Great to hear that the update has helped some. Any improvement on N64 games is appreciated since before it was basically unplayable unless you had people that were located closely with quick connections and decent computers.

I'll test out some games this weekend with people and let you know what I think.

sonikku and I played some n64 games on netplay.

mario tennis went out of sync a couple times, but we managed to get a match done when we switched to their server, although we only tried once.

we played mario golf and we went out of sync fairly quickly.

we played mario kart 64 and also went out of sync even before a race started.

there was also quite a bit of lag for mario golf and mario tennis also had some lag.

when we didnt use sonikku, we used us L2 server

hope that helps.

I do believe that there will be a much better sample size during this weekend though.

I played one session of Mario Kart 64 with Bobq and it was out of sync within the first lap, so it seems like not a lot has changed with regards to that game.

I'll check out some different games later this weekend.

This seems exciting! I'll have to check it out at some point. Maybe you could do some kind of a netplay tournament for next month? I think that would be a pretty good test of this.

sonikku : Do you have a solution?

pray75 : I usually do seasonal netplay tournaments since the tournaments I host last 2-3 months (I'm currently hosting one now). If you're asking for an N64 netplay tournament, I'd rather wait until we figure out the desync issues.

Davideo7 : Well, I'm not the most knowledgeable person to ask about networking issues, but I can theorize what's happening.

I believe desync happens when the client sends input to the server, but the packet containing my input are lost before it can reach the server. The problem here is, Kaillera doesn't seem to get the full game state from players and only registers their input. So if one person presses A to go to the main menu and the server fails to receive this input, it results in desync that you usually can't recover from.

I think this only happens on Kaillera netplay servers because Mednafen is a little smarter about netplay. Any time I've lagged in-game to where my screen freezes, when I recover, Mednafen updates my gameplay to its current location. Sometimes it fails to register when someone's let go of a button or is pressing buttons (as I saw last night playing with Kitoko), but at least everyone sees this issue, so the server on Mednafen netplay seems to keep its own state of things while Kaillera does not.

I can think of a number of solutions, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to perform each one.

1. Make it so the clients send packets with labeled numbers and timestamps, and save the last few packets sent out. This way, if the server fails to receive a packet and gets a later packet than it should, the server could store that packet and request a resend of some missing packets. Depending on latency, this might still desync players, but not nearly as badly as all players would eventually receive the same input.

2. Make the Kaillera server have its own version of things and have it send out its state of things instead of the clients keeping their own states and updating based solely on input received. This might require heavy modification of the server or even a complete rewrite, but it would solve most issues. The only problem would be the same issue Mednafen has; if the server doesn't see it happen, then it didn't happen. Like you letting go of left, but the server doesn't get this packet.

Combining 1 and 2 might produce the best results, if it's doable. But there is a (rather nasty) third solution.

3. Switch to TCP. This is a nasty solution because, while TCP guarantees a direct connection and as such allows the client to resend lost packets should anything happen to them, it's also slower than UDP, which uses an implied connection. But if you're desperate not to have desync happen, and the above two solutions simply can't be done, this is probably the only other way.

There might be other solutions, but with my limited networking knowledge, these are all I can think of. These are also only guesses as to what's happening. Without direct access to the code and several days of staring at it to figure out exactly how it works (and assuming it's in a programming language I know), I can't give you an exact diagnosis of the problem.

sonikku : Thanks for the info, it'll come in handy in the future.

I have not tried the 4 player thing yet, David, but i will try to test that out for you this weekend, see how it goes, since 3 players seemed to work fine on the first try.

thing1 : Something else we could test out is if 4 player N64 netplay has less desyncing than 2 player N64 netplay. It probably sounds crazy and it's probably not the case but it's worth testing out. But thinking about it, the times that I didn't have desyncing problems, I was playing with 3 other users.

Davideo7 : So you would like me to test the syncing abilities of 2 player games AND 4 players games, compare them, and report them here. O.K. That won't be an issue. It might be awhile though.

thing1 : Exactly. If possible, the person who you test with in the 2 player test, try to get that person to join in the 4 player test. Also, be sure that everyone you test with is form the USA.

Actually come to think of it, your tests wont be good since you live in Hawaii. That's equivalent to living in a different country.

Davideo7 : It seems to work pretty fine. I had somewhat of an issue when earthwarrior had his Mario Kart 64 tournament, but Mario Kart 64 and Nintendo 64 NetPlay servers all had problems. 

I will try it anyways.

bobq :
patar4097 :  

You guys up to this? and bobq... what was your friend's name that we played with? PM me if you are interested.

thing1 :

boomer is his name, got some numbers, check my friend list