IPv6 multiplayer support, pretty please?

[Laurreth]

With more and more ISPs supporting this now almost a quarter century old protocol, switching to CGNAT because they run out of IPv4 addresses, and thus making hosting games from home all but impossible or at least very painful, please implement support for IPv6. Dual-stack hosting should not be too much of a hassle.

The alternatives like buying hosting or running to your ISP's support line with big googly eyes asking if you could pretty please have a "proper" IPv4 address are quit out of proportion in terms of cost and effort for the on-again off-again filthy casual who just wants to try some stuff with a few friends. Implementing and providing STUN/TURN servers also seems a bit old-fashioned.

[upyr1]

Yes 

[QuiGon]

10 hours ago, Laurreth said:

With more and more ISPs supporting this now almost a quarter century old protocol, switching to CGNAT because they run out of IPv4 addresses, and thus making hosting games from home all but impossible or at least very painful, please implement support for IPv6. Dual-stack hosting should not be too much of a hassle.

The alternatives like buying hosting or running to your ISP's support line with big googly eyes asking if you could pretty please have a "proper" IPv4 address are quit out of proportion in terms of cost and effort for the on-again off-again filthy casual who just wants to try some stuff with a few friends. Implementing and providing STUN/TURN servers also seems a bit old-fashioned.

IPv6 hosting is already supported in DCS since 2020 at least. Just be aware, that if you host a server with IPv6, that only clients that also use IPv6 can join the server, while clients using IPv4 can not.

[Tippis]

In fact, not only is it supported, there was (and possibly still is) a bug whereby DCS's favouritism of IPv6 over IPv4 for the purpose of connecting to a server caused issues with running multiple servers and clients on the same network.

[Laurreth]

2 hours ago, QuiGon said:

IPv6 hosting is already supported in DCS since 2020 at least.

Is that a feature of the dedicated server only? I can't find any reference when hosting from the game itself, and the public server list also doesn't show anything about it.

Edited June 27, 2022 by Laurreth

[QuiGon]

36 minutes ago, Laurreth said:

Is that a feature of the dedicated server only?

IPv6 hosting should work for both.
 

36 minutes ago, Laurreth said:

I can't find any reference when hosting from the game itself, and the public server list also doesn't show anything about it.

There is/was an issue that the master server did not support IPv6 and thus IPv6 servers are not listed and you need to join via direct IP:

On 5/26/2020 at 1:04 PM, c0ff said:

 

It is fully IPv6 for quite a while already. There was even a bug with empty server list on the machines with disabled IPv6, because all IPv4 addresses inside were mapped to IPv6.

 

The only thing which is not IPv6-ready ATM is the master server, which keeps the list.

So you can host IPv6-only right now, but

1) your server won't be listed and your clients will have to use either direct address, or DNS-name.

2) obviously, it will only serve IPv6-clients. For example, my ISP does not support IPv6 so I won't be able to connect to your server, no matter if it is listed or not.

I'm not sure if this is still the case.

[Laurreth]

Alright, thanks to you. I'll do some more experiments to see what happens. I did expose the DCS port on the host machine, but didn't get anywhere. May be an issue with a new Windows install still using v6 privacy features in all the wrong ways.

For CGNAT hosts it'd be useful if the master server supported IPv6 and hosts could straight up disable v4.