Shared Nightmares

[fred]

Well, the conclusion to several days of messing around with connection sharing and Games servers, is “don’t even go there!”. In short, games were not supposed to be run on shared connections and setting them up is a nightmare – and will not work 100% no matter what you do.
The main problem is that the rest of the world has trouble seeing which machine the game is running on. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. The best way to try and sort the problem is to assign unique ports to each copy of the game on your machines and then using static IP’s ‘forward’ the ports to the specified static IP’s in the Shared connection setup. In the case of a Linksys Router, this has a page specifically for the job. Quake Arena also has a special command to setup the port:
"C:\Program Files\Quake III Arena\quake3.exe" +set net_port 27661
This will get you on the NET and also make sure that each of your machines can access the other. The one strange thing about this is that all your local machines vanish from the local list and appear in the internet list instead. This seems to be a Quake Quirk though, because the router certainly seems to know what is going on.
BUT, and this is a big BUT! That’s not the end of it. Although you are now connected to the NET as a server, I have read plenty of complaints that the connection is not very stable. Sometimes it seems okay, other times, it’s not.
So I repeat my initial statement! ‘Don’t even go there’. It’s complicated and it don’t work very well either. Fact is that if you want to setup a server, don’t do it on the cheap - buy a dedicated connection, not a Linksys router*! There are far too many good servers out there without a pile of cheap ones too.

* By the way, I am using the Linksys as an example, but you get similar problems with all shared connections.

[Orcmonkey]

Well for half life at least, If you want to play on the server from the lan, don't go into the local, just type the LAN ip into internet games. There is a command you put into server.cfg that makes it lan only, and takes off the WON identification part of the server. It's not the ports which makes it tricky, for me it was the fact that the server IP would change every few days, and thats just a snag in the service I am paying for. It is quite possible to have a successful server while sharing bandwith, although it is challanging at first.

[fred]

Hi Orcmonkey,

I don't have the problem with the IP because although mine is re-allocated every four hours, I am the only subscriber in my block, so I always get the same number!

I believe that games other than Quake may be more stable, but as far as I know, there is no stable solution for Quake. Although I did set the server up, and it worked fine, there are lots of reports out there that indicate that the Quake servers on shared connections are not stable. They often kick the clients out half way through a game and so on. The problem is that it is extremely difficult to tell how stable the connection is, since the instability does not affect anyone on the local network. At that point I wondered if it was all worthwhile. And I must admit, I felt the answer was no! Unless you have a suitable web site to get feedback from your clients, you have no way of telling how good the server is. To my mind it is easier to pay for a dedicated connection. I guess what I wanted to do here though is warn off thinking that using a shared connection is the simple approach. Certainly for Quake, it isn't at all simple.