Xlink : KAI 8 Discussion

Kai Lover Joined: 17 Apr 2005 Posts: 516

damn! the features are very promising..

A built in XIG? will it work on every xbox?

Kai Lover Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 528

SS-Funk @ Thu Jan 01, 1970 12:00 am wrote:

Wow, all of that and a bag of chips. My only question is, will it order some pizza for me too? Not sure I can drop the controller long enough to order it on my own when 8 is out Very Happy

My cell phone has voice activation and Ive got the best pizza joint in town on speed dial Wink

The real question is who is going to make the first recliner/fridge/crapper? That is the next project tx should be looking in to Cool

Team XLink Moderator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 1536

Quote:

- so let's apply em to the next generation of console tunneling. We'll start with Evo VII. Then let's add an engine which doesn't care about your network connection - it works completely, even behind hardened LAN's where even Live! fails.

w00t

Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 4:59 pm

hmm.. I was always wondering if it was possible to "mod" the way an Xbox signed into Live... like.. instead fo it contacting Microsofts servers.. Contact the main XLink server... which woudl allow users to use "LIVE" but its with XLink users... I'm sure thats pretty illegal.. but I'm sure it can be done... The post says "All multiplayer game play" so maybe they already did it. But if not.. that woudl be cool if it coudl happen.. I'm sure TD has something tricky in his hat once the final step comes around.

Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 5:14 pm

[_Dp_]~Jonny~ @ Thu Jan 01, 1970 10:00 am wrote:

hmm.. I was always wondering if it was possible to "mod" the way an Xbox signed into Live... like.. instead fo it contacting Microsofts servers.. Contact the main XLink server... which woudl allow users to use "LIVE" but its with XLink users... I'm sure thats pretty illegal.. but I'm sure it can be done... The post says "All multiplayer game play" so maybe they already did it. But if not.. that woudl be cool if it coudl happen.. I'm sure TD has something tricky in his hat once the final step comes around.

Once again, we do this, and the only thing you'll be playing on is XBox Live (or XBC).

"I'm sure thats pretty illegal.. but I'm sure it can be done"

This is Microsoft you're talking about here. M I C R O S O F T. There would be enough lawyers in front of Andy's house that we'd make CNN Very Happy

Team XLink Administrator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 3354

Yeah and we like Andy, so we would rather not do that to him if possible Very Happy

Team XLink Moderator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 1536

dfunked @ Thu Jan 01, 1970 12:00 am wrote:

There would be enough lawyers in front of Andy's house that we'd make CNN Very Happy

we can make history...go out with a BANG Razz

if Andy chooes to.. as

theres always "back doors"... in Matrix film the Key Maker saying "There's always a way".... when they go to the back doors to open the doors with the bright lights. Andy is Neo... and all the Smith are all M$ agent. just don't trigger the bombs... then Andy will meet the Architect in the white suit (Bill Gate) the option here is CHOICE Wink

Hello Andy....

follow the white rabbit.

Posted: Sun May 15, 2005 7:41 pm

[_Dp_]~Jonny~ @ Thu Jan 01, 1970 1:00 am wrote:

hmm.. I was always wondering if it was possible to "mod" the way an Xbox signed into Live... like.. instead fo it contacting Microsofts servers.. Contact the main XLink server... which woudl allow users to use "LIVE" but its with XLink users... I'm sure thats pretty illegal.. but I'm sure it can be done... The post says "All multiplayer game play" so maybe they already did it. But if not.. that woudl be cool if it coudl happen.. I'm sure TD has something tricky in his hat once the final step comes around.

Just give me a call when you broke the encryption and I'll provide you with dutch beer (as seen on the popular tv show the Simpsons!) for the rest of the year!

Team XLink Administrator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 3354

redwolf @ wrote:

dfunked @ Thu Jan 01, 1970 12:00 am wrote:

There would be enough lawyers in front of Andy's house that we'd make CNN Very Happy

we can make history...go out with a BANG Razz

if Andy chooes to.. as

theres always "back doors"... in Matrix film the Key Maker saying "There's always a way".... when they go to the back doors to open the doors with the bright lights. Andy is Neo... and all the Smith are all M$ agent. just don't trigger the bombs... then Andy will meet the Architect in the white suit (Bill Gate) the option here is CHOICE Wink

Hello Andy....

follow the white rabbit.

OMG, LMAO!

That was awesome and really got me thinking, but I still have to go with no. Leave the white rabbit alone and make your own matrix or even better "If you build it, they will come".

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 12:02 am

lol... ok ok... just a thought/dream. lol... or maybe even a thirdparty produced disc for xbox that works on all xboxs that will have the "official" xbox UI for Kai. That way everyone can use the Kai Station and also have more of a full featured feel. I remember hearing some things about 3rd party production back in the day when evo8 was first mentioned. Also..is there a way to legally make the Kai engine run ON the xbox... I know TD said that its possible to mod the kernel and make it work.. but yet again.. thats illegal and your trying to make this as clean as possible. Anyways.. jsut letting my mind flow with ideas i've had for a long time.. oh an another thing. I kow Dfunked said taht getting the Xbox 360 to work on kai wouldn't me that hard aslong as it had a system link thing, and that they would just have to figure out the codeing of the data or whatever. Does this mean that we will NEED a wireless router for the xbox 360 to go on Kai? whatever*off topic*. But also if you made a produced disc for Xbox360 taht also had a GUI on it for Kai that would be cool aswell.*dreams away* cya guys

Jonny

P.S.. You guys are amazing.. All the stuff I've mentioned to people about what Kai shoudl be like and all that crap.. even down to the XIG i was workgn on for my tourney site... what the duece... you guys scoop everything up. lol.

Kai Lover Joined: 20 Oct 2004 Posts: 638

Sounds good -

Few questions:
Voice fix on Halo 2?
DSA VS. Orbital Mesh - I got confused sorry not the smartest cheese in the grilled cheese.
XIG - So we will be able to make streaming videos as our avatars? Yikes. - So could I record a nice porno and make it my avatar?

Kai Admirer Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 324

Just want to ask soemthing...
I AM NOT TRYING TO SHOW OFF ANYTHING FOR XBC.
A legit question..

Quote:

XBC 5.1 has been released as a mandatory update. What's new in XBC? Well, this version of XBC is using the newly designed tunnel. This tunnel is the highest performing tunnel anywhere.

Since the beginning of tunnel software, there has been one inherit problem that has plagued them, overhead. All tunnels add overhead to every packet of data from the game console. Up until now, all tunnels added roughly 30 to 42 bytes of data to every packet of data coming from the console. XBC has changed this.

XBC 5.1's new tunnel only adds 1 (one) byte of overhead. Well, what does this mean? No matter how you slice it, you are going to experience less lag in your games, period. Don't believe it? Visit our download page and try it for yourself.

Now, can we expect the new Kai to have the same?

Kai Spammer Joined: 21 Jul 2004 Posts: 1168

[_Dp_]Princess @ wrote:

So could I record a nice o and make it my avatar?

I already can.............hehe.

Team XLink Administrator Joined: 21 May 2004 Posts: 4061

Just read the news on evo 8.

WoW!

It looks very,very nice!

I hope your weekend break in europe helps you out, TD and Xcondor!

I was looking to goto Amsterdam myself in june, but its now gonna be in late august..would of been nice to buy you guys a few beers and have a natter. Maybe nextime.

Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 0

There's loads of us going now duke .. you up for it mate?

TD

Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 0

Yeah Joe-E,

We had this working in the old Messenger style XLink days - it just involves rearranging the UDP packets src / dst IP addresses and ports, and pcap/pddsk/whatever'ign them out onto the WAN interface. It worked pretty good - but to be honest, data size is not the point - ping time and time-through-software is. Thats why the win32 kaiEngine gets the data straight from the capture to the internet in as fast a time as possible.

It could be argued that the new XBC approach could in theory allow people to host larger games. We've got that covered in 8 with the port spectrum stuff - you should see a big difference on full-compliment H2, R63, etc.

It's a nice approach XBC have taken though - dont get me wrong. Things are simpler for them though - it's basically all Halo - so they know they've got to get "lots of medium size UDP packets" optimised. Here, we need to account for UDP, TCP, ARP, etc. - so that approach doesnt really fit.

I guess if there's a demand for it, we can dig the old code out which we had for this and make it an option in 8 - but I doubt people will really notice the difference.

TD

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:24 am

TheDaddy @ Thu Jan 01, 1970 12:00 am wrote:

I guess if there's a demand for it, we can dig the old code out which we had for this and make it an option in 8 - but I doubt people will really notice the difference.

If it's easy to do, add it anyway.

Anyway, how much overhead does Xlink have anyway?

Evo VII, Evo VIII, and 'Competitiors product version 5.1' comparison chart anyone? Smile

.

Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 0

It's not especially easy - but we have it here already from before. We didn't go with it before for the reasons above, and because we were using winpcap back then - and it wasn't stable enough at injecting data onto WAN interfaces.

If we can get it completely stable, and in a state where it wont piss people off by bluescreening all the damn time, we'll put it in.

TD

Posted: Mon May 16, 2005 11:54 am

TheDaddy,

I've read on XBox-scene about an other tunnel client that should have even less lag than XboxConnect or Xlink.

Quote:

If you are interested in running your own xbox tunnel server, the game server (called gserver) of xmelee has been released. You can also get the source code for the end user xbox tunnel client to do your own mods.

The xmelee gserver is probably a great option if you are on a private lan like a university campus and need to run your own server. This will also allow you to play xbox system link games against people in other dorms since the packets are encoded as normal IP/UDP packets (most university campuses don't allow you playing xbox system link games on the internal network).

The xmelee gserver is also usefull for anyone looking to run their own xbconnect like gaming network. With the optional user interface source code, you can distribute your own client for your gaming network and server.

The xmelee packetization core is also less laggy than xbconnect/xlink kai.

initial@xmelee.com

I asked him how exactly it is faster :

Quote:

If you look at xbconnect for one, you can find yourself in situations where users are constantly trying to connect to your game, after you locked the door (because of the old information they have). Alot of this messaging is all TCP based. Communication with the game server as well happens in a TCP fashion, which can cause some retransmits, packet fragmentation and so forth.

From a pure game play experience, if you look at the packetization core. Xmelee always does packetization of mulitple packets within one UDP frame (you don't have to buy the version). the packet sizes are also kept small in order to avoid any fragmentation by any router or other network boxes the packet may encounter when it is transmited from the originator to the destination. It will also catch up with the contents in multiple packets if a hickup occurs on the users box or the network.

The original ethernet frames of the xbox along with the IP, UDP Header and CRC's are also stripped out and recreated at the far end. There is also a very small header 4 bytes used to prefix individual packets. PC's these days are much faster, and you might as well use the CPU to recompute the CRC and rebuild the packet then to send all this data over to the far end and consume extra bandwidths..

There are other minor things I've done as well..

initial@xmelee.com

What is your opinion on this? Does it work? Isn't it what Warp pipe used (compresion)?

Joined: 30 Jul 2006 Posts: 0

Quote:

If you look at xbconnect for one, you can find yourself in situations where users are constantly trying to connect to your game, after you locked the door (because of the old information they have). Alot of this messaging is all TCP based. Communication with the game server as well happens in a TCP fashion, which can cause some retransmits, packet fragmentation and so forth.

Heh.. both Kai and XBC have been doing this right for years. You dont get "people constantly trying to connect" - in either service - even in Kai's *public* arenas Smile

The talk about TCP fragmentation is childish - it uses like 8 bytes / sec Smile

Quote:

From a pure game play experience, if you look at the packetization core. Xmelee always does packetization of mulitple packets within one UDP frame (you don't have to buy the version). the packet sizes are also kept small in order to avoid any fragmentation by any router or other network boxes the packet may encounter when it is transmited from the originator to the destination. It will also catch up with the contents in multiple packets if a hickup occurs on the users box or the network.

Lumping packets together was in the old XLink Messenger - and is performed dynamically by the win32 kaiEngine right now. It "kinda" works but waiting for the next packet before you send the ones you have can impact latency. XBC also implemented it shortly after we did - same results really. MTU is observed by both tunnels, and doesnt cause any fragmentation whatsoever. Oh well Very Happy

Quote:

The original ethernet frames of the xbox along with the IP, UDP Header and CRC's are also stripped out and recreated at the far end. There is also a very small header 4 bytes used to prefix individual packets. PC's these days are much faster, and you might as well use the CPU to recompute the CRC and rebuild the packet then to send all this data over to the far end and consume extra bandwidths..

Every tunnel in history has always done this - it's obvious. The way Tod is setting XBC up now makes this approach look silly, to be blunt. We still have the code from when we tried it, and if the WAN injection is stable enough for people with USB modems or PCI modems, we'll put it back in.

I'm not knocking the guy - it's great to see another tunneler on the scene - but he needs to realise that a hell of a lot of work has gone into both XBC and Kai, and most everything we can do to get em fast has been done. 8's port spectrum will help big hosts by a fair amount, we know that, and if Tod's stuff seems stable, we'll reintegrate it into kaiEngine for 8. Apart from that, it's all maxed out.

As for the claim that it's faster than Kai and XBC, it's not. Kai is tuned up as good as it can be, and I assume XBC is pretty much the same. Besides - is it only me who's noticed that the system link games coming out now dont really care too much about ping? Since Halo1 and Brute Force, nothing has really needed < 80ms or whatever.

Back to the drawing board son Smile

TD