Wolfpack And Spanish American War multiplayer issues

[Daelkyr]

Hello, I have already submitted a ticket on this issue but in the meantime I’d like to see if anyone has any fixes for this issue.

I have been trying to do a live play session with an opponent in SMAW. He sets up the match and is waiting for me to connect. I plug in his IP address and the game freezes and becomes unresponsive a second or two later. The only option then is to close the program.

I then try to host the match myself. I pick the mission and when I try to start it, the exact same thing happens: it freezes and becomes unresponsive. I have tried both methods numerous times.

I have also forwarded ports just like it says on the FAQ and turned off all my security software including my firewall. Still no success.

The game works fine in single player. And I have played Squad Battles plenty with live play.

This seems to be some sort of software issue from what I can tell because it doesn’t show any indication to me that it’s network related. But im not certain since no error message is displayed during these freezes.

Does anyone have any tips for how to fix this? It would be appreciated.

Thank you

[rahamy]

Try using Hamachi - https://vpn.net/ - most likely the packets won't route on the web. With semi-recent changes in standards IP v4 addresses are almost impossible to get connected with now.

[Daelkyr]

Yeah I was going to give that a try today. Good idea to try out for sure.

However, you think this is a connection issue? I mean I can’t even begin to host a game before it crashes without my opponent even having time to try to connect.

Edit: and when my opponent tries to host, it gets to the normal screen we are all used to, where you’re simply waiting for your opponent to connect. With me, I don’t even get that far.

[John Roddy]

Your computer not initializing Direct Play Host is indeed strange, I presume that happens with both Wolfpack and Spanish American War?

I play various Naval Campaigns games most every week using a Himachi virtual LAN connection but remember getting all sorts of flaky issues when trying to connect before I discovered Himachi. My understanding of the problem is that the connection cannot be established through both your router and opponents router as those routers prevent your computer's IP address from being directly exposed to the Internet. A virtual LAN tunnels through your routers and resolves this issue.

Every once in a while one of my group of players will have trouble getting their Direct Play Host or Caller to initialize and sometimes restarting the Himachi virtual LAN fixes it but other times it takes restarting that computer to get it running

I suggest first setting up a Himachi virtual LAN and then seeing if the initialization problem goes away or not to assist in isolating the problem to your computer.

[Daelkyr]

Hello,

Thank you for your response. And yes it happens with both Wolfpack and Spanish American War.

Unfortunately, hamachi also doesn’t work. I tried it and attempted to connect using the local, ipv4 and ipv6.

I can ping my opponent directly using hamachi and he can do the same. It still freezes and crashes just like before. I also still can’t host a match because of said crashes.

So, I’m totally at a loss here as how to resolve this.

Edit: I tried hosting and joining again in Vienna 1683, and Soviet afghan war. Just to test it out. And everything works just fine. This seems like a software issue so far to me. Hopefully this can be fixed

[John Roddy]

Hmm, since Hamachi won't establish as connection, this doesn't sound like a WDS game engine issue. If you can get Hamachi running then I suspect that the Naval Campaigns will run. I am not skilled with Network issues but Hamachi should run so it seems that is the first issue to resolve.

[Daelkyr]

Sorry, I don’t think I explained that too well. What I meant was that hamachi does actually work. It does establish a connection between the two machines. We can both ping each others machines in ipv4 and ipv6 and in the local ip that hamachi provides. So our machines are able to communicate directly using hamachi. And it still crashes when I try to host or join a game.

All the other John tiller games work fine too. We tested a bunch of them to make sure. It’s specifically naval campaigns. Something about Wolfpack and SPAW just don’t mesh well with my PC or something and cause these freezes and crashes. Such a bizarre problem. But I’m sure the team can fix it since I’m totally lost at this point.

[John Roddy]

I've gotten some sort of message when running a Naval Campaign game the first time about do I want to allow this or that. I run Windows 7 without antivirus or firewall settings so I'm not quite sure what is generating that message. Did you have to allow anything on your first install of you other games that are working? Not having gotten a permission message might be some sort of clue. Way out of my depth here.

Only other thing I can think of is if you have a spare Network Identification Card to try running off it instead.

[Daelkyr]

Just so everyone knows. The issue is, seemingly, resolved.

What I have to do is when it freezes, is to simply let it stay frozen for about 1-2 minutes. While making sure not to click on anything. At this point windows will say that the program isn’t responding. And asks if I would like to close it or wait for it to respond.


I hit the option to wait for a response. And the game will immediately load up. I can join or host now.

Once I host, it will give me an error saying it can’t determine my external IP address and that I may not be able to play on multiplayer. This seems to effect nothing as far as I can tell. No hamachi is needed for this.

Thank you everyone for the help.

[John Roddy]

I get a white frozen screen every once in a while when initializing and have seen it take up to one minute or so to unfreeze and then run just fine. I have never been able to identify whether the latency has something to do with the Himachi itself or the overall Internet connection speed. I have also gotten the unable to determine the external IP address message but it has always run correctly anyway.