It looks promising but...

[aarbee]

I have looked into the documentation and it seems that it works differently from what I expect.

I expect something like FShost. In which I run software on a pc and everybody who wants to join a session, runs that client, which is connecting to the host program.

But I think in case of JoinFS it is: I start my sim and like in the gamespy period host a session, and somebody else starts a client, which connects to my hostsession and then we fly together.

Perhaps a bit cryptic, but does the host needs an flightsim running in order to be able to play the host.

Thanks ahead.

Rob

[blue_ice]

You don't need to have a sim running to use Joinfs, you don't even need to have a sim installed. You need to have simconnect installed on the pc running Joinfs if you don't already have FSX/P3D installed

Regards
Darren

[Peter]

Hi Rob,

JoinFS is indeed quite different to the old "Who's hosting?" method. JoinFS is purely a peer-to-peer network so it's best to forget about the idea of a host person. There is only one program, the JoinFS client. It links to multiple other clients. A session is a group of clients that are all connected to each other. The integrity of the session remains no matter who leaves the session, including the person that created the original session.

This means it's actually very flexible. If you want to create something like a 'host' server then you simply run the JoinFS client on that server and let people know the address. If everyone connects to that address then they'll be in the same session. Incidentally, a person could connect to the same session by specifying another person in the session, it doesn't have to be via server address. So you could connect to a friend's address and you'd simply join the same session that they are currently in.

No, you don't have to run the simulator on your server. You could have a laptop with just the JoinFS client installed (and SimConnect) and it would still work as a permanent session.

Hope that helps,
Peter

[aarbee]

Thank you for the explanation, this sounds very promising.
As I was planning to add a second virtual machine to my nas, and thought, O... need a videocard an that will not run on this nas.
I was allready spending another 2000 euro for the new nas.
I had been looking into FSopen and I think they need to have FSX for instance running, and also to FShost, which works with a client/server setup.

But in FShost, I as the host needed to port forward all the necessarry ports to the virtual machien.
Is it so that with JoinFS everybody needs to port forward to their pc's local ip addresses?
Or can that be done by the "host" only.

[Peter]

The session can cope with people that haven't enabled port forwarding, however, it won't cope well at all if everyone doesn't enable it. Generally, the more people that enable port forwarding on their router the better the session will be. This is because JoinFS reroutes traffic if a particular connection is blocked due to the router. It can happily reroute some of the traffic without major impact, but if it has to reroute most of the traffic then some dropped connections may occur.

So I would advise you to port forward if you can.

JoinFS only uses one UDP port, so that's all you need to forward on the router.

Peter

[aarbee]

Thank you for the info.

Will test it out asap.

Rob