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UPDATE (May 26): My Starcraft II no longer seems to be using UDP (in very brief testing in FFA), so Blizzard may have disabled UDP use, rendering this program obsolete.
Beyond the complete game drops that seem to be the result of a the game servers at Blizzard crashing, there still seems to be a high amount of in-game lag (slow unit response / minor freezing / random drop screens / etc) in Patch 13. I suspected this was the result of poorly implemented UDP networking code, so I wrote a program to test this theory.
By default, if SC2 detects you are able to send and receive UDP packets, it will default to the new UDP netcode in Patch 13. If your UDP is not usable, it reverts to TCP as in previous versions. By blocking UDP, you can force Starcraft II to use the old TCP code. After very early testing in a few 4v4s, this seems to have helped reduce the amount of in-game lag.
EDIT: Note that this won't magically fix all lag instantly, as other players in the game may still be using UDP. See this for more information. At best it prevents you from causing lag or dropping.
Use at your own risk, etc. Requires Visual C++ 2008 runtimes. Please post feedback whether this helps or not, it will be useful to know if this is actually the reason as I am not able to do enough testing by myself.
http://www.teamliquid.net/staff/R1CH/Sc2UDPBlocker.7z
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wow.
rich you really get it done.
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CA10831 Posts
i wish i could understand what you just said but regardless i'm sure you wizarded up is amazing lol
nice work!
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konadora
Singapore66363 Posts
haha that's pretty cool. Why isn't Blizzard thanking you yet? -.-
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Can you post a replay of your 4v4? I want to see you play. ^^
Oh and awesome wizarding, I'll give this a try tomorrow.
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haha that's pretty cool. Why isn't Blizzard hiring you yet and paying up the G's? -.-
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I'm so terrible that I wasn't invited to the 4v4 team, but I heard success stories.
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<3 R1CH. You are amazing man.
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On May 26 2010 13:52 R1CH wrote:
I'm so terrible that I wasn't invited to the 4v4 team, but I heard success stories.
thats terrible  you should go on strike till you get a team together
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Nice work man, really cool tool to have.
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what if a player with UDP plays against a player with TCP? Doesn't bnet try to sync them up and so making the tcp player lag just as much as the udp player?
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On May 26 2010 13:50 Megalisk wrote:
haha that's pretty cool. Why isn't Blizzard hiring you yet and paying up the G's? -.-
Because this doesn't actually fix the problem. It just forces the game to use the already existing TCP.
If Blizzard wanted to force TCP, they could have easily released a patch 13.1 to do that. They don't because they want to fix UDP. To do that, they need people playing with UDP so they can see where the bugs are. Shutting off UDP works against this.
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On May 26 2010 14:02 AssuredVacancy wrote:
what if a player with UDP plays against a player with TCP? Doesn't bnet try to sync them up and so making the tcp player lag just as much as the udp player?
Bnet sends the same information to everyone, just with different protocols. If someone is using UDP it seems they have a higher risk of lagging, so the whole game will still stall when they lag for sync reasons. So the benefit of using this in a 4v4 is pretty low when there is still a chance 7 other players could lag, unless you're on a team and have your allies using it too.
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On May 26 2010 14:05 NicolBolas wrote:Show nested quote +On May 26 2010 13:50 Megalisk wrote:
haha that's pretty cool. Why isn't Blizzard hiring you yet and paying up the G's? -.- Because this doesn't actually fix the problem. It just forces the game to use the already existing TCP. If Blizzard wanted to force TCP, they could have easily released a patch 13.1 to do that. They don't because they want to fix UDP. To do that, they need people playing with UDP so they can see where the bugs are. Shutting off UDP works against this.
I'm sure Blizzard has plenty of data to work with after four days of lagging games. It's not hard to spot the deficiencies in the protocol, releasing a patch and QA is what takes time, and a minor hotfix is still very costly since it requires bnet downtime and another gig of space on each players machine at the very minimum.
Although they can probably turn off UDP server side too thinking about it, that would be a pretty simple way to hotfix it.
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r1ch you are the most amazing person evar. dling and trying it now.
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R1CH man you're awesome, I don't even have SC2 installed, but I can appreciate what you do. As a fellow "computer guy" working on his degree I aspire to be like you some day 
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Blizzard needs R1ch. nuf said.
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Thank you R1CH, now I can ladder again!
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R1CH, you don't get enough credit, and I am saying this as a person unaware of the amount of work you probably are doing behind the scenes. Thanks for the assistance on this matter!
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my question is why isn't this front-paged yet
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EPT
