From installation to tcp/ip games; SMAC(X), Hamachi and you - by DrazharLn

[Buster's Uncle]

...That would be a lot of meticulous work for the index thread I never caught up on, but it's only less than 90 scenarios, IIRC, and I'll put that in the mental rolodex to get to for my next bored-for-a-project-and-manic spell unless someone beats me to it.  Tedious work, but totally doable given time and will - for a valuable content asset we host, value added...

Your thing with the auto-sorting would be great - sounds like something a business database-type program would sort with ease once someone took the time to enter what information was with each scenario.  You'd know better than I how easy or hard something like that would be to code; it would require not-many fields apiece for this.

[DrazharLn]

I think most of it should be automatable.

Can tell if it's modded or not if the download is more than just a scenario, player count will be in the scenario file somewhere. Difficulty I can't predict. Author might be scrapable from the posts, but a good default would just be to set Darsnan as author for everything and fix the few wrong'uns.

[Buster's Uncle]

He gave author if he could find out - site of original post, always, a lot of the kind of things you're looking for - one of us will have to look at a few threads to get a better idea, and I don't know how hard he tried for information while he was searching and processing so many...

[DrazharLn]

Added to my todo list for after I finish the revised mod manager.

As an extra attribute, it might be good to support ratings or something? I dunno.

[Buster's Uncle]

...That last would require either the compiler doing a lot of playtesting of a LOT of scenarios and publishing a personal snap judgment, or just as unlikely, alas, a lot of audience feedback...

[DrazharLn]

I was imagining putting a button in the manager to rate or recommend a mod or something, but yeah, audience is probably too small.

[Buster's Uncle]

Put the button in anyway - not a lot of lines of code, is it?  You never know...

(I think have the rating line only appear if there's a 'recommend'.  "One user recommends this" -or more- is not nothing, but "0 users recommend this" could end up being self-reinforcing.)

[DrazharLn]

Agree

[Senti]

hi, we wanted to play smacx over gameranger but it doesn't work. When my friend hosts, i'm stuck on the waiting for host window
and when i host, Smacx won't show the gameranger adapter on multiplayer.

We also tried hamachi but the game will freeze when one of us tries to join the others game.

[berroforte]

Hi, an update from someone who spent many hours getting multiplayer up and running in 2020! So far we have only tested vanilla SMAC 5.0 from GoG.
Three players have been able to successfully TCP/IP Directplay over a VPN service, we used Radmin VPN, and we were all in Windows 10.
I went through a few extra steps my group did not, ensuring my router was port forwarding my computer for directx7/8, which is ports 2300-2400 TCP/UDP, and 47624 TCP I also had a router firewall that I changed the settings on from NAT only to normal, and then allow directplay 7/8 which was an option for me.
We all made sure our legacy option for directplay was enabled, which you can find in Turn Windows Features on or off.
In the Windows Defender firewall, which we made sure had program exceptions on public and private networks for terran.exe.
The major issue we found, if Skype was running while we tried to connect, players could find the lobby but would get booted trying to join it.
This would lead me to wonder what other things connecting to a network might interfere.
Happy to answer any questions I can, there was limited information compiled so I spent many hours like I said, searching through forums such as this and testing stuff out with my buddies!
Hope you get it working, we played a small map straight through last night we were so excited.
Cheers,
berro.

[BlaneckW]

The unofficial patch link on this is no longer working.  Which unofficial patch would I use for this?  The most recent scient?

[DrazharLn]

Yes. https://alphacentauri2.info/index.php?action=downloads;sa=view;down=365

I've updated the link in the original post.

The patch is still good, but the rest of the guide is quite outdated. There's a small community on discord who still play TCP/IP games, I think. It might be worth asking them how they do it, if anyone out there is interested. https://discord.gg/yPVhhvWBBF

[Buster's Uncle]

I'm allowing this discord link to live, mostly because Draz.  -Somebody please tell them guys how much we'd love to have them here, where you can find the turn notification posted yesterday.