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..