How can I play with my friend

[Roxcuttle]

It's been 2 years since I last played this game. My Hamachi has relayed tunnel (blue dot on my friend) and the ping is annoying between me and him. I wish I had green tunnel or whatever it's called, so we could actually play together comfortably but no :(.

Are there any solutions, looking for the easy ones but I can handle harder too. Is Tunnggle or Tunggle, is it trustable? Port Forwarding? Hamachi is out of option. I will not use it.

Please send me some tips or ideas and tell me from your experiences.
Thanks! :)

[Balim]

For Hamachi, both of you could try a re-install and it may fix the problem, but it may come back again.

The thing with the free services such as Hamachi and Tunngle is a limited throughput, meaning it won't allow you to use your full internet bandwidth for hosting/joining. You can pay those services to increase the throughput, but the only logical reason to do so would be for VPN (Virtaul Private Network) and/or NAT (Network Address Translation) punchthrough.
Port Forwarding is free, all you have to do is a little research.

This will be depending on where you live and what router/ISP you are using. Particularly Dynamic-NAT, Static-NAT, or a DMZ. Dynamic-NAT is where you will most likely not even have to port forward, as your local IP address will be mapped to a public IP address from a pool that was assigned by your ISP. There is also a possibility that your router is using a DMZ (DeMilitarized Zone) in both Dynamic-NAT and DMZ cases, it will usually not be using a network based Firewall and you will most likely only have to allow the access through Windows Firewall and possibly assign a wildcard IP address assignment through a dedicated server install, as Source usually binds the first local IP address it can find.
If you are using Static-NAT (which North America homes generally use), then you will have to do port forwarding.

Check what your local IP address is by whichever method you wish, but I will use the CMD example, press the Windows Key and without moving the mouse or clicking anything, type cmd and press enter.
It will open a black box with white letters (unless you customized it to show otherwise), in the box, type: ipconfig
You may have to scroll up to find it, but you are looking for a Classful Subnet, A is 255.0.0.0 or /8, B is 255.255.0.0 or /16, C is 255.255.255.0 or /24 IPv4 Default Gateway. It will look like one of these: 192.168.#.# 172.16.#.# (through 172.32.#.#) 10.#.#.# The address will usually be the first or the last address on the subnet.
On that same adapter information, take note of what the "IPv4 Address" is as well, as you will most likely need this for the actual port forwarding process.

Next, go to an internet browser and in the address bar, type the gateway address, if it doesn't work at first, try adding a / at the end of the address.
You should now see the router configuration log in screen. The username and password will either be a default one which can be found online by searching the model, or on a sticker on the physical router. Or someone may have set it, in which case, you will have to try to get whoever set it to log into it. If this person is not available any time soon, you *may* be able to perform a factory reset on the physical router and it will usually reset the username/password to default. There may also be documentation by the router manufacturer as to how to reset the username/password.

Now you are looking for something along the lines of Firewall, or Port Forwarding. When you find it, they will usually ask for the IPv4 address (which you should have from the ipconfig step), a start/end port, UDP/TCP, and whether or not it is enabled.
What you need to enter is the IPv4 address which you got from the ipconfig step, start and end ports will be 27015, if there is an option for both UDP and TCP then select that, but if not, select UDP and you may have to create a separate port forward for TCP if you wish to do so.
Then tick the enabled box if there is one.
For ensuring that your IP address doesn't change, your router might be using sticky DHCP. But if it isn't then you will probably want to set up static DHCP reservation in the router, or set a static IP in your NIC just note that setting it in your NIC will require you to change it back if you switch networks at any point.

You may be finished at this point, or you may have to additionally configure Windows Firewall to allow the access.
If so, open Control Panel on your computer, depending on what layout you are using either go to System and Security or Windows Firewall, then click Allow an application through Windows Firewall. To be sure, you should do "Allow another application" and go through the directories to steamapps\common\Synergy\ and add hl2.exe, srcds.exe, and synergy.exe and allow for both home and public Firewall configurations, unless you have specific settings within those configuration sets (usually using wf.msc).

Now you should be able to host a Source server (as almost all Source games use port 27015).

Windows Firewall breakdown.
I just want to make it a bit clearer for people who don't think Windows Firewall does anything. WF is a layer 3 and 7 (network IP/Port and Application) firewall. For reference, a majority of routers are specifically layer 2 and 3 (Data link and network IP/Port) firewalls.
If you want to know more about what layers I am talking about, search online for the OSI model.
When you first connect to a network, you are presented with three options: Home, Work, or Public. These are configuration profiles for levels of security within WF.
Setting to Home will allow almost all traffic in any direction unless specifically defined, also enables Workgroup.
Work will block almost all traffic except most business applications (Active Directory, Samba, SMB, NFS, etc). It may also be configured by a Domain Controller if configured to do so.
Public will block all traffic in any direction unless specifically defined. Although usually when set on Public, when launching an application that has networking enabled, you will get a notification saying something along the lines of "Windows Firewall has blocked some features of this program", giving you the option to allow for Public or Home/Work profiles.
This notification may also appear when on the Home profile, unless you set the Home profile to allow all anyways.
Note that this notification will only come up once per networked application. If you set something incorrectly, you will have to either go to the Control Panel and change settings for it or use wf.msc
wf.msc is a way to access "Windows Firewall with Advanced Security" wherein, you can configure much more advanced and specific configurations. Most cases that people would use this is for Windows Server installations. In default WF, you have a check box to allow all inbound/outbound communication. But in wf.msc you can configure for example, specific IP addresses or IP address ranges to access applications and/or resources. You can also create connection rules using IPsec ensuring that there is a secured connection between you and another before allowing for access to specific resources.

There are several ways to use IPsec through wf.msc I would encourage you to look through them if you wish to learn more. Just know that, if you do manage to lock yourself in, and you are not sure how, disable the IPsec rules and/or delete them, then restart your computer and it should be all back to normal.