UDP Network port fowarding that can improve the gameplay

[DLCI]

So I've been doing some wiresharking of the connections that darktide uses all week, and after going over the logs I've come up with a consistent list of UDP ports darktide uses to communicate. Opening these ports on your router or edge device seems to improve performance quite a bit, especially since timing is such an important thing for melee combat.


Obviously, it's not 100% required for connectivity since any decent device these days can NAT dynamically. Opening/forwarding these ports reduces NAT buffering or delays that come from dynamic translation. Depending on your connection, this can improve performance in a noticeable way.


For TCP it uses 443 aka standard HTTPS, which is not really feasible to forward to a specific device.

For UDP I have consistently seen ONLY the following external ports: 35510, 35520, 35530, 35540, 35550.

This is good! This means the servers are NOT using a wide dynamic range like some games, and will always use one of these 5 UDP ports, and no other game I know of uses them.

Not really planning to explain how/why to open ports on your device, but if you already know how to do that, give it a try and see if it helps you out.

[Gioke]

Thank you for your research, will give these a shot!

[Arcobio]

Thanks a lot.

[pRaX]

This wouldn't be necessary if we could properly deactivate the VOIP which is still running on peer2peer.

Besides, I doubt it will do much in the first place in general.

[DLCI]

It depends a great deal on the game in question whether this helps or not.

For games that convey game updates via RTP-UDP packets and rely on precise timing, like you get in darktide with melee combat or when trying to dodge attacks by specials (hounds, trappers, etc.), even a small reduction in any latency or delay can make the experience feel more seamless and enjoyable.

In other games, like you said, you would not notice the difference at all.

For my own connection, I've found that it seems to improve my ability to time hits and dodges, so I felt the information was worth sharing. It's up to you what you decide to do with it.

[DLCI]

Wanted to post an update to this because I found out something else that seems to have made a pretty drastic difference in how the game plays.

For some reason, if the steam connection gets disrupted briefly, things in game start to get very laggy and weird. Oddly, None of this seems to have anything to do with the data being passed back and forth to the actual darktide game servers, so I'm not entirely sure why that is.

However, I was able to take this idea and infer that if a spotty steam connection caused problems with UDP packet flow, perhaps forwarding/opening the standard steam ports might improve how seamless the game runs?

Going off this guide

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/2EA8-4D75-DA21-31EB

I tried opened up the following ports on my local firewall (sets them as listening) and on my router.

Steam Client

• UDP remote port 27000-27100: (Game traffic)
  
• TCP remote port 27015-27050: (steam server connection)

Steamworks P2P Networking and Steam Voice Chat

• UDP remote port 3478
  
• UDP remote port 4379
  
• UDP remote port 4380

It turns out that it does! The result was pretty amazing, too.

Ever since the beta I've had a hard time reacting to melee swings from behind because it feels like the sound played at exactly the same time as the attack, it was delayed or something.

As soon as I went through and set all of this, it was amazing how much more time I had to react to... pretty much anything. No longer did pox-hounds warp on top of me, no longer did mutants grab me from 10 feet away, no longer did horde enemies seem to "slide" into melee range to hit me mid-swing.

It felt/feels SO much more like playing vermintide where I could stand toe-to-toe with a hundred enemies at once and still block/dodge anything I wanted.

I don't think there's anything particularly unique about MY network hardware that would cause some strange problem like this, so I strongly suspect this is something that may benefit a great many players who I have heard voice similar complaints.

I highly, HIGHLY recommend you at least give it a try. It isn't all that many ports so it's not that big of a risk if it doesn't work.

As for the WHY does this make a difference... well....

I honestly do not know why. I suspect something about how the network framework is constructed passes data THROUGH steam servers somehow, but it makes very little sense to me that the flow of data would be optimized so much by manually forwarding normal steam client ports.

It's a bit of a mystery.

I did manage to verify over multiple tests that disabling all forwarding of the above ports causes the gameplay to revert to how "broken" it was before. Further, re-enabling them immediately corrects the "broken" feeling and makes everything much more seamless.

Seriously, do yourself a favor if you know how to configure this, and at least give it a shot. If you don't there are probably some steam FAQs somewhere, since none of it is anything except normal steam TCP/UDP ports.

It's almost like playing a whole different game.

[Gioke]

Originally posted by DLCI:

Wanted to post an update to this because I found out something else that seems to have made a pretty drastic difference in how the game plays.

For some reason, if the steam connection gets disrupted briefly, things in game start to get very laggy and weird. Oddly, None of this seems to have anything to do with the data being passed back and forth to the actual darktide game servers, so I'm not entirely sure why that is.

However, I was able to take this idea and infer that if a spotty steam connection caused problems with UDP packet flow, perhaps forwarding/opening the standard steam ports might improve how seamless the game runs?

Going off this guide

https://help.steampowered.com/en/faqs/view/2EA8-4D75-DA21-31EB

I tried opened up the following ports on my local firewall (sets them as listening) and on my router.

Steam Client

• UDP remote port 27000-27100: (Game traffic)
  
• TCP remote port 27015-27050: (steam server connection)

Steamworks P2P Networking and Steam Voice Chat

• UDP remote port 3478
  
• UDP remote port 4379
  
• UDP remote port 4380

It turns out that it does! The result was pretty amazing, too.

Ever since the beta I've had a hard time reacting to melee swings from behind because it feels like the sound played at exactly the same time as the attack, it was delayed or something.

As soon as I went through and set all of this, it was amazing how much more time I had to react to... pretty much anything. No longer did pox-hounds warp on top of me, no longer did mutants grab me from 10 feet away, no longer did horde enemies seem to "slide" into melee range to hit me mid-swing.

It felt/feels SO much more like playing vermintide where I could stand toe-to-toe with a hundred enemies at once and still block/dodge anything I wanted.

I don't think there's anything particularly unique about MY network hardware that would cause some strange problem like this, so I strongly suspect this is something that may benefit a great many players who I have heard voice similar complaints.

I highly, HIGHLY recommend you at least give it a try. It isn't all that many ports so it's not that big of a risk if it doesn't work.

As for the WHY does this make a difference... well....

I honestly do not know why. I suspect something about how the network framework is constructed passes data THROUGH steam servers somehow, but it makes very little sense to me that the flow of data would be optimized so much by manually forwarding normal steam client ports.

It's a bit of a mystery.

I did manage to verify over multiple tests that disabling all forwarding of the above ports causes the gameplay to revert to how "broken" it was before. Further, re-enabling them immediately corrects the "broken" feeling and makes everything much more seamless.

Seriously, do yourself a favor if you know how to configure this, and at least give it a shot. If you don't there are probably some steam FAQs somewhere, since none of it is anything except normal steam TCP/UDP ports.

It's almost like playing a whole different game.

About to test this. Yesterday felt unplayable for me. Even melee light attacks were overlapping, dodging felt like blinking... trrible experience.

[DLCI]

so the other day I was having pretty severe de-sync issues where enemies were warping from one position to another

and upon further investigation I found that my windows firewall had actually been intermittently blocking/dropping some of the inbound darktide server UDP packets

this was surprising because based on my original research and this post, I added the UDP ports manually as an exception but also because when installed it is supposed to be set up to add all "darktide.exe" UDP packets as a standard inbound exception.

The main reason you would want to open the ports is to set your NIC/OS firewall to be listening on these ports, which helps to reduce any kind of delays

now, for my own issues, it turns out fatshark had expanded the port ranges that they use over what I had originally documented in this post from several months ago. So the port list I had opened in the firewall was no longer covering the full range used by the game servers, and in the games which used a port in the expanded range, UDP packets got dropped intermittently

upon further consideration, because this was the consequence of

THE DEFAULT BEHAVIOR OF THE WINDOWS FIREWALL
DESPITE THE EXCEPTION CREATED BY THE DEFAULT INSTALLATION OF THE GAME

THEREFORE

I decided it may actually be affecting a considerable number of people!

ie

1. there is nothing special about my settings that would explain why it decided to randomly drop the UDP game-state traffic
2. if it is doing this to me as part the default windows 10/11 firewall behavior despite the created exceptions, there is nothing that would prevent it from doing the exact same thing to other people.

So I wanted to bump this old post and update it for anyone who is having server or sync issues.

There is a very good chance that this may be exactly what is happening for you: the windows firewall is flagging some (but not all) of the UDP packets from the game-server to drop

if that is the case, opening the game-server UDP ports as an inbound exception in windows firewall may be able to help considerably with these issues

to clarify: from what I have seen, the game servers use the following UDP ports to communicate UDP game-state data (things like client actions, enemy positions, etc. that are very time sensitive)

35510
35520
35530
35540
35550
35560
35570
35580
35590
35600
35610
35620
35630
35640
35650

Your client makes outbound connections in the dynamic UDP range to the server and it will connect to one of these (probably based on which server box out of the cluster your connection is for)

the fastest way to open these would be to allow a remote inbound exception on your local firewall for

• UDP as protocol
  
• any port as the local port
  
• ports 35510-35650 as the remote ports

the safer way (creates less holes) is to add

• UDP as protocol
  
• local ports as 49152-65535 (the dynamic range),
  
  the remote port listing each individual port in the sequence of
  
  
• 35510, 35520, 35530, 35540, 35550, 35560, 35570, 35580, 35590, 35600, 35610, 35620, 35630, 35640, 35650

to open these ports on your router is a little bit outside what I can explain since every model/manufacturer is going to have a different frontend or webUI and you must be using static IP addressing or have your device configured to always be assigned the same address by your router's DHCP server

if you know how to forward ports and already have this set up, just add all of these ports in the range (it is simpler) forwarded to your local ip address

as an aside

I have no idea why they implemented such an obnoxious socket sequence that increments every 10th port.

It made sense when it was limited to 5 ports since no other game uses these ports (that I know of), but when expanded to >10 ports it becomes a pain to open each port in sequence; It seems likely they plan to continue expanding in this space, so this will only get worse.

[Gabriel0101]

Wow - no even 1 freaz or disconnect on lte connection. Before I got a lot of
stuttering every time mobs was spawn on a map and I thought it is a problem with VRAM/RAM

I use:

Steam Client
UDP remote port 27000-27100: (Game traffic)
TCP remote port 27015-27050: (steam server connection)

and for DT

UDP as protocol
local ports as 49152-65535 (the dynamic range),

the remote port listing each individual port in the sequence of

35510, 35520, 35530, 35540, 35550, 35560, 35570, 35580, 35590, 35600, 35610, 35620, 35630, 35640, 35650

@DLCI Well done!!!

Edit I will do more testing and come back

Unfortunately on weekends is still bad (