Weird issue with joining multiplayer games

[PuerNoctis]

Ahoi!

We are a group of five people that were "Europa 1400" from since more than a decade now, and we really want to play "The Guild 2 - Renaissance" in multiplayer now. But for some reason we got some.... "weird" problems with joining into a game session that we tried to get around for two days now.

The problem is that if 4 of the 5 people host a game we cannot see the game in the LAN game list, it just doesn't appear. If the 5th person opens a game, 3 of 4 can join, the others again don't see it.

The weird thing now is, that SOMETIMES, VERY RARELY these people can see the game, but
joining the game fails and after that it disappears from the list.

I went ahead and captured some network traffic, and when we do a "refresh" from the LAN game list, we actually receive packets from the server (Port 2801->2816 UDP) containing some game information (like the host's player name etc.), but it just doesn't appear in the game list.

Here is our setup and what we tried so far:

- We are running V4.17b
- The "GuildII.exe" process has been explicitly white-listed in our firewalls.
- We use the Hamachi VPN to make LAN games possible and we can all ping each other's IP within the VPN. We cannot use Tunngle as one of us uses Linux to play the game (but Wine is probably not our problem here because our issues affect others, too). The Hamachi adapter priority has been bumped to the top.
- I have opened all the specified ports that I could find (2801, 2816, 30180, 15666), TCP and UDP, and out of desperation even tried an exposed host setting in my router once - no success, no one can join or even see my game.
- We tried disabling anti-virus software and firewall for testing once.

Usually I'd still say that it's just a matter of firewall and router problems, but this wouldn't explain why we receive proper game-information from the server upon a "refresh" (so the broadcast works) and why we sometimes (rarely) can see the game and most of the time not. So the game DOES realize that there are games available, only not... quite. It seems quite random. If it were router / firewall issues, I guess it wouldn't work 100% of the time.

Does anyone have any ideas what else we can try, or what could possibly cause such a weird half-broken behaviour?

Many thanks to any pointers.

Cheers!

[Leslian Lexter]

Got something like the same on our physical local network.

We were 3 people. 1 is the host. When none of the other 2 were in the game, the game would pop up on their list, but as soon as one of them joined it would disappear for the other.
We tried to have them join at the same time, but it would just let one of them join and crash the other's game.

We were on a physical network (A router and 3 straight-through utp cables) and it works well with any other games. I hope that helps rule out the third party software as an issue.

Any fixes will be much appreciated.

[PuerNoctis]

Gosh, thanks for replying, otherwise I would have forgotten about this thread :)
We have fixed the issues on our end and I the solution (for us) was stupidly simple:

Guild II does require DirectPlay 8, a deprecated framework within DirectX, for network-gamig and since Windows 8 vanilla does not contain the proper runtime when it ships, the game went downhill while playing via network - and even worse, since it did work "a little bit" (seeing games for a short time in the lobby) they do not rely on DirectPlay all the time apparently.

So what to do? Can't install DirectPlay on Windows 8 anymore, the setups do not work. Well... I must point out that we didn't upgrade to Windows 8.1 on our machines because we are all lazy here... that was our demise.

Long story short: As soon as we upgraded to Windows 8.1 and started the game, Windows even recognized that the application requires DirectPlay to work properly and if we want to install it right away. And after that network play ran smoothley, no complaints anymore. Windows 8.1 introduces a built-in DirectPlay version for legacy gaming that Windows 8 did not contain.

So the solution for us, and hopefully for you too, was to install DirectPlay properly. If you are running Windows 8, upgrade to 8.1 and the problem should fix itself. If you are running an earlier version of Windows, try installing earlier DirectX redists and maybe SDKs (although I doubt that the SDKs will contain runtime DLLs for DirectPlay) and try again.

Also, please post any lines from your 'logfile.log' that are beinning with [network] (including the brackets). That and some debug sessions was our starting point of realizing what was going on, because some of the operations on IDirectPlay8LobbyClient and some other COM objects actually failed.

Cheers!