Sporadic red lobby ping for the past month

[Internet Cat]

Ever since mid-July 2020, I've noticed my ping in most (but not all) lobbies in OpenRA will be red the majority of the time in the lobby - sometimes it will switch to green for a few moments then back to red. Other people have noticed the same thing lately and they'll back me up in the lobby chat to persuade the host not to kick me for having a red ping - and vice-versa. I stress there are never any lag issues in-game, however!

This happens with OpenRA servers that are in the same country or geographical area as me (North America), as well as in Europe.

I'd like to pin down the red ping indicators - I assume it's due to packet-loss rather than actual high ping times - but there's a lack of immediately visible documentation in the OpenRA community about how the lobby ping test system works.

Has anyone else noticed the same thing lately?

[lawANDorder]

The code indicates a red ping means that you have had over the last 25 seconds an average connection latency of over 600ms.

Here are some code bits and what I think they do(might be wrong and incomplete)

server send ping: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/2 ... ger.cs#L33

client receive ping/send pong: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/0 ... rs.cs#L330

server receive pong: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/3 ... er.cs#L717

latency indicator: https://github.com/OpenRA/OpenRA/blob/1 ... ls.cs#L284

There's also LatencyJitter but that seems only set but not used anywhere. If you can play without problems then this sounds like a good sign that something is not working as assumed, because >600ms latency should be noticeable (no?). Hope this helps, but beware of the black magic networking code is, it drives people crazy.