Pitboss 18 IT and Tech Issues Thread

[spacetyrantxenu]

Played and rolled turn, sorry for the delay.

[Caledorn]

I just gave my gaming PC a dedicated IP address inside my lan network. I have set up port forwarding for 2056-2065 to that IP address. It seems like I should also forward some other ports (as per Cale above) as well as editing my civ.ini file (snip below). Anything else?

Code:

; NetComm Port
Port = 2056

Try setting that Port = 2070. And then people can start modifying their .ini files progressively upwards (2071 for the next one, 2072 for the next after that, and so forth). Anyone modifying their ini file should post here what port they used to ensure we don't get any duplicates. And maybe just open ports 2056-2099 or some such, to ensure everything is open, for those who can actually open port ranges. If it doesn't work those who have opened a port range can just narrow it down later on.

[NobleHelium]

If you're actually going to try this one person per port idea you should develop a hashing scheme, where you can hash something unique to you, such as your username, into a port number. Keep in mind that players play more than one game, so just because there's nobody else using 2071 in this game doesn't mean someone hasn't taken that port for another game. Then you join a third game with that person and you have issues. It would be tedious to keep changing the port number for different games.

Off the top of my head, I would say that you should take the last three digits your forum user ID and add that to say 22000. You can obtain your user ID by going to your profile (click your name at the top left where it says Welcome), and looking at the URL. The uid parameter is your user ID. Mine is 2881. The last two digits are 881, so adding that to 22000 gets me a port number of 22881. Collisions are still possible of course, Gaspar's uid might be 1881 and we would collide in that case. But given that you're opening ports here I don't think you want to open too many, and a port range of 1000 gives a good balance of collision probability versus number of ports open. I picked 22000 as the base port arbitrarily (it starts with 2 like 2056 does), but it's generally better to use larger port numbers (>10k) which have much lower probability of collision with other applications. I did a quick check and there's nothing significant on the 22000 range.

So in this scenario everyone would open port 2056 and then ports 22000 through 22999.

[Cheater Hater]

Before we start opening up a million ports, have we checked that this actually works?

[Caledorn]

Before we start opening up a million ports, have we checked that this actually works?

No, so go ahead and feel free to test, guys! I'm in bed now, but if a few of you team up to test, my router is configured to forward ports 2056 to 2065 to the server. The ports from 2061 to 2065 are not in use by any Pitboss, so those four ports are up for grabs for testing purposes

Edit: And should this prove to work, NobleHelium's suggestion is excellent, and I fully endorse it.

[NobleHelium]

Now that I think about it some more, I think the suggestion is overzealous actually. You'd probably just pick a new port number unused in both games in the sequential case and be done with it. Probably easier that way. I do recommend using a higher range of port numbers regardless though.

[retep]

Off the top of my head, I would say that you should take the last three digits your forum user ID and add that to say 22000. You can obtain your user ID by going to your profile (click your name at the top left where it says Welcome), and looking at the URL. The uid parameter is your user ID. Mine is 2881. The last two digits are 881, so adding that to 22000 gets me a port number of 22881. Collisions are still possible of course, Gaspar's uid might be 1881 and we would collide in that case. But given that you're opening ports here I don't think you want to open too many, and a port range of 1000 gives a good balance of collision probability versus number of ports open. I picked 22000 as the base port arbitrarily (it starts with 2 like 2056 does), but it's generally better to use larger port numbers (>10k) which have much lower probability of collision with other applications. I did a quick check and there's nothing significant on the 22000 range.

So in this scenario everyone would open port 2056 and then ports 22000 through 22999.

No. The last two digits are 81.

[Ruff_Hi]

Why not use the feature of specifying a civ4.ini file in a short cut. Then you can have your game specific port in the game specific ini file.

"C:\Program Files\...\Civ4BeyondSword.exe" ini=CivIV-pb18.ini

[spacetyrantxenu]

Now that I think about it some more, I think the suggestion is overzealous actually. You'd probably just pick a new port number unused in both games in the sequential case and be done with it. Probably easier that way. I do recommend using a higher range of port numbers regardless though.

I would keep the number of open ports down to the minimum necessary. 1000 is definitely too many.

[NobleHelium]

Higher range as in higher numbers, not necessarily more of them open.