[Hufer]

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.

[Thaeris]

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.

[The E]

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.

[Colonol Dekker]

Multi's down?

Aww boooh :C


Also

[Hufer]

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.

[Robsoie]

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 ?

[Treelor]

I can confirm multiplayer is 100% inoperative as of the open source release.

[Robsoie]

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 .

[Vas709]

You can try using pLan server, and see if it's working. And then please let me know. http://explainationhowto.blogspot.com/

[Parias]

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.

[doctorfrog]

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.

[Cyberkada]

a SQL database for player/ ships stats instead of the current .def files? 

[Echelon9]

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.

[Colonol Dekker]

Press X to JSON?

So what multi functionality is in place at the moment?

[Cyberkada]

Photon Hosting? there is a C++ plugin for that.

[hostas]

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..