Multiplayer after GameSpy - Lobby and NatNeg

[whiskee81]

I'm having issues at hosting a multiplayer game with 1 or 2 friends. Massively frustrating.

1. Both replaced the .exe and just to be on the safe side, I edited the batch file as requested.

2. We both created accounts at Zulan's and logged in to the multiplayer lobby, no problem there.

3. Before that, we both allowed a bunch of ports to open for win 10 and the router too. Port forwarding and exceptions, hope I did everything ok.

4. We have the gog.com version of BtS.

Trying to connect forever... time after time after time... Is there something I'm not getting here? CIV4 multiplayer has been a massive headache for me ever since the game was released.

[4298redo]

I really wanna play CIV IV BTS in multiplayer with more human players than four. I understand that pitboss is the option for that.

But I need help...


What do I need to do from scratch to acctually host a pitboss game and make other players see my game?

How do I host a pitboss game?
How do I know that others can see my game?
Does the computer have to run the game all the time 24/7?



Happy easter everyone!!!

/4298redo

[Ramkhamhaeng]

3. Before that, we both allowed a bunch of ports to open for win 10 and the router too. Port forwarding and exceptions, hope I did everything ok.

One error I can imagine:
The forwarding in the router does not send the traffic to the correct IP in your LAN.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

I really wanna play CIV IV BTS in multiplayer with more human players than four. I understand that pitboss is the option for that.

But I need help...


What do I need to do from scratch to acctually host a pitboss game and make other players see my game?

How do I host a pitboss game?
How do I know that others can see my game?
Does the computer have to run the game all the time 24/7?



Happy easter everyone!!!

/4298redo

Hello,

the answer depends on your requirements

How do I host a Pitboss game?

1. The fastest/minimal solution without any mod:

Download Civ4BeyondSword_PitBoss2014.exe and put it in the installation folder of Civ4:BTS
Start this executable and loop through the dialogs to create a new DirectIP game.
Give your users access to Port 2056 on this machine. (Depends on your network setup.)

• If you use the Steam version you had to select the branch with DirectIP support.
• You could also use the original pitboss binary, but then you will hit an annoying timeout during two dialogs. (Program requests Gamespy website, but gets no reply)

If you just want play a short game, this could be your choice.


2. The better solution with the improvements of the last years:

The normal Pitboss server had several flaws…
• Disconnecting users leads to permanent network traffic
• Restart of games only possible over dialog clicking marathon.
• Hosting difficult on Linux machine with headless setup.
• Old Civstats-Webinterface only show stats but not allow management of the game.
• ...

We developed a Mod, a server side environment, and the PBSpy-webinterface to solve this problems: https://github.com/YggdrasiI/PBStats/

As player the Mod 'PB Mods_v9' needs to be used (or an mod which includes it.)
As server host you had to setup a game in the 'PBs' folder. Copy it from
above repository. Then copy 'PBs/seed' to 'PBs/PB1', open a terminal and use startPitboss.py (preferred) or startPitboss.bat to start the server.
Some environment variables had to be set before it works, e.g in PBs/startPitbossEnv.py and PBs/PB1/CivilizationIV.ini  
More details are written in the PBStats Readme.

How do I know that others can see my game?

If you use the PBStats approach, PBSpy can be used to show the game status to others. Setup will be done in the configuration file 'PBs/PB1/pbSettings.json)

Does the computer have to run the game all the time 24/7?

The server needs to run 24/7. Or you develop a solution, which wake up it if an user wants join

[whiskee81]

3. Before that, we both allowed a bunch of ports to open for win 10 and the router too. Port forwarding and exceptions, hope I did everything ok.

One error I can imagine:
The forwarding in the router does not send the traffic to the correct IP in your LAN.

You'd be correct. The issue is that not many of us are pc tech -savy and probably can't configure their ports and firewalls correctly. Do I really need a steady IP, for example. My Huawei router is picky about IP-addresses, as first I used the 192.168.1.x to forward to and then the IP of this pc... which sometimes varies. I think I fucked that up. The only connection issue I had was with a friend who couldn't find the port forwarding option from his router settings. 

I hope with Steam none of us would have to configure anything at all. (?) I would simply send invitations and we all have the same version, no mods etc.

I have not played C4 with "strangers" for ages but would prolly have no problem playing on this magnificent server, which I'll get into later.

[Gudura]

Hello, if Zulan or Ramkhamhaeng could help, I would much appreciate it.

As Steam doesn't allow more than 4 players, the six of us have installed the GOG version and changed the hosts file. Only two of us, who are on the same router, managed to enter the game. We are all able to reach the lobby. After that, a couple of us manually entered our IPs and enabled port forwarding - all the ports I found for Civ online + 2056-2107 that Zulan mentioned in the first post. Still we couldn't connect. We also tried alternative exe files (before we did port forwarding). We also changed the disablecache value to "1".

After everything failed, I added inbound rules in firewall for those ports, and tried entering games that are open online. Still nothing. After more than six hours of trying, I ended up writing this message. If there is anything else to try, or you think I made an error on some step, please, do let me now.

[Gudura]

Update - Today I tried joining with the person on my router that I previously could've joined with, but now we couldn't. So we both reinstalled civ and now our connection works fine. After that I tried joining with a person on different router, and still it doesn't work.

[Ramkhamhaeng]

Wasting six hours sounds bad :-(

• I do not think that reinstalling the game really had an effect on the network setup in your environments.
Did you respect the fact that "B can join into A's game" is not equals to "A can join into B's game"?
=> If you was able to join with 'B' in your local game, but later 'C' can't join, then it will be your PC who needs a proper setup.

• You wrote that two players shared the same LAN. Have you thought about the fact that you cannot use the same ports at the same time?
In your LAN, this will be no problem, but not if an external player will join…

So, one of you needs to edit the CivilizationIV.ini (normally placed in [My Documents]\My Games\Beyond the Sword) and change the 'Port' value from 2056 to an other value, p.e. 3056.
Then, the port forwarding rules also need to be adapted.


• If players of your group had no IPv4-connection, it's getting complicated. Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LogMeIn_Hamachi could help you in this case, but I've never try it myself.

[Gudura]

Wasting six hours sounds bad :-(

First of all, thanks for the reply!

• I do not think that reinstalling the game really had an effect on the network setup in your environments.
Did you respect the fact that "B can join into A's game" is not equals to "A can join into B's game"?
=> If you was able to join with 'B' in your local game, but later 'C' can't join, then it will be your PC who needs a proper setup.

We tried vice-versa joining and there was nothing odd (the two of us on the same router could both join each others' games while no one else could join anyone else's), so this probably wasn't an issue.

• You wrote that two players shared the same LAN. Have you thought about the fact that you cannot use the same ports at the same time?
In your LAN, this will be no problem, but not if an external player will join…

So, one of you needs to edit the CivilizationIV.ini (normally placed in  [My Documents]\My Games\Beyond the Sword) and change the 'Port' value from 2056 to an other value, p.e. 3056.
Then, the port forwarding rules also need to be adapted.

I haven't thought about this, thanks! Should I do this for all dozen ports that I found for Civ - or only for 2056? In that case I just add 3056 for that IP in the router settings, and of course the .ini file?

• If players of your group had no IPv4-connection, it's getting complicated. Maybe https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LogMeIn_Hamachi could help you in this case, but I've never try it myself.

Hamachi is quite buggish from my experience.

[Gudura]

Thank you very much, it all works now! There was one more thing we had to do, perhaps it's specific for our country, I don't know, but in case someone else encounters the same problems: it wasn't enough to just forward the ports on our router settings, we had to call our internet service provider to enable our public IP (or something like that) for port forwarding.