Updated: August 17, 2009
In this post, I will try to give you helpful information on how to interpret your connection to the various servers that HiTech Creations deploys.
First, the server IP addresses, to be used for traces/ping plots.
Early, Mid, Late War Orange Main Arena Server Address:
206.16.60.39Axis vs Allies, Training, Dueling, Late War Blue:
206.16.60.41Special Events:
206.16.60.38The current port range for all arenas in Aces High is 2000-6000, inclusive, for UDP and TCP. Aces High will use a random subset of those ports for all online play.
I get a lot of questions about connections, net status, variance, and so on.
Let me start by dispelling some myths.
1) Your ping is some what irrelevant to the servers. If it is below 300ms, then you are golden. I see complaints from people complaining about their ping going from 10 to 60. To Aces High, you have the same connection at those rates.
However, the best connection is one that is steady without wide swings in the packet latencies.
2) Plane warping is not as much server related as it is client or Internet related. This is a simple fact. I will explain further down why.
MY CONNECTION SUCKSI get this from users occasionally. If you say that to me, all I can say back is, "So?". You have to understand that without tangible data, it is impossible to do a thing for anyones connection.
Every hop/router affects your connection to the any of the Aces High arenas. We cannot control them. We can only directly affect the
immediate connection at the servers, just like you.
What to do:
1) Make sure you have no programs running in the background, especially Microsoft's AutoUpdater.
2) If you had been running another DirectX game before starting Aces High, then reboot and try Aces High again. Some games leave DirectX in an unknown state or have memory leaks.
3) If you have a bad connection, then you should immediately leave the game and run either a traceroute (tracert for Windows users Start->Run->command) or a
PingPlot and post that data here in this forum.
4) If you are connecting using a 56K modem, try reducing your connection rate to 33.6K. 56K modems normally have much slower speeds coming from your computer (<19.2K), whereas a 33.6K connection will usually run >26.4K on the downlink from your computer. If the upload and download rates are badly skewed, then you will probably get a lot of "Losing UDP, switch to TCP" messages from the game.
5) Check how many background processes are running on your computer. For Windows 2000 and XP, it should be between 19 and 21 for a normal system. For Windows Vista and Windows 7, if you can get it around 35 to 38, you will be in much better shape. The more you have listed, the more resources are used up.
6) Check your CPU usage in the Windows Task Manager (under the "Processes" tab). For Windows 2000, XP, Vista, and Windows 7, it should vary from 0 to 1% (maybe 2% on occasion) at regular intervals. If it is spiking higher than 2%, you have other active programs (possibly spyware/malware) running on your computer and these will effect the performance of the game in a big way (stutters, pauses, freezing, loss of UDP, loss of connection, crash to desktop are but a few of the potential problems manifested by this issue).
KAZAA AND OTHER FILE SHARING PROGRAMS (also known as P2P)If you run any file sharing program, you might as well get use to the fact that you will never have a decent connection to the servers.
Turning off those programs after they have been running for any period of time at all does not stop the users on the Internet from pounding on your connection.
This will cause lost packets, switches from UDP to TCP, and just generally lousy connections to the servers.
My testing shows, that after the program has been running longer than 3 hours, it takes over 24 hours for your Internet connection to return to normal.
USB versus ETHERNET Internet HardwareFor those of you who have a Fiber Optic, DSL, or Cable modem connection to the Internet, you are using a modem to interface to the broadband ISP you are connected to.
It is imperative this modem have an Ethernet port and not a USB port to attach to your computer.
USB based modems will cause significant connection problems.
A cheap Ethernet card can also cause problems, but not as bad as a USB based modem would. Generally, for Windows I recommend either the 3Com 3C905 family, a DEC2104x based card, or an Intel 8255x based card.
Those Ethernet cards will give you the highest throughputs and least amount of software overhead.
Concerning 'tweaker' programs for the TCP network stack. Do not use them! The default configuration for all versions of Windows since Windows 95 is fine for broadband/LAN activity.
Yes, you can improve your download performance by using tweakers, but you risk hurting online gaming performance, and by a substantial factor, as well as reducing the stability of your online gaming connection.
Bottomline, we cannot control the Internet. It is a dynamic beast with a mind of its own some days, but for the most part it works well.
I will be adding/changing this post from time to time, so give it a read once in a while.
