From: jmt@legend.cma.fr (Jean-Marc Tanzi)
Newsgroups: rec.games.netrek
Subject: Re: Players from EUROPE? --Please read.
Date: 9 Sep 92 09:56:33 GMT
Reply-To: jmt@legend.cma.fr (Jean-Marc Tanzi)
Distribution: rec.games.netrek
Organization: INRIA Sophia Antipolis, France

In article <1992Sep7.193040.28126@alijku05.edvz.uni-linz.ac.at>, siegl@risc.uni-linz.ac.at (Kurt Siegl) writes:
> In article <4610@disun44.epfl.ch>, margot@disuns2.epfl.ch (Joel Margot) writes:
> > Hi to you, european fans, if any ;-O
> > My purpose would be to regroup us, european players, by some
>
> That would be great. I would also suggest an european league.
> But the european network have a major problem. They are slow. Most of the conections 
> are only 64k/s links and 128k for the main routes. That restricts playing a lot.

The situation is hopeless inside Europe for now :-( Connections are slow and worse
routing is terrible. For exemple, I'm located in France near the Italian border,
so I tried to connect to the new Italian server ghost.dsi.unimi.it (149.132.2.1).
I have some *2000 ms* average ping time to it!

Look at the result of a "traceroute":

traceroute to 149.132.2.1 (149.132.2.1), 30 hops max, 40 byte packets
 1  193.48.50.170 (193.48.50.170)  7 ms  6 ms  6 ms
 2  eunet-gw.inria.fr (192.93.1.109)  68 ms  180 ms  148 ms
 3  Amsterdam.NL.EU.NET (134.222.2.1)  916 ms  1018 ms  862 ms
 4  Amsterdam-EBS1.Ebone.NET (192.87.4.17)  517 ms  258 ms  617 ms
 5  192.87.4.10 (192.87.4.10)  1037 ms *  700 ms
 6  chep1.cern.ch (192.65.185.2)  1283 ms  1533 ms  730 ms
 7  GARR-gw-mi.infn.it (192.12.193.49)  763 ms  1569 ms  1025 ms
 8  GARR-gw.cilea.it (192.12.193.41)  1376 ms  2408 ms  1136 ms
 9  cisco.csi.unimi.it (131.175.254.2)  889 ms  686 ms *
10  149.132.254.1 (149.132.254.1)  473 ms *  869 ms
11  149.132.1.254 (149.132.1.254)  644 ms  925 ms  727 ms
12  * * *	....... (temporary problem?)


It seems that every single Internet packet in Europe goes through Amsterdam!
That's the bottleneck. 

We tried last year to set up an European match with Peter Pregler in Austria, 
but the lag was too bad. We have much better connections with US (but we are
specifically favored but an almost direct link to Princeton), and we had two
scrimmage matches against strong US teams. Needless to say, they are much
stronger but we also improved our play. The problem for playing with US is
the six to nine hours of time difference. That does not let much latitude
to choose a timing.

Anyway, we managed last year to have full scale games with local players
on legend.cma.fr. I'm confident it will restart this year as soon as the 
students come back. Then we can set up teams and train again.

If there are European players or teams that have correct connections to the US, 
we could try to meet there if some US Gods agree (I'm sure they will).
Then we can use the time difference to our advantage, for exemple
in the morning in Europe, when the US net is somewhat idle.

I've also precise ideas on how the game could use the net much more efficiently,
especially when two away teams meet: each packet could carry an update
for *all* players that are hooked to the same local net. 
It's going from the client-server to a master-slave server model.
That will be xtrekIII maybe.

-- 
=============================================================================
Jean-Marc Tanzi  |  Millions of years to make oil and forests,
jmt@cma.cma.fr   |  a century to burn them. Mankind versus Nature: 100000 to 1.
                 |  Will Mankind find a tougher planetary opponent?