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Hello guys.
First off I want to tell you that I pretty much don't know anything about how Latency / ms works. I know that it's response time from router -> SC Server and then back?
Well, my question is. Is there anyway to optimize my SC2 Latency? And is there anyway to see what my ingame latency is?
I have notised in my gameplay that I can't micro to the best of my ability due to slow response time. Which makes me really sad.
I live in Sweden with ~6mbit in and ~0.8mbit out.
Thank you.
And btw, just by curiosity. Do anyone of you guys know where the gameservers are hosted? (france?, Germany??) This I could imagine haveing a pretty big impact on the ms.
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You're correct that latency is from your workstation to the server and back. Your bandwidth has little to do with your latency. Sadly, your latency is 99% the responsibility of your ISP, and ultimately is just a reflection of how well they route your traffic. Don't bother installing and optimizers or accelerators. They're all just horseshit. If you're in Sweeden and playing on EU, I find it hard to believe that you'r having latency issues, unless there's some specific physical problem on the line were you live.
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Optimizers are not all just horseshit. The default settings that many operating systems use for the TCP protocol are often terrible for broadband connections and can really get in the way of a smoothly operating connection. They can make a difference. Try TCP Optimizer:
http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php
Also, make sure you don't have other programs in the background dragging your connection down. Often times people think they are having connection troubles when in reality there's just something in the background hogging the connection. Use TrafficShaper XP to check out what connection are open:
http://bandwidthcontroller.com/trafficShaperXp.html
Last, sometimes people think they're connection is causing lag when it's actually their page file being used all the time to swap info in and out of memory. Try turning down your graphics settings to low to see if it makes a difference, and close all other programs in the background. use task manager to end processes that don't need to be open.
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Anyone know if eu.battle.net resolves to the actual EU game servers? If so, you can -tracert eu.battle.net from Start-Run and you'll see where the problem is
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I dont think you rly need programs for it, you just need to edit some stuff in the registry to make latency better for online gaming.
You could do it all manually, or automaticly with this file (yes i know its a WoW site but it doesnt matter)
Leatrix Latency Fix will reduce your online gaming latency significantly by increasing the frequency of TCP acknowledgements sent to the game server. For the technically minded, this is a script which will modify TCPAckFrequency.
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The location of the servers are most likely kept hidden, in order to weaken/prevent attacks from ill-disposed people.
Well, at least that's what I think. I may be wrong though, but it makes sense to me that Blizzard tries to keep the location of its game servers unknown.
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There is no way to hide the IP# of the server, since you sort of have to send data to it (and receive data from it).
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On November 03 2010 06:34 carde wrote:
There is no way to hide the IP# of the server, since you sort of have to send data to it (and receive data from it).
lol. yes you can. it's called a proxy server and i can almost guarantee you blizzard uses them.
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Sure, but you can still trace to the proxy server (rather, a loadbalancer, most likely).
If the point is to optimize _your_ latency to the service, it does not really matter what is behind the public IP#, since you cannot affect that in any way.
Also, there is not very likely to be very high latency there (granted, sometimes there are internal network issues, but most of the time the latency from a loadbalancer or LVS or such to the actual host is not all that high)
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If you are having trouble with latency you could always try a tunneling service. These services just optimize the route from your computer to the server you need to be contacting. Or try using a latency registry fix. It seems with most blizzard games, thats lots of your ping is spent confirming packets. I know with world of warcraft and easy registry fix nearly halves your ping. (Leatrix Latency Fix) and I have also used a Starcraft 2 based one, but the name escapes me (Although I believe they both accomplish the same thing)
And as most people are saying that blizzard keeps the location of their servers unknown, this is not the case, You can easily get the IP to every blizzard datacenter and even specific WoW Realms.
I would expect the Starcraft 2 servers to be located where the main World of Warcraft Datacenters are as to reduce complications with the realID system and to cut maintenance costs.
http://www.wowwiki.com/US_realm_list_by_datacenter
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On November 03 2010 06:59 carde wrote:
Sure, but you can still trace to the proxy server (rather, a loadbalancer, most likely).
If the point is to optimize _your_ latency to the service, it does not really matter what is behind the public IP#, since you cannot affect that in any way.
Also, there is not very likely to be very high latency there (granted, sometimes there are internal network issues, but most of the time the latency from a loadbalancer or LVS or such to the actual host is not all that high)
ah, okay yes you are correct 
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Tunneling only works if your provider has bad peering with the provider the service you are trying to reach is using, and you have good peering to the tunneling service. Then it can really, help, though.
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Both Loophole and Talho have good suggestions, but a word of caution: enabling something like the Leatrix Latency Fix WILL greatly improve your ping times and overall responsiveness, however it can also cripple your network for anyone else on it. It's recommended that if you have other people using your network, or especially if you are serving any content, that you tweak the settings to be a little less aggressive.
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My bad, I just assumed it was similar to google's data centers. Thanks for correcting me
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I been gettin mad delay at times too.
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In game traffic is not routed through Blizzard servers, that would be silly and horribly inefficient. Traffic in SC2 is sent directly from player to player, and in game response time is determined by each players internet connections. If you are having high latency trying to do things in Battle.net itself, like navigate windows and such, that may be due to high latency with Blizzard servers, but in game latency has nothing to do with Blizzard.
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No, traffic is always sent via their servers.
I just ran a FFA just to check. :-)
Once I was logged in (which involved some traffic to 87.248.207.183, amongst other things it seemed to fetch the list of 'bad´ words) all the traffic was directed towards IP#:s in the 213.246.66.0/24 range.
ICMP seems to be blocked, but tcptraceroute on port 1119 shows something like this:
# sherman$ tcptraceroute 213.248.127.133 1119
Selected device eth0, address 10.30.0.172, port 39722 for outgoing packets
Tracing the path to 213.248.127.133 on TCP port 1119, 30 hops max
1 10.30.0.1 0.131 ms 0.088 ms 0.074 ms
2 * * *
3 * * *
4 s-akix-i1-link.telia.net (213.248.66.121) 1.092 ms 1.609 ms 1.660 ms
5 80.91.246.250 2.143 ms 2.254 ms 2.235 ms
6 s-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.251.191) 2.336 ms 2.386 ms 2.351 ms
7 ffm-bb2-link.telia.net (80.91.251.147) 59.854 ms 29.713 ms 29.920 ms
8 ffm-b10-link.telia.net (80.91.251.124) 29.888 ms 29.173 ms 29.968 ms
9 blizzard-ic-128333-ffm-b5.c.telia.net (213.248.90.70) 29.262 ms 29.337 ms 29.211 ms
10 * * 213-248-127-133.customer.teliacarrier.com (213.248.127.133) [closed]
So, if we assume their servers are somewhere in France, the 29ms delay makes sense, since it would take light about 15ms getting there going in a straight line..
Fun google fact: You can get the theoretical best latency by googling this:
1234km / speed of light in a vacuum * 1.5
where 1234 is the distance to where the server is.
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On November 03 2010 04:53 Loophole wrote:Optimizers are not all just horseshit. The default settings that many operating systems use for the TCP protocol are often terrible for broadband connections and can really get in the way of a smoothly operating connection. They can make a difference. Try TCP Optimizer: http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.phpAlso, make sure you don't have other programs in the background dragging your connection down. Often times people think they are having connection troubles when in reality there's just something in the background hogging the connection. Use TrafficShaper XP to check out what connection are open: http://bandwidthcontroller.com/trafficShaperXp.htmlLast, sometimes people think they're connection is causing lag when it's actually their page file being used all the time to swap info in and out of memory. Try turning down your graphics settings to low to see if it makes a difference, and close all other programs in the background. use task manager to end processes that don't need to be open.
What this guy said.
And actually programs WILL improve your latency, OS default settings are for wide range of connections and speeds, while optimizers like tcpoptimizer do it depending on your bandwidth and also has a good calculator for response time.
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I have lowered 200s ~ ping to 80s modifying regedit, but it's too long to explain here
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The TCPAck fix does not work for Starcraft 2 unless your firewall is blocking UDP, by the way, since UDP does not (by definition) use TCP, or anything like the Nagle algorithm.
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On November 03 2010 07:39 eksert wrote:I have lowered 200s ~ ping to 80s modifying regedit, but it's too long to explain here
are you sure? isnt bnet responsiveness "capped" to 125ms?
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SC2 has build-in high latency. Amazing micro isn't possible until this is removed. No, EllenPage micro isn't that impressive compared to what is done in other RTS games. It just adds 250 ms to your delay. Imagine playing an FPS game with a ping of 250. We didn't even do that 10 years ago.
In game traffic is not routed through Blizzard servers, that would be silly and horribly inefficient.
Just because it would be silly and horribly ineffective doesn't mean Blizzard doesn't do it that way. SC2 is routed peer to peer, which has the advantage of neither and the disadvantages of both. Reason they do this is probably to prevent third party servers.
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On November 03 2010 07:42 BeMannerDuPenner wrote:Show nested quote +On November 03 2010 07:39 eksert wrote:I have lowered 200s ~ ping to 80s modifying regedit, but it's too long to explain here are you sure? isnt bnet responsiveness "capped" to 125ms?
It was during beta to even things out. If you have less than or equal to 125ms "real" ping, the server saw to it that the in-game ping was 125ms or so. If you had more than 125ms, well, you had more.
I am uncertain about if that is still the case, the game feels more responsive, but that might be due to lag-hiding in the client.
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On November 03 2010 07:44 Xtar wrote:SC2 has build-in high latency. Amazing micro isn't possible until this is removed. No, EllenPage micro isn't that impressive compared to what is done in other RTS games. It just adds 250 ms to your delay. Imagine playing an FPS game with a ping of 250. We didn't even do that 10 years ago. Show nested quote +In game traffic is not routed through Blizzard servers, that would be silly and horribly inefficient. Just because it would be silly and horribly ineffective doesn't mean Blizzard doesn't do it that way. SC2 is routed peer to peer, which has the advantage of neither and the disadvantages of both. Reason they do this is probably to prevent third party servers.
The delay is not 250ms. There is definately less lag than that when you move things.
A major advantage with routed P2P is that nobody has to open up and forward ports in their NAT "homerouter" to play.
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I seem to get some sort of lag "bubble" when i micro very intensively in a battle, but I guess that's just beceause I'm playing on a laptop?
Very annoying to send your helions away from the zealots, and get a few seconds of lag where you just pray the command went through.
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On November 03 2010 07:49 carde wrote:
The delay is not 250ms. There is definately less lag than that when you move things.
A major advantage with routed P2P is that nobody has to open up and forward ports in their NAT "homerouter" to play.
I believe measurements over claims from random people. It was measured to be around 250 during beta. I think there were even a few respectable and tech savvy people that claim that ping wasn't set to 250 but that 250 was added to your base ping. Now I think that was before the netcode change so maybe they changed that now. But they did a short experiment with 125ms on the US server but then went back to 250 because people didn't notice the difference.
Everyone has to rerout ports for every application. It's not an advantage or a reason to set it up like that.
Also, people have been playing SC2 for many many months now and they are used to this new latency so they don't notice it anymore. It limits hugely the micro you can pull off. It is why we barely see any micro even from players that compete in the biggest tournaments.
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On November 03 2010 07:39 eksert wrote:I have lowered 200s ~ ping to 80s modifying regedit, but it's too long to explain here
i guess we have the time to read it if it's for that purpose... i want less than 200 ms T_T
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On November 03 2010 08:06 Xtar wrote:Show nested quote +On November 03 2010 07:49 carde wrote:
The delay is not 250ms. There is definately less lag than that when you move things.
A major advantage with routed P2P is that nobody has to open up and forward ports in their NAT "homerouter" to play. Everyone has to rerout ports for every application. It's not an advantage or a reason to set it up like that.
There is no need to open any ports in order to play SC2. It works directly, since it connects to a server from your computer.
That is almost always allowed by the firewall.
However, for true P2P your computer needs to be accessible from outside, people has to be able to connect to you. That requires configuration of the firewall, if you have one.
If not, fine, then it works (well, windows firewall if you have a windows machine will block it too, but there will be a dialog asking if it is OK, which is simple enough to handle for most users).
I just tested in game, and while the latency (the delay from when I click somewhere until the unit starts moving) is not 0, it's most definitely not 1/4:th of a second.
And what would be the point of adding the latency on top of the already existing latency? From what I read of the in-beta experiments the code tried to keep you around a certain latency, not add to your actual latency. There is a difference.
And if you believe in measurements over claims, it's sort of humorous that you are only referring to claims, and have not done any measurements.
It is somewhat hard to see what the latency is using wireshark, since the other player is also doing stuff all the time, but perhaps one could set up a test where one player does not do anything at all. Then simply watch the delay from when you send an UDP package to when you get one back.
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On November 03 2010 07:39 eksert wrote:I have lowered 200s ~ ping to 80s modifying regedit, but it's too long to explain here
plz explain how u did it
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On November 03 2010 05:02 MandoRelease wrote:
The location of the servers are most likely kept hidden, in order to weaken/prevent attacks from ill-disposed people.
Well, at least that's what I think. I may be wrong though, but it makes sense to me that Blizzard tries to keep the location of its game servers unknown.
You can't hide an IP-adress... Stop watching all those TV-shows. With a network tool you can see all connections (and the IP-adresses), at least all good ones.
Think as an IP adress as your mail box that you go out to every morning to get your news. The mail man kinda needs to know the adress to being able to put the news in your little box.
If you don't want to show your REAL ip-adress, you can sort of hide it by using a proxy. Then you have lots of middle hands. A connects to B, B connects to C, C connects to B, B connects to A (with 1 proxy). By doing this b and c will have the connection which b will send to you, I'm really tired right now.. SO this might not make any sense at all...
Point being, blizzards server is easy to find for anyone who wants too and have some knowledge about how the mighty intraweb works.
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Doesn't StarCraft II use udp protocol in game. Rendering these tcp optimizers useless here?
I don't know, just asking.
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Launch a game VS AI
Run wireshark
Check that bnet protocol is made over UDP, not TCP (wouldn't make sense at all for a game btw)
Get the IP of blizzard server ( 195.12.229.166 for me )
Reverse DNS the IP (http://remote.12dt.com/lookup.php), found teliacarrier.com
Browse the net to discover that teliacarrier is not directly bnet, just an ip load balancing provider
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Yeah be very mindful of what people tell you in this thread. Yes SC2 (like all internet games) runs on UDP, and not TCP for the actual game data. TCP optimizers are, for the most part, horseshit since you cannot change the delay of the line by adjusting settings on your computer. If you have high latency in this day and age, it's almost certainly a result of your ISP, and is out of your control.
Modifying the frequency of how often your computer sends ACK packets is LOL wrong. Not really worth arguing since the point is there's nothing the OP can do to change his scenario unless another ISP is available.
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The TCP ACK thingy only work on TCP game... the last one that probably use it is WoW...
Starcraft 2 use UDP... and yes theres a build in lag... probably to lower the stress on their internet services.
If you still lag... try to change your router/modem... if its still crap... change your ISP... but here in north america, internet services arent that bad.
Also do not confuse lag and when your computer is too slow to run the game.
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I think i know why the latency:
i have an Ati Mobility Radeon HD 5730
6 gigs ram
and a cpu Intel Core i7 Q740 1.73Ghz
i see better performance of starcraft 2 when i sets the catalyst control center as:
Paramètre 3D: Optimal Quality
Mipmapping: High Quality
Anticrénelage: 8X
Mode anticrénelage: Super sample AA
Filtre anisotrope: 16X
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Didn't realize this thread was buried in the pet cemetery...
What you seem to be talking about addresses FPS issues.
This thread was best answered by the TCPack post in page 1, post 3 or 4.
Best to set the CCC to use "program settings" and make these changes in the starcraft app itself.
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On February 17 2011 08:10 Toss.Pro- wrote:
Didn't realize this thread was buried in the pet cemetery...
What you seem to be talking about addresses FPS issues.
This thread was best answered by the TCPack post in page 1, post 3 or 4.
Best to set the CCC to use "program settings" and make these changes in the starcraft app itself.
CCC?
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On February 17 2011 08:10 Toss.Pro- wrote:
Didn't realize this thread was buried in the pet cemetery...
What you seem to be talking about addresses FPS issues.
This thread was best answered by the TCPack post in page 1, post 3 or 4.
Best to set the CCC to use "program settings" and make these changes in the starcraft app itself.
No...if you look a few posts above yours, the first page is filled with misinformation.
On November 03 2010 23:03 kirkybaby wrote:
Yeah be very mindful of what people tell you in this thread. Yes SC2 (like all internet games) runs on UDP, and not TCP for the actual game data. TCP optimizers are, for the most part, horseshit since you cannot change the delay of the line by adjusting settings on your computer. If you have high latency in this day and age, it's almost certainly a result of your ISP, and is out of your control.
Modifying the frequency of how often your computer sends ACK packets is LOL wrong. Not really worth arguing since the point is there's nothing the OP can do to change his scenario unless another ISP is available.
It's not good to keep spreading false information...the people on the internet that don't know better will eat it up (No offense, I love everybody)
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catalyst control center = CCC
It's not good to keep spreading false information...the people on the internet that don't know better will eat it up (No offense, I love everybody)
This is not false information. It has been confirmed SC2 uses TCP. You are right about the majority of games using UDP, but SC2 is an exception, and uses a point-to-point TCP connection.
Just a note on the TCP / UDP issue, this has already been confirmed by a TL admin some time ago.
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EPT
