Author Topic: Multiplayer? Of any kind?  (Read 8181 times)

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Offline Hufer

  • 21
Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Hey all, I'm a little new to Hard Light but seeing as Starshattermods is down for good I thought I'd pop the big question for my group of friends and I.

Is multiplayer in this game possible? Before you say the servers are down and have been down for a while; does LAN play still work? There are many programs (such as Hamachi and Tunngle) that can create virtual LAN servers to get players in the same game.

I've tried using the -lan command while starting the game but so far have had no luck getting my buddies to see my game. Can anyone tell me if this is impossible, needs more work, or already exists and I'm just not doing it the right way. If LAN play still works I'm almost sure there should be a way to get Tunngle or Hamachi to work and set up games for anyone connected to them. I love this game and would love to play it with friends for once.

Thanks in advance.

 

Offline Thaeris

  • Can take his lumps
  • 211
  • Away in Limbo
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
I'm not sure how much of the old downloads remained for older versions of the software. BUT, the current builds of Starshatter do not support multiplayer due to... was it linking to a Matrix Games server? There is something on that order for why multi doesn't work. On the upper hand, current builds do not need a serial input to run. But you're right, this is a real bug, and it's probably the most important one to fix in the near future.

If you can find an older build (before the current Open release), that should be able to do multi.
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"Look on the bright side, how many release dates have been given for Doomsday, and it still isn't out yet.

It's the Duke Nukem Forever of prophecies..."


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Everyone else takes normal damage.
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Offline The E

  • He's Ebeneezer Goode
  • 213
  • Nothing personal, just tech support.
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Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Current builds rely on some external server to do matchmaking. Since we don't have the source for that server (at least I don't think we do), multi has been disabled for now. I shall take a look at pure LAN games when I'm back home.
If I'm just aching this can't go on
I came from chasing dreams to feel alone
There must be changes, miss to feel strong
I really need lifе to touch me
--Evergrey, Where August Mourns

 

Offline Colonol Dekker

  • HLP is my mistress
  • 213
  • Aken Tigh Dekker- you've probably heard me
    • My old squad sub-domain
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Multi's down?

Aww boooh :C


Also
:welcome:

Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
GO GO DEKKER RANGERSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
President of the Scooby Doo Model Appreciation Society
The only good Zod is a dead Zod
NEWGROUNDS COMEDY GOLD, UPDATED DAILY
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Offline Hufer

  • 21
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
So if I find a copy of the game before the open source release I could do LAN games using the -lan command?

And it says in the manual that using -lan kicks off the Internet Broker.

Regardless, out of curiosity what version would I need/how would I tell I have the right version that still has multiplayer working.

Thanks for the help, by the way.

 

Offline Robsoie

  • 23
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
If i go to Multiplayer i see a button to create a Local Server , and then from the screen that follow i can set the "Type" to LAN.

After that, i just tried the "Hawk Match" mission that put me to fight in deathmatch with some AI (that would be replaced by players i guess if there were other people joining)

While i don't have a true LAN, in the past i have used programs like Hamachi and more recently Tunngle (as Hamachi has limited the amount of people for their free version that can play together)  to play privately with some friends.

So is multiplayer -completely- disabled in the actual open source release, or as i imaging LAN game has nothing to do with contacting some matrixgame server, is it still possible to play with Hamachi/Tunngle/whateverVPN with Starshatter "LAN" setting ?

 

Offline Treelor

  • 24
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
I can confirm multiplayer is 100% inoperative as of the open source release.
hi

 

Offline Robsoie

  • 23
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Thank you for the reply, hopefully the LAN part will be activated again sometime in the future so people will be able to use a VPN to battle around .

 

Offline Vas709

  • 22
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
You can try using pLan server, and see if it's working. And then please let me know. http://explainationhowto.blogspot.com/

 

Offline Parias

  • 27
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Going to throw down my own hope that multiplayer gets fixed up at some point in the future as well.

Actually, what I've always really wanted out of this game (ever since the first early builds of Starshatter came out, long long ago) was a full-blown dynamic co-op campaign; one where I could hook up with a buddy with one of us taking control of the carrier group and managing high-level orders and logistics, while the other led the fighter wings and handled actual implementation. This would've been absolutely bad-ass, but I don't think the original game's multiplayer really supported this.

It'd probably be a pain and a half to implement, but I'd love to see this occur some day.

 
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Sorry for the thread necromancy, but it's possible that a limited, perhaps buggy form of multi is possible. See this thread: http://starshattermods.net/forum/viewthread.php?thread_id=148

Basically, running the game with the -server command switch appears to allow multi to work.

I have not tested it myself, but there it is if there are at least two people who want to try it out on their own. Read the thread I linked to thoroughly, though.

 

Offline Cyberkada

  • Moderator
  • 24
    • http://b5sc.com
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
a SQL database for player/ ships stats instead of the current .def files? 
Babylon 5: Starship Commander

 

Offline Echelon9

  • 210
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Thinking about alternative formats, a simple human readable format with plenty of validation tools (e.g. JSON) could be useful.

We're considering JSON support for the FS2Open player formats at the moment with success.

  

Offline Colonol Dekker

  • HLP is my mistress
  • 213
  • Aken Tigh Dekker- you've probably heard me
    • My old squad sub-domain
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Press X to JSON?

So what multi functionality is in place at the moment?
Campaigns I've added my distinctiveness to-
- Blue Planet: Battle Captains
-Battle of Neptune
-Between the Ashes 2
-Blue planet: Age of Aquarius
-FOTG?
-Inferno R1
-Ribos: The aftermath / -Retreat from Deneb
-Sol: A History
-TBP EACW teaser
-Earth Brakiri war
-TBP Fortune Hunters (I think?)
-TBP Relic
-Trancsend (Possibly?)
-Uncharted Territory
-Vassagos Dirge
-War Machine
(Others lost to the mists of time and no discernible audit trail)

Your friendly Orestes tactical controller.

Secret bomb God.
That one time I got permabanned and got to read who was being bitxhy about me :p....
GO GO DEKKER RANGERSSSS!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
President of the Scooby Doo Model Appreciation Society
The only good Zod is a dead Zod
NEWGROUNDS COMEDY GOLD, UPDATED DAILY
http://badges.steamprofile.com/profile/default/steam/76561198011784807.png

 

Offline Cyberkada

  • Moderator
  • 24
    • http://b5sc.com
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Photon Hosting? there is a C++ plugin for that.
Babylon 5: Starship Commander

 

Offline hostas

  • 22
Re: Multiplayer? Of any kind?
Hi!

I have managed to play a pure LAN game with Starshatter 5.1.66 (under win7 x64), though there was some obstacles to solve, so i will share some guidance on it. To put it in short there were 2 things to do:

- add the line "192.168.1.100 fake.dom" to the host file of the clients ("C:\Windows\System32\drivers\etc\host", google it up how to find, open and edit...), where that IP belongs to the LAN server
- create a new pilot for the multi


At firs i couldn't connect to the server with direct IP (192.168.1.100:11100 - status offline). After inspections with a packet capture program, it turned out to be that the game tries to resolve a LOCAL! IP address by querying the IPS DNS server, which is just plane wrong and it's a full stop from here. I have downloaded the source code and found the culprit in the NetHost.cpp file. It must be the "gethostbyaddr" function (I have downloaded and compiled the demo code from msdn https://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/windows/desktop/ms738521(v=vs.85).aspx and tested it for the same behaviour). This might be corrected in that cpp file by removing the if-else structure around that function and leaving only the gethostbyname function from the else branch (resolves booth IP and host name), however such a modification and the recomplie is beyond my knowledge and without the proper binary it won't be a help for others. So here is the different approach: add a line to the host file pointing the IP to some fake dummy domain name. That way Windows will simply resolve it from it's internal in-memory DNS cache, so that problematic DNS server response is now completly bypassed. And it worked, server online, ping 65ms, greate! Lets join to that host...

Bamm, next problem: lobby is completly empty, can't move on with the game. Thats why I had to create a new pilot as well. I have just copied the game directory from one PC to the other with exact same pilot settings so they probably conflicted during some authorisation, resulting with an empty, stucked lobby screen.

Too bad, but the carrier crash is comfirmed here as well Sad

I wonder if i could compile and debug such a huge project and try to solve some bugs. I don't do programing for a living, but I'm familiar with Visual Studio and have some basic C++ knowledge as well and maybe some freetime and passion too, but its hard to sort out all the initial linker/compiler errors, multiple projects, etc..