unreal

[Stuart]

What router is it ?

The easy ones to do are Netgear's DG834, BT Home Hub. You may get problems with linksys.

Does anyone want me to write a sticky for router setups, perhaps explaining what DHCP is , what port forwarding actually is etc. I'll try to make it as english as possible but i'tll take me a few hours and I'll do it if more than a few people would benefit.

Sounds a great idea - keeping as much as possible in non tech language.

[bolders]

What router is it ?

The easy ones to do are Netgear's DG834, BT Home Hub. You may get problems with linksys.

Does anyone want me to write a sticky for router setups, perhaps explaining what DHCP is , what port forwarding actually is etc. I'll try to make it as english as possible but i'tll take me a few hours and I'll do it if more than a few people would benefit.

im using linksys. ports are easy to setup and i have no issues connecting in phoenix

[Klaus]

In tiddlers session i could see tiddler and woodster. Texting in multiplauer stopped working mid session, was not possible to type anymore - that happened before.

Session before that i was in a session where i could see one guy. When one of these guys reconnected suddently i could see everyone. Its quite clear that if i had closed ports it would be constant for sure. I have a feeling its more a nat issue then port forwarding issue where the network protocol does not use the nat receiver trics which Are available.

Problem is most issues seem to be isp related where some isps tunel their clients and hence natting them. Users have no control over this and i for instance would never Get a new isp just for phoenix, i got myself one who give me fixed ip and 30mb up and down almost for free i would be crazy to Get anotherone. Then idd rather save the money i save on my isp to Get a sim with working networking

My home setup is double routers with failover to be able to host the entire house with the sensors I tied together with my host server to make it intelligent (made it myself btw) and host my multimedia centers both grownup and kiddie one together with the 5 computers I have for each family members personal use. These routers can't port forward manually because of their network expanding setup, but they got upnp and bonjour to be able to configure all clients personal uses - but when a packet header contains the wrong data it will be eaten because of security. I know I do not have the run of the mill network setup BUT it works flawlessly with applications who do networking right like:
-warhammer online
-world of Warcraft
-realflight
-aeroflight 5
-skype
-spottify
-even p2p download clients

You can draw your own conclusions but I am waiting to get a working Phoenix network

[heliphil]

I have a netgear DG834GT ( ex Sky ) flashed with 3rd party software - It seems to work OK with the sim but I have not done the port forwarding yet

[bolders]

For those who think that phoenix is the only p2p type software with problems then you would be wrong. I play MW2 on the PC which has switched to p2p networking (previous versions of the game used dedicated servers). Switching to p2p was the worst thing they done in MW2 - you are frequently dumped from a game, have problems connecting, get a lot of lag during gaming and it takes an age to resume gaming when the current host disconnects etc. Bear in mind this is a large company selling a lot more copies than Phoenix and have a bigger budget and they still cant get it right.

Im not condoning the networking problems in Phoenix and although I have not had any problems with the beta I have seen the problem with missing players in the stable release, but at least they are working on it.

However what I would realy like is a dedicated server. In the past I have run one on my server for a driving sim (live for speed) which I left running 24/7 and it worked perfectly. The dedicated server was a small download that does not contain any copy protection or gfx (just a console showing server status etc) which, can either be run independantly on your gaming PC or on a completely seperate system.

Im sure there would be plenty of people willing to run a server or even pay for a hosting company to do it. It would be cool if there was a pw protected rc-heliaddict server online 24/7. It would be a point we could all go to and know we would be able to catch up with other forum members.

[msssltd]

I paid good money for the sim. The online was the thing that sold it to me. Hmmmmmm

Ahh, well, the thing is...No you haven't.

Considering the work required to produce it, you have paid hardly anything for Phoenix. Whatever you did pay, 33% to 50% will have gone to the retailer for doing little more than handing you a box. The cruel truth is that small development companies writing applications for niche markets would probably make more money writing accountancy packages for banks - and that takes a lot less skill.

The online functionality works about as well as it can work, given all the limitations inherent with a real time peer to peer connection over the UKs tragically overloaded broad band network.

Phoenix could, I suppose, move to a client/server implementation. It would take another round of development and it is unlikely Phoenix are going to have engineers experienced in hosting on public internet servers on staff at the moment. So some big additional costs for Phoenix, which it is only fair they pass along. How do you feel about paying a monthly subscription to play on line? How much would you pay? Keep in mind that it is a niche product. The possible market is at least 10 times smaller than X-Box live or any other mainstream platform. So you are not going to get access for £10 a month. Using the X-Box estimate, £60 to £100 a month would be a reasonable price to ask for the service :eek

Alternatively I could set you up a Phoenix server all of your own in a data centre. I will guarantee that your online play will be a lot more reliable. Say £5K to £10K to set up and then x£1000 PA to keep it going. I would be doing you a favour at that price too.

You can solve most technology problems when you are prepared to throw enough money at them. The conundrum being, the vast majority are not so prepared.

I'm not crying i'm just saying comments that are negative towards peoples issue like yours is EZchopper aren't helpful. No i'm not crying just saying that my experience with Phoenix tech support is S**T. I sent many mails they replied once yes once. So get a grip buddy.

Ambivalence is the place to be. Give me the strength to change what I can change and to realise what I can not.

The vast majority of issues reported about Phoenix network play boil down to peer to peer connection over cheap routers, cheap ADSL lines and cheap network providers (ISP). By cheap I am not talking about an extra £10 a month for an ISP or a £100 quid more on a router. I am talking about the relative cost of broad band Vs more reliable networking infrastructures.

The big bottleneck for Phoenix is the upload speed of the line that is hosting the session. Everyones traffic has to go through that pipe and the router connected to it. It costs around £5 to £50 a month for 400Kbps to 1Mbps of upstream broadband throughput on a good day. A centralised server gets 100Mbps to 1000Mbps of upload, but it costs a minimum of £100 to £1000 pcm just for the shelf space, the power point and the network port and you may have to pay extra per Watt of power used. So when I say cheap, I mean orders of magnitude cheap. Note - Before anyone pipes up that they know a bloke who is paying £20 a month for a dedicated server, they probably do but they are quoting headline price, not total contract and operational cost price.

If you buy a power shower and connect it to your overloaded water main, is it the shower manufacturers fault that their product does not work perfectly for you? What do you expect them to do about it?

Now define sh*t support. Is a tech support deparment sh*t because they do not keep repeating the same information to the same people. Is the company sh*t because they do not employ more people to repeat the same things to the same people. Is it sh*t when all those people repeating the same things to the same people, cost so much that there is little left to fund development? Honestly these are the sort of issues talked about in software house boardrooms. There are companies out there spending more on defending their truly crap products than they are spending trying to develop them. Real engineers cost real money. Employing ignorant muppets to repeat dubious scripts to ignorant customers, is much more lucrative.

Oh yeah MY SYSTEM IS AT FAULT....NOT

Well more THE SYSTEM, than YOUR SYSTEM. The faults you endure are the same faults Phoenix endure and neither of you can fix them. We are in it together, so to speak.

After about 7pm on some days (not all days) I can't watch Youtube in HD without it buffering to the point it is unusable. Between the multi billion pound budgets of Google, Apple, Microsoft and BT and the millions of my ISP, Youtube in HD sometimes does not work for me. What chance a small, niche market, development company like Phoenix - Zero.

If anyone from Phoenix is reading this, I would just like to say that I think the product is a phenomenal achievement despite the screams about networking issues. I guess the difference in perspective come down to my running networks for a living and sometimes writing software. Shame so few technology customers have any clue how flippin complicated it all is and so, understandably, fail to distinguish the great from the sh*t.

Now when do we get a Mac version for the few that can spot quality when they see it

[Biggles]

Ahh, well, the thing is...No you haven't.

Considering the work required to produce it, you have paid hardly anything for Phoenix. Whatever you did pay, 33% to 50% will have gone to the retailer for doing little more than handing you a box. The cruel truth is that small development companies writing applications for niche markets would probably make more money writing accountancy packages for banks - and that takes a lot less skill.

The online functionality works about as well as it can work, given all the limitations inherent with a real time peer to peer connection over the UKs tragically overloaded broad band network.

Phoenix could, I suppose, move to a client/server implementation. It would take another round of development and it is unlikely Phoenix are going to have engineers experienced in hosting on public internet servers on staff at the moment. So some big additional costs for Phoenix, which it is only fair they pass along. How do you feel about paying a monthly subscription to play on line? How much would you pay? Keep in mind that it is a niche product. The possible market is at least 10 times smaller than X-Box live or any other mainstream platform. So you are not going to get access for £10 a month. Using the X-Box estimate, £60 to £100 a month would be a reasonable price to ask for the service :eek

Alternatively I could set you up a Phoenix server all of your own in a data centre. I will guarantee that your online play will be a lot more reliable. Say £5K to £10K to set up and then x£1000 PA to keep it going. I would be doing you a favour at that price too.

You can solve most technology problems when you are prepared to throw enough money at them. The conundrum being, the vast majority are not so prepared.
Ambivalence is the place to be. Give me the strength to change what I can change and to realise what I can not.

The vast majority of issues reported about Phoenix network play boil down to peer to peer connection over cheap routers, cheap ADSL lines and cheap network providers (ISP). By cheap I am not talking about an extra £10 a month for an ISP or a £100 quid more on a router. I am talking about the relative cost of broad band Vs more reliable networking infrastructures.

The big bottleneck for Phoenix is the upload speed of the line that is hosting the session. Everyones traffic has to go through that pipe and the router connected to it. It costs around £5 to £50 a month for 400Kbps to 1Mbps of upstream broadband throughput on a good day. A centralised server gets 100Mbps to 1000Mbps of upload, but it costs a minimum of £100 to £1000 pcm just for the shelf space, the power point and the network port and you may have to pay extra per Watt of power used. So when I say cheap, I mean orders of magnitude cheap. Note - Before anyone pipes up that they know a bloke who is paying £20 a month for a dedicated server, they probably do but they are quoting headline price, not total contract and operational cost price.

If you buy a power shower and connect it to your overloaded water main, is it the shower manufacturers fault that their product does not work perfectly for you? What do you expect them to do about it?

Now define sh*t support. Is a tech support deparment sh*t because they do not keep repeating the same information to the same people. Is the company sh*t because they do not employ more people to repeat the same things to the same people. Is it sh*t when all those people repeating the same things to the same people, cost so much that there is little left to fund development? Honestly these are the sort of issues talked about in software house boardrooms. There are companies out there spending more on defending their truly crap products than they are spending trying to develop them. Real engineers cost real money. Employing ignorant muppets to repeat dubious scripts to ignorant customers, is much more lucrative.

Well more THE SYSTEM, than YOUR SYSTEM. The faults you endure are the same faults Phoenix endure and neither of you can fix them. We are in it together, so to speak.

After about 7pm on some days (not all days) I can't watch Youtube in HD without it buffering to the point it is unusable. Between the multi billion pound budgets of Google, Apple, Microsoft and BT and the millions of my ISP, Youtube in HD sometimes does not work for me. What chance a small, niche market, development company like Phoenix - Zero.

If anyone from Phoenix is reading this, I would just like to say that I think the product is a phenomenal achievement despite the screams about networking issues. I guess the difference in perspective come down to my running networks for a living and sometimes writing software. Shame so few technology customers have any clue how flippin complicated it all is and so, understandably, fail to distinguish the great from the sh*t.

Now when do we get a Mac version for the few that can spot quality when they see it

Spot on!!!!!

This is why I don't deal with home users!!!!!!

[msssltd]

However what I would realy like is a dedicated server.

I would agree there could be some milage in that idea. Only the Phoenix development department know how feasible it is to strip out the graphics engine. Only their managers know if it is economically feasible. I am going to take a guess that the idea has occurred to them.

Not much point running it on the end of a broad band line. You still have the problem of restricted upload speed, which will cause sessions to drop when the router or line get's congested.

Hosting on a shared server might be possible. You need Phoenix to strip out the graphics and get the CPU use and memory footprint down. You need to convince a hosting company it can make money hosting a dedicated Phoenix server process - that can be difficult for a niche product. Each potential host has to invest into load testing and then has to find enough potential customers to pay for it. Otherwise we are into vanity publishing.

Then fibre to the curb comes along in a couple years and P2P comes back into fashion.

[barney]

If its the Heliaddicts session that was running last night it was set at 5 players so something doesn't add up. LOL

The people in that session where:

• Gareth71
• Asid
• Klaus
• Kozmyk
• Woodster
• Raptormark

[Mark_T]

Alternatively I could set you up a Phoenix server all of your own in a data centre. I will guarantee that your online play will be a lot more reliable. Say £5K to £10K to set up and then x£1000 PA to keep it going. I would be doing you a favour at that price too.

Remind me not to ask you for a favour at those prices

Seriously though in all other respects you are correct.

I used to run a company a while ago specializing in the provision of game servers, server hosting and related services both for consumers and for game developers/publishers.

The main selling point and attraction for end users is the fact that P2P gaming is essentially very unreliable no matter how good the code gets, and yes the main issues are upload bandwidth (which with ADSL is a huge bottleneck) ping times and CPU power. If you get a slow PC with a poor ping join in it can kill the experience for all the other players.

These days it is much less necessary to make huge changes to a 'game' to create a decent standalone server module. Yes it is better if the video display aspects are suppressed or removed but servers can easily have low profile DX capable graphics cards fitted if it is required for the game to see such a card before it runs. Mostly the need is to be able to run from a command line and either accept parameters that way or read from a config file.

Pity I don't still run that company or we'd have a solution sorted out a lot faster

[Dedcalm]

Using the X-Box estimate, £60 to £100 a month would be a reasonable price to ask for the service :eek

You are forgetting market forces - people will pay what people deem resonable for the service they get. If you try to charge too much then it would fall flat on its face.

I did not realise Phoenix used a P2P type model as you had to log in to play online - so I presumed there was a central server sorting out connections etc. I can understand the problem with running a client/server solution if you want to control the server but if you release it then servers will spring up all over the internet by those inclinded and capable of running them. This costs nothing (other than the dev work).

[Asid]

Ahh, well, the thing is...No you haven't.

Considering the work required to produce it, you have paid hardly anything for Phoenix. Whatever you did pay, 33% to 50% will have gone to the retailer for doing little more than handing you a box. The cruel truth is that small development companies writing applications for niche markets would probably make more money writing accountancy packages for banks - and that takes a lot less skill.

Actually i did pay £79.99 for the product. How the supply/distribution chain break down the percentages of profit etc is surely no concern to the customer

The online functionality works about as well as it can work, given all the limitations inherent with a real time peer to peer connection over the UKs tragically overloaded broad band network.

Phoenix could, I suppose, move to a client/server implementation. It would take another round of development and it is unlikely Phoenix are going to have engineers experienced in hosting on public internet servers on staff at the moment. So some big additional costs for Phoenix, which it is only fair they pass along. How do you feel about paying a monthly subscription to play on line? How much would you pay? Keep in mind that it is a niche product. The possible market is at least 10 times smaller than X-Box live or any other mainstream platform. So you are not going to get access for £10 a month. Using the X-Box estimate, £60 to £100 a month would be a reasonable price to ask for the service :eek

Alternatively I could set you up a Phoenix server all of your own in a data centre. I will guarantee that your online play will be a lot more reliable. Say £5K to £10K to set up and then x£1000 PA to keep it going. I would be doing you a favour at that price too.

Well the online functionality is what attracted me to the product. It does not say anywhere (unless i am wrong) that it may not work. They sell the product as online ready so if it does not work online sufficiently for a large number of users then surely it is an issue. I paid the money for online play so it seems ludicrous to even imply that the end user should contribute towards fixing this problem even in its most basic form

******************************

If you buy a power shower and connect it to your overloaded water main, is it the shower manufacturers fault that their product does not work perfectly for you? What do you expect them to do about it?

True but in this case i purchased a product that has no warnings about online problems. If i purchased the shower and it said it would work with my system then i would expect it to work. Not just work intermittently so the analogy isn't applicable

Now define sh*t support. Is a tech support deparment sh*t because they do not keep repeating the same information to the same people. Is the company sh*t because they do not employ more people to repeat the same things to the same people. Is it sh*t when all those people repeating the same things to the same people, cost so much that there is little left to fund development? Honestly these are the sort of issues talked about in software house boardrooms. There are companies out there spending more on defending their truly crap products than they are spending trying to develop them. Real engineers cost real money. Employing ignorant muppets to repeat dubious scripts to ignorant customers, is much more lucrative.

My definition of S**T support is when i have sent countless emails and only ONE was ever replied to and that was with a generic reply

Shame so few technology customers have any clue how flippin complicated it all is and so, understandably, fail to distinguish the great from the sh*t.

So everyone that has a similar issue falls into this category? Some of us do have a "clue"

I understand that beata releases are necessary. I have been in quite a few. However this connectivity issue is pre-beta and on going. Same with the lack of customer support for myself and other users.

There is an issue that needs to be addressed. I do not expect it to be fixed over night. However the port forwarding thing is getting old.

Why not say "we acknowledge...we are working.."? instead of "you are imagining or making it up or its YOUR fault?

Not trying to bash a company or product here just mistified by the responses to genuine issues

[robgt]

Asid,
Saying their support is sh!t is bashing the company.
Did you consider that all but one of your emails to them ended up in a spam bin somewhere, for whatever reason?
There is no need for this to be on this forum - send your issues over to them directly.
If you don't get a response, try again, or withdraw from beta testing perhaps?

Cheers,
Rob

[Asid]

Asid,
Saying their support is sh!t is bashing the company.
Did you consider that all but one of your emails to them ended up in a spam bin somewhere, for whatever reason?
There is no need for this to be on this forum - send your issues over to them directly.
If you don't get a response, try again, or withdraw from beta testing perhaps?

Cheers,
Rob

I am expressing my frustration Rob at the lack of service I have received.

My problems are Pre beta. For the 1000th time guys PRE-BETA. they are still there.

[robgt]

Take it up with them directly rather than slag them off publicly here.
It helps nobody.

Cheers,
Rob