The saga continues-
I figured I'd risk it briefly and opened up 1-65000 ports and still no ping in battlefield.
So what about the ICMP angle? Could battlefield actually be using ICMP echo?
My router is old and possesses no option for shaping incoming ICMP, but it does have a ping response built in which I might add is RFC compliant. So technically when someone pings me, its my router who is pigning them back instead of my computer, but that's no cause for any manner of concern. For one, the returning pong would be from the same WAN-IP; it is irrelevant of which machine behind NAT it comes from. If it is relevant, then that begs a SERIOUS question: What is battlefield doing? What about my network is it trying to observe? The hosted game server gets its pong, it should be happy? In addition, the purpose of ping is to determine the status and latency of a host, and since the router's response is on the *same connection* as the machine, the pong is for all intents and purposes the exact same thing whether the router hardware generated it or my windows OS generated it. Granted, there is a little room for a computer science debate that pong time might be extended if my machine were affected by its various processes but this would very negligible in multi-threaded architectures (which is basically every Intel and AMD chip in existence today) *provided* the machine isn't "thrashing" (that's actually a CS word), but mine isn't 🙂
I did create a custom windows firewall rule to allow ICMP to all "just in case." I just wanted to add this line in case an EA mod wants to blow me off by saying, "Did you add an ICMP rule to your windows firewall?" -- yes, I did.
I played around with netstat a bit:
netstat -a -b -n -p UDP
netstat -a -b -n -p TCP
While bf4.exe makes use of both protocols, it appears the primary connection to the server is TCP. I'm kind of shocked that a game developer would do that, since UDP with CRC-32 error correction has traditionally been a better choice for FPS games... this probably explains all the "netcode" trolls you guys have been getting. Anyway, 3702 UDP looks like its talking to the battlelog plugin (probably over SOAP-udp I imagine), and there is some curious UDP ports it uses from 50000 - 60000 or so, chosen at random, and yes I let those through the router too.
I'm just generally curious at this point how the game goes about determining ping. It doesn't seem conventional in any case.
