Battlezone 1

Hi,
I'm using the BattleZone1.5b installer and everything apart from multiplayer works fantastically well.

My setup consists of my desktop pc running Win7 Home (64bit) and an O2 Wireless II router.

During a bit of experimentation, I connected my laptop and created a LAN game with no issues.It was only later, after introduncing my nephew to the game that my problems began when trying to play over the internet.

After reading various posts, I followed the instructions regarding forwarding ports 21000-22000 on both UDP and TCP and setting a static IP address which I managed to do relatively easily.I have no firewall software running and disabled Windows firewall.I read further literature online about accessing the routers superuser account and totally deactivating the routers own firewall which I can confirm has now been successfully done.

However, having done all of this, I'm still unable to actually join anyones game or host my own, even though I am visible to other players in the "Players in room" section of the screen.

If I create a room, it is visible to others.If someone else creates a room, I can see it.If someone creates a game, this becomes visible to me in the "Games" section of the screen, but the "Players in game" box remains empty.

If I select to join someones game (even a passworded game), I can get to the next screen, but no players names are showing and the chat box fills with dots and times out eventually saying I'm unable to join.

On the odd (very) rare occasion, a ping number has shown for the player(s) in the room (I'm aware that you need to wait for this to show), however even when this happens I haven't managed to join a game.

More often than not, all other players in the room show 100% loss.

Any ideas whats going on here? Any help greatly appreciated.




P.s Bought this game when it was first released back in the good old days.Loved it then and replaying it again brought back so many great memories.

As I told your nephew, you are connecting with different ports than 21-22k, so forwarding those won't help. As stated in the main Port Forwarding topic, you have to discover which ports you get assigned by your router, then forward those too. I saw you at 40k, 50k-something, but next time it might be something else (you get new port after each server rejoin). The best thing is to set DMZ, that will set all ports free.

Thanks for the reply.

First off, it seems with this particular router, DMZ is not possible.

And regarding your previous reply (and bearing in mind that my knowledge of networking etc. is limited at best), how do I go about finding which ports I'm being assigned by the router?

Maybe it is just named differently? On my router DMZ = Exposed Host.

There are many 3rd party programs that can read ports... You tried suggested WireShark but you don't know how to use it? If so, I'll write some step-by-step instructions later, when I'll be on my other comp.

Well I've searched Google and it seems that DMZ is a bit of a grey area on this router.Unless I've missed something obvious, there doesn't seem to be anything resembling a DMZ setup within the router itself and no straight answers on Google so it's not looking too positive in that respect.

I have heard of Wireshark but never used it, though as I say, I've never had the need to tinker too much with router/network settings so this is all a bit new to me at the moment.

I'm determined to get to the bottom of this (and learn a few tricks along the way hopefully) so really appreciate you taking time to help.

Install WireShark.
Go in "Options" and under "Interface" select your Network Adapter. Also uncheck "Capture packets in promiscuous mode".
Press "Start".
Under "Filter" type "UDP" and press "Apply".
After a few seconds press "Stop". 21175 is always the Server's port, while other port in the same line (assigned to IP something like 192.168.1.250) is current yours.

Ok, I got WireShark installed.

Can you just confirm that when you say "the server port", you mean the Battlezone server (in other words run the game and goto the multiplayer screen/options) ? And you state the port number is 21175 for this.Did this mean to be 21157?

Yes, 21157 is BZ server's port, my bad.

So having installed WireShark, and run it while in the Battlezone multiplayer lobby, what EXACTLY am I looking for in the data that shows up after doing the "capture" ?

After having a scroll through the data, I can see "destination" references to port 21157 (the BZ server?) and the "source port" as 21145 which show as red writing on black background.

source: 192.168.1.* (your internal IP)
destination: 97.74.125.45 (server's IP)
protocol: UDP
info: Source port: 21165 (your current port) Destination port: 21157 (server's port)