Multiplayer matches

Jekky · Post by **Jekky** » Tue Jul 14, 2009 7:08 pm

To help get things moving along with the new multiplayer lobby, both myself and cerbykins (the developers of conquest) will be available this friday at 1pm(UK time) if anyone is interested in a game - If you can't make it then don't worry too much, we'll schedule more of these matches soon.

Jekky · Post by **Jekky** » Fri Jul 17, 2009 12:19 pm

It seems that there might be some confusion regarding the lobby and how to get it to work.. so i'll address it in this post.

If you are experiencing the following problems, then the information in this post might help you:

*You can login to the lobby, but other players usernames appear as IP addresses
*You do not see any chat messages appear other than your own
*You cannot see any hosted games (bear in mind that there might really not be any - this on it's own is not enough to be sure you have a problem with the port)
*You host a game but no-one can join it (again, this may not be enough on it's own to be sure of the problem)

In order to get the lobby to work, you -must- have port 2301 (UDP) open for traffic.

If you have a firewall, you will have to tell your firewall to allow traffic on this port (see your firewall documentation for specific details on this).

If you are behind a router, then you will also have to tell your router to forward the port to the computer you intend to use to play Conquest - again, this will vary by router and you will have to refer to your specific documentation.

If you want to host games, you will also need to have port 2300 (TCP) open and forwarded - if you do not intend to host games then you do not have to do this.

If you are unsure what to do, or if you can't find your documentation, this website might be able to help: http://portforward.com/

If there are any questions about this, please don't hesitate to ask and we will do what we can to help you out.

honestabe · Post by **honestabe** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 7:13 pm

Jekky wrote:It seems that there might be some confusion regarding the lobby and how to get it to work.. so i'll address it in this post.

If you are experiencing the following problems, then the information in this post might help you:

*You can login to the lobby, but other players usernames appear as IP addresses
*You do not see any chat messages appear other than your own
*You cannot see any hosted games (bear in mind that there might really not be any - this on it's own is not enough to be sure you have a problem with the port)
*You host a game but no-one can join it (again, this may not be enough on it's own to be sure of the problem)

In order to get the lobby to work, you -must- have port 2301 (UDP) open for traffic.

If you have a firewall, you will have to tell your firewall to allow traffic on this port (see your firewall documentation for specific details on this).

If you are behind a router, then you will also have to tell your router to forward the port to the computer you intend to use to play Conquest - again, this will vary by router and you will have to refer to your specific documentation.

If you want to host games, you will also need to have port 2300 (TCP) open and forwarded - if you do not intend to host games then you do not have to do this.

If you are unsure what to do, or if you can't find your documentation, this website might be able to help: http://portforward.com/

If there are any questions about this, please don't hesitate to ask and we will do what we can to help you out.

This is bad very bad indeed. We as gamers don't want to have to deal with opening closing forward this and that with ports and things we know absolutely nothing about. We want to click and go and play. We shouldn't have to jump through hoops to be able to play a game online. Even Gamespy isn't that demanding.

Post by **pipfromslitherine** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 9:10 pm

Sadly there isn't a solid way for us as developers to deal with firewalls in a nice way. NAT firewalls are so common these days that we are continuing to work on a better solution, but there isn't one which works all the time on every firewall. This is for a number of reasons, ranging from bad firewall protocol implementations to user setups. There are people (although frankly I am not one of them) who think that firewalls should in fact demand you manually open any ports which applications want to use - hence the lack of a solid approach for doing so. Even games as massive as WoW are still forced to have support pages explaining how to open firewall ports.

Larger developers have teams specifically to work on this issue - as a smaller independent developer we don't have those resources, and even more so for Illustrious. Work is ongoing to try and build a more robust solution for all our projects, but it's not a trivial task.

If anyone is having problems configuring their firewall then feel free to post and we will try and help out as much as we can.

Cheers

Pip

Jekky · Post by **Jekky** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 2:56 pm

We're going to be hosting another multiplayer session - July 28th (Tuesday). This time we're going to try an evening session - 10pm.

Everyone is welcome to come and challenge the developers

If you would like us to set up one of these sessions at a particular time, let us know and we'll try to accommodate you.

Please read the stuff posted above regarding ports, it will save everyone a lot of pain.

As regards ports and forwarding - yes there are ways to avoid it for the lobby - but they are not simple, not guaranteed to work, and require a central server to mediate the connections. Even then, there is no way to avoid the fact that a person who wants to host a game still has to forward at least one port to be able to do so.