SupersonicWaffle
Inkster Jr.
- Joined
- Aug 18, 2015
- Messages
- 21
- NNID
- supersonicwaffle
Hey guys,
I've seen it a lot on this forums that a lot of people say that Splatoon has a ****ty LAN-Mode which in essence is flat out wrong. Yes Splatoon does have a ****ty netcode that has nothing to do with LAN though. Also since Nintendo showed off how to play on LAN there's been more and more false information floating around from people who don't know what a switch, router or even WiFi (-in essence) is.
Let me start by giving you an overview of the networking components needed.
If you want to run a LAN game you will still have to use Nintendo servers as the connection broker, this is the reason you still need an internet connection. Since the server will only know your Public IP-Addresses and ports players should connect to, every Wii U that wants to participate in the game would have the same IP-Address but different ports, these will be translated to private IP-Adresses in your router. Once the game starts Nintendo servers are out of the loop until the results get reported. The other difference to a traditional LAN setup is that Wii Us will communicate though public IP-Addresses as opposed to private ones. As I mentioned earlier your Wii Us cannot communicate directly with one another like this because the IP-Addresses will be outside of their private IP-Net, this is not too bad though because your router will basically send the information to itself which will amount to a near immeasurable amount of additional latency. Check the picture below to see the actual difference.
During the first round of pings I used my public IP-Address, which was redacted, during the second round I used the private IP-Address of my router. As you can see the difference is about 0.2ms. I'd be hard pressed to say that it's what is to be expected though because when there's a bit of traffic to go around the latency within your LAN will oftentimes exceed 1ms-2ms.
I hope this thread clears some things up, if you have any questions feel free to ask. If you want to run a LAN event I can also help you select proper compenents and explain how to set everything up.
I've seen it a lot on this forums that a lot of people say that Splatoon has a ****ty LAN-Mode which in essence is flat out wrong. Yes Splatoon does have a ****ty netcode that has nothing to do with LAN though. Also since Nintendo showed off how to play on LAN there's been more and more false information floating around from people who don't know what a switch, router or even WiFi (-in essence) is.
Let me start by giving you an overview of the networking components needed.
- Modem: This is a device that more or less translates IP traffic to be sent over the medium that your internet connection uses i.e: telephone line, coaxial cable, fiber (although in this case it wouldn't be a modem but a media-converter). For consumers at home this is often integrated into the router.
- Private an public IP-Addresses: All your networking enabled devices have an IP-Address! The problem is that there's not enough IP-Addresses provided by version 4 of the internet protocol (IP) for every device in the world to have one unique IP-Address because it's only a number with 32-Bit length (2^32 possible combinations). To get around this issue three private IP-Address ranges have been defined (10.0.0.1 to 10.255.255.254, 172.16.0.1 to 172.31.255.254. and 192.168.0.1 to 192.168.255.254).
- Router: A router is important because your devices will only be able to directly communicate with other device if they're in the same subnet. If you have a private IP-Net of 192.168.1.0/24 your devices will only be able to communicate with devices that have an IP-Address of 192.168.1.x . Every other communication will have to go through the router as it knows the routes the next device to talk to if you want to reach a device in a different network (in your home that would be the internet). Since there can be millions of private 192.168.1.0/24 networks in the world the router uses a method called Network Address Translation (NAT) that enables your private IP-Net to talk to the outside world, to do this it swaps out source and destination IP-Addresses of all outgoing and incoming traffic to your home network to make it look like it's your only device. Thereby we are able to get around the issue of not having enough IPv4 addresses. Your router will be able to simultaneously manage thousands of connections as a single connection will always have to have IP-Address and port number specified. There is a total of 65,536 ports available.
- Switches: Communication within the same subnet does not work by IP but by MAC-Addresses. Switches will keep a MAC-Adress table to create a point to point connection for every device on your LAN. These devices can only be used within the same network.
- WiFi (or more correctly WLAN): Is nothing more but a way to connect to you LAN wirelessly, communication wise it does not make a difference whether devices are connected though WLAN or wired connections if they're within the same IP-Net. An access-point can more or less be seen as a switch for wireless access. The access-point will most likely be integrated into your router in home networks.When using Ethernet adapters for all Wii Us an access-point or access to the internet via WLAN is not needed.
If you want to run a LAN game you will still have to use Nintendo servers as the connection broker, this is the reason you still need an internet connection. Since the server will only know your Public IP-Addresses and ports players should connect to, every Wii U that wants to participate in the game would have the same IP-Address but different ports, these will be translated to private IP-Adresses in your router. Once the game starts Nintendo servers are out of the loop until the results get reported. The other difference to a traditional LAN setup is that Wii Us will communicate though public IP-Addresses as opposed to private ones. As I mentioned earlier your Wii Us cannot communicate directly with one another like this because the IP-Addresses will be outside of their private IP-Net, this is not too bad though because your router will basically send the information to itself which will amount to a near immeasurable amount of additional latency. Check the picture below to see the actual difference.
During the first round of pings I used my public IP-Address, which was redacted, during the second round I used the private IP-Address of my router. As you can see the difference is about 0.2ms. I'd be hard pressed to say that it's what is to be expected though because when there's a bit of traffic to go around the latency within your LAN will oftentimes exceed 1ms-2ms.
I hope this thread clears some things up, if you have any questions feel free to ask. If you want to run a LAN event I can also help you select proper compenents and explain how to set everything up.
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