithreaded, which helps with latency, it's currently configured to call SimConnect more than it used to, so that may have made your existing problems worse. If so, then I can easily scale back the frequency of SimConnect calls.

Peter

[simskunkworks.com]

Thanks for replies Peter,
realized now that aircrafts out of range are not injected to sim, so the weird beaviuor mentioned on my post is pretty normal.
Will test 1.1.9 tonight and i will report.
Our network bandwidth ar usuallly above 5 Mb ingoing but limited in out going, generally not more than 1Mb, in my case even less, 384 Kb.
Will look at monitor to see if something is wrong
thanks
/Mario

[Peter]

Yes, that's actually a good point. There's currently no indication whether an aircraft has been injected or not, so it's not immediately obvious when an object isn't in the sim. I'll have a think about this - perhaps I'll highlight the distance column green when the aircraft is within the circle of activity and in the sim.

384kb should be okay, but perhaps with 15 aircraft it's getting uncomfortable. There is a low bandwidth option in the settings which halves the requirement, at the expense of smooth updates.

In the monitor window you're basically looking for indications that something is wrong, for example, a '"Failed to create..." message or "Simconnect exception...", or a flood of messages.

Peter

[simskunkworks.com]

Hi Peter,
some good news, we could make a pretty good session with 5 players, monitor did not show any problem except one or two simconnect execption 3.
Also we could see correctly other's external stores, not stable however, sometime we can see sometime we don't, could not understand when and why.
We cannot run the server in single player mode since there are other players not using JoinFS that need to use it in multiplayer, However i guess to have sort out simply running JoinFS, use "create" and set "Simulator" as red, in this way JoinFS should ignore the P3D server/player itself, is that true ?
Noticed that port used by users is not shown anymore, is that correct ?
tia
/Mario

[Peter]

I see. As long as only the server is in multiplayer mode, you should be okay. I meant for the other clients using JoinFS, they should only be using Free Flight.

If you disconnect SimConnect then I think the JoinFS clients won't be able to see the multiplayer pilots. You should be okay to do what you're currently doing. As above, just make sure that the JoinFS pilots are in Free Flight. Server JoinFS can be in multiplayer.

The missing port is actually a bug. Thanks for spotting it. Fixing it now.

Peter

[simskunkworks.com]

Do you mean that an user that connect in P3D MP to a server that is connected also to JoinFS is able to see also JoinFS players ?
That's should be cool will make some tests
/Mario
EDIT:
I have made some test mixing single and muliplayer:
Let's consider:
- player A, P3D runs in single player mode, connected to JoinFS server
- player B, P3D runs in multiplayer mode, connected with P3D server, initially not connected with JoinFS server
- P3D server and JoinFS server are on same machine
- P3D server runs in MP mode
- JoinFS server runs creating a net and not connected with the P3D ("Simulator" button/label is red)
- both clients and server use port 5000, using 6012 clushes with P3D in MP using same port.
as long as player B remains disconnected from JoinFS, A and B can't see each other, when player B connects also with JoinFS voilà both A and B can see each other, also external stores are correctly rendered, loading/unloading stores is perfectly congruent, even if you deprecate it the mix between player in single or multi mode seems do not hurt anything, movements and animations seems to be smooth.
If this is generally true and stable is an amazing bridge between this two worlds.
/Mario

[Peter]

Yes, I believe this can be made to work. You just need to enable "Auto Broadcast (experimental)" in the JoinFS settings, only on the server.

Peter

[simskunkworks.com]

Above tests conducted with autobroadcast unset.
/Mario