Overcoming packet loss – the bane of online gamers

Packet loss on gamers’ networks can cause serious knock on effects to gameplay, increase latency, and totally ruin the gaming experience for players and spectators alike. With the recent growth of gaming and esports leagues this can put serious money at stake for competitors who are competing on skill, but losing out because of network and traffic properties like packet loss.

Whether its multiplayer PC or console gaming, mobile games, or using one of the many game streaming services launched in the last few years, we’ve all experienced these dreaded effects of packet loss on our gaming experience which makes your game freeze or delays your inputs so you crash and burn.

Gaming as a spectator sport has also really taken off with steaming services such as Discord, Twitch, YouTube and many others allowing players to stream their game footage to friends, or the whole world.

What this means for game developers and network operators is that there’s a lot more real-time, and therefore low latency traffic going to and from each machine, which needs to be accounted for, and instead of one person being able to rage privately or to themselves, or friends on their voice channel, millions of spectators might be watching and seeing the effects of poor connectivity or poorly optimised game traffic affecting gameplay.

What can we do about packet loss?

From a practical standpoint, there’s not always much that can be done to stop packet loss occurring on a network. Short of requiring every gamer to be equipped with Gb/s fibre connections to the home, and a fully wired setup, which is great to have, but a) won’t necessarily mean there will be no packet loss, and b) isn’t a viable, practical or economical option for many people.

Traditionally networks used retransmissions to resend packets which were lost along the way, but this can add considerable delay, especially when many losses occur at once So to solve the problem, and also make sure that all gamers, with even those with basic connectivity can join the online gaming ecosystem to play and communicate with their friends around the world, the only viable option is to have a system that can operate flawlessly even in the presence of packet loss, and mask it from the user such that they don’t experience any drop outs, lag, delay, lost inputs and connection instability.

Game developers also need to be aware that packet loss rarely occurs at fixed intervals, losses are often bursty and unpredictable, which means that any solution needs to be able to adapt to varying levels of packet loss between players and the server.

FEC is the solution

Next generation FEC codes are an easy to implement solution to overcome detrimental effects of packet loss in gaming. The trick is having a solution which can adapt to the changing network conditions, so when packet loss does start to rear its ugly head, the system will automatically generate repair traffic to mask the effects of packet loss and let the user continue to enjoy the application.

When packet loss increases, the FEC needs to be able to ramp up the amount of repair included, and when no packet loss occurs, the FEC should be able to turn off to save bandwidth and CPU resources.

Steinwurf’s FEC Solutions are adaptable

Classic FEC schemes like Reed Solomon don’t have this ability to adapt on the fly to changing network conditions, but Steinwurf’s RLNC based FEC codes make it easy to operating across real world networks with packet loss variance.

If we couldn’t adjust the FEC on the fly, then, except in the rare case when the gamer’s packet loss rate exactly matches the repair rate of the FEC, you would always either have too much repair, wasting bandwidth, or too little repair, meaning not all packet loss is masked, which breaks the gaming experience.

By using Steinwurf’s Low Latency FEC solutions such as Rely, game developers can ensure that gamers dont get left behind by having too little repair traffic to mask packet loss, and that hardware and networks are running efficiently by not overloading the service with excess repair when it isn’t necessary.

How it works for Game Streaming Services

To understand how this plays out visually, our game streaming demo shows the most latency sensitive gaming application, when teh players’ console is in the cloud, and being operated remotely from the home, or even on the go via mobile. For action heavy games which require constant interaction between the player and the game packet loss can be a total killjoy. If the game service adds an optimised FEC into the mix though, the gamer is none the wiser to packet loss, and has one less reason to leave the service behind and can keep playing, and subscribing to the streaming service.

Supercharge your game service

To learn more about how Steinwurf’s low latency FEC solutions can supercharge your game service, or other multi-user interactive applications get in touch on contact@steinwurf.com. If you’re designing a game or game related service like in game voice chat and streaming, and want to ensure your player base doesn’t exclude gamers with occasional or persistent packet loss issues, Steinwurf’s next generation FEC is a must have component for a seamless gaming experience.