Losing Hell

I've just bought Hell Let Loose - it's a lot of fun but very hard. However, I noticed that voice appeared to randomly work on some servers, but not others. I was watching my FW logs as I was playing the game and adding individual UDP ports in as they showed up as denied.

It seems that the initial voice packet is tried once - if it fails, then the game appears to just give up and doesn't try and send any more on some servers, others it retries on multiple ports (I will say that I haven't analysed the traffic in detail because cba, so this could be other traffic apart from VOIP wrt to retries), so it was generally just a single deny line in the logs. The servers where voice worked, happened to be on one of the ports I'd already allowed. If it didn't... well.

I ditched all the individual ports and put a range in for the game (originally the range was 27000-30000 but that wasn't enough. Edit 3: dropped initial port to 12000 and maxed 32000 as there was a UDP packet at 13950 this morning. A Vivox post below suggested 12K - 32K):

UDP: 12000 - 32000

UDP: 4350 - 4400

20K ports is a fair old range, and now edges Discord with 13,500 ports.

I will update this with a larger range as and when things break.

Note: The policies are from 'Trusted Internal' (i.e. my PC) to 'Any External', as my FW will automatically deny outgoing traffic to a random port somewhere on the internet.

Note 2: Some evidence that this may be your issue, before you try messing about with your FW policies, is if when you press the voice chat keybind, you do not see the little graphic in the bottom left that shows your active mic. It appears that the software tries to send packets before triggering the voice icon on the overlay, so if it cannot do so successfully, then the icon will fail to appear. This appeared consistent across various games when voice did/did not work. If the icon appears, this is probably not your issue.

Note 3: I did notice that my FW was also blocking some traffic due to DDoS protection features. The limits were set at 100 connections/sec (per server/per client quota). I upped this to 500, and the traffic flowed again. I have done no testing on actual rates, so 120 connections/sec might have been enough; I may revise it down when I can be arsed. 100 connections/sec is a fair number, so I was surprised this limit was reached. A note of caution: correlation is not causation, so it might have been a combo of this game and other things too, the game just pushing it over the limit.

Note 4: Even writing (Note 3) made me feel dirty, with such a profligate approach to FW settings. Turns out the traffic limits were being breached by the 'Refresh Server' button, so was fairly easy to iterate over. Reset the 'Per Server' rate limit to 100, and appear to have settled on a figure of 170 connections per second for 'Per Client' quota to stop the packets from being dropped. This makes me feel better. The fact it happens on 'Per Client' leads me to believe that it's not just the game software, but will include other background activity too; but there's no denying that it certainly bursts traffic.

Note 5: Some people have reported having a VPN solves this - this lends credence to me that the problem may lie with a user's gateway hardware firewall/router (where it comes into your house) more. If the VPN from your PC is encrypting traffic in a tunnel straight out of your network, then your hardware firewall cannot interfere with the traffic.

Note 6: This post talks about requiring ports 12000 - 32000 UDP for Vivox, but so far I haven't found any out of the range above. https://sites.google.com/site/tecolaproject/virtualworld/technical-support

Addendum:

I didn't need to check this stuff in this addendum as it seemed to work, but while fiddling about checking out Vivox, there's a customer help page on solving Vivox issues, with a whole suite of checks to run through:

http://vivox.com/gamers/help/19

with this link being the most interesting on how to disable SIP-ALG (Vivox uses SIP apparently) on your router:

https://support.8x8.com/equipment-devices/network-devices/disable-sip-alg-router-firewall

Be interested to see how well it works.

Addendum 2:

This is getting silly. Many games seem to use Vivox, and thus is a SIP based service. Discord does not use SIP, it uses WebRTC, while similar to SIP, just uses whatever protocol the devs choose to deliver the data - in this case, I think Discord rolled their own delivery mechanism, so did not need to use SIP as a protocol. This means that when someone says, 'Discord works, but not this!' - they are comparing Apples to Oranges.

A number of other posts discussing fixes for SIP-based in game voice (for other games like PubG, Foxhole etc. etc.) chat seem to coalesce around disabling SIP-ALG wherever possible on hardware router/firewalls (it works like a kind of NAT, but mangles the endpoint IP address, so delivery fails. As they are all UDP packets, there is no error checking. Why not use TCP! TCP is no good for voice chat, as it takes too long due to the in-built error-checking. You just need a stream of packets as fast as possible.).

Get Back, Blackguard!

So, Dishonored 2 is out soon. Talking to a friend about it, I was reminded what a superlative game it was. Incredible level design allowed you a true decision in what path to take. Certain choke-points to take you through to the next sub-section, but other than that there was often 3, sometimes 4 different ways to achieve your objective. Sneak, kill, distract, possess, blink...

It's been about 3 years, I can't really remember the details of the story, it would be good to do it again. Was it ever!

You invest Corvo Attano, the Royal Bodyguard. The opening sequence deals with your titular misfortune - a dastardly plot that pits you against the powerful senior members of society in the city of Dunwall. Pretty soon you link up with the Loyalists, a group of concerned citizens fighting to save the Royal Progression and leverage power from the veiny mitts of the plotters. You are also chosen to be the Outsider's champion, the patronage of whom gives you supernatural powers... pretty soon Corvo is embroiled deeply into plots within plots, as the game's story plays out across the industrial cityscape.

As these types of games go, the story is pretty decent (if at times predictable)- you care (at least, I did!) about the characters, cheering some and booing the delightfully pantomime villains of the piece. As the game goes on, you meet more principles, get to know older ones better, and by your actions in the game alter those people's attitude towards you. I think Samuel was my favourite, and remember feeling singularly disappointed in myself at his later disparagement. I was a Bad Man(tm).

Although you have obtained the right to use your powers, the game doesn't hand them to you on a platter - The Outsider's tokens must be hunted down to increase your abilities - you are given some at the start to get you going, but if you want more, you're going to have to work for it. It's a really nice design balance that shows up some games' achievements for collecting as simple Magpie Moments. At the same time, it encourages exploration and consideration as opposed to speed running, something I've never really been a massive fan of (or indeed, any good at). These powers never feel unbalanced really either - you could, if you so wished, not bother with any of the more powerful abilities (barring blink), and survive on your wits alone - but this game is to be played and I would rather not torture myself with the frustration. Especially if attempting the non-lethal route. (I do have a small whinge here - I was never able to work out where to hide the bodies if I had knocked them out rather than made them vanish, always got tagged for it on the end of level tally). The final supernatural aids that you are given are runes, which are incremental upgrades to various parts of your arsenal, carved out of whalebone.

Also worth a mention is the voice acting. It is brilliant. I'd forgotten how great it was, and on a few occasions thought I recognised a voice, looked it up and it was them. There is some serious voice talent in this game, which really adds to the atmosphere - Brad Dourif in particular stands out for me.

The backdrop of the city is richly detailed; a civilisation powered by whale oil, steampunk contraptions abound, a hard life for most with the extraction and hunting of the whales pretty unpleasant (with indications of them getting more rare). Arkane clearly took great pains to paint a vivid picture, plenty of background snippets to read all add to the excellent atmosphere.

I enjoyed it so much the second time around that I ended up buying some DLC - The Knife of Dunwall, aka 'Daud's Story'. Daud is the head of an assassin's guild, and he's feeling guilty, Ladies and Gentlemen. He's having doubts about also being a Bad Man (tm) and your task is to salve his soul. You are given somewhat of a different choice of powers (although disappointingly the runes don't seem to have changed much). There is a second add-on called The Brigmore Witches, where Daud again tries to prevent another gang from sealing his fate (at the hands of Corvo) with a powerful ritual.

I will probably wait before I get Dishonored 2 (because DotA), but I will look forward to playing it. If this genre rocks your world and the quality holds, it should be great. A cut above.