NedFox TZW

I have been hosting all kinds of games, and none require DMZ, as long as all *outbound* is allowed. For game-hosts to host successfully, clients must be able to reach the computer in your LAN. This means, the data sent from clients to the gamehost must be 'translated' to your inside IP-address. This is called NAT (Network address Translation). With NAT, you configure your router, so it sends all data send to a certain PORT on the router to your gamehost. For OFP (default), this port is 2302. If you want gamespy-servers to access your host (for the playerlist etc), you need to add one extra NAT-rule, and this is always 1 higher then the port used for OFP (so, by default, 2303). ====== How do you do this ? Many routers have a setup for NAT. I've seen maufacturers call it "Virtual server" too.. When you want to add such a rule, you need to supply 5 important numbers : 1 ] The outside PORT used (2302) 2 ] The inside PORT used (2302) 3 ] The outside IP used (your internet IP-address) 4 ] The inside IP-address (the IP-address of your gamehost, the INTERNAL ip that is! 5 ] The protocol used. For OFP this is UDP That's step 1. Do this again for allowing gamespy-servers peeking into your computer ;-) 1 ] The outside PORT used (2303) 2 ] The inside PORT used (2303) 3 ] The outside IP used (your internet IP-address) 4 ] The inside IP-address (the IP-address of your gamehost, the INTERNAL ip that is! 5 ] The protocol used. For OFP this is UDP **Sometimes you don't need to supply 3.. ** All other data is outgoing (ie. sent from gamehost to the Internet). Normally, all your computers have outside access, so it should work without a problem. ===== Disabling gamespy ===== This is kind of hard, and IMHO only possible if your router supports firewall rules. OFP will always ping the master gamespy server, to announce it's presence. If you want to block that, you will need to block all outgoing UDP traffic on PORT 2303. I've tried setting "ReportingIP" to 127.0.0.1 , but still my firewall registered data going from gamehost to gamespy. If you want some visual stuff how all this is done, I can make some webpages. We already have long documents about routers and firewalls on our site, but those are DF related, although I guess it has enough details to understand what's going on... http://www.timezone-warriors.net/index2.htm (Look for techTalk, bottom of menu). And yeah, we're working on a new site ;-))))

</span><table border="0" align="center" width="95%" cellpadding="3" cellspacing="1"><tr><td>Quote (Suma @ April 09 2003,11:49)</td></tr><tr><td id="QUOTE">There is no specific message for chat, chat is sent together with all other game information and there is no easy and reliable way how to get it from the network trafiic.<span id='postcolor'> Thx Suma.. I'll put some extra time in searching for it in memory then.. Getting it from the network-traffic puts too much load on performance.. We've used the program for some weeks now, and it's great :-) Since I have 2 monitors, I can see guys join and chat, while playing.. Normally I alt-tab to buddy, to say we know they are there...

Many times the server is locked, and I have to wait for the MP Setup to get in. But I don't want to stare at a ..playing... screen for 30 mins. So, the buddy pings me when a game ends, and I can chat with all the guys connected. I hoped I could use the ingame chat, to be able to see what's happening in the game, without really being joined to it (locked, so you can't get in). For as far as MP setup, briefing etc, I was able to find the chat, but the most important bit, when playing, was hard.. It's too bad the gamespy-stuff doesn't support this.. Now I had to peek into game-memory, and that's unreliable.. I'm still working on it..

I'm very, very, VERY disappointed. Guess all of BIS is playing BHD atm ? Forgive me my sarcasm, but IMHO at least you could reply on my simple question.

Too bad there's no response.. I really would like to see *some* kind of reaction. When it's official policy to keep all ASE-related stuff secret I can live with that, but now I don't have any response at all... I just want to be able to 'catch' the chat from a dedicated server....

Reply to self : Chat works on all screens, except when playing. In briefing, mp setup, debriefing etc the chat is trackable, but when playing, other things happen. Have spent another few hours on it, and it seems I'm stuck, so I still need any info there is..

After hours of investigating I think I found it. There's just one memory-position where the chat is inserted. If you program it neatly, you can keep up with the messages, and forget all about the history.. And I found the (fixed) pointer to that location too :-) Some extra info goes there. When a player joins, I see a referral to the custom face etc.. Need to filter those messages out. BtW, to reply to you : For now it's a dedicated tool, running on the ofp-server itself. It allows clients to connect, and provides some gamestats (and chat now). This is run however on windows-platform, don'r know if you can run any indy-driven delhpi-program on Linux....

Hi all, Fairly new to this forum, but not to OFP and online gaming :-) I'm a skilled Delhpi-programmer, I've written DEM, a remote administration tool for all DF-series, and my biggest hobbies are writing client-server programs for gamers to make their lives more comfortable or pleasant. I've seen 1 message about this topic, which was answered with "IMHO this is not possible" . So I want to ask very specifically towards the programmers: I want to retreive the gamechat from a dedicated OFP-server (and resistance), so I can use this in a buddy-tool for OFP-gamers. I know servers hidden from gamespy, and users reluctant to use it too, but still want some kind of tool to see who's playing on their favorite server, and receive alerts and game-status change. All those things I've tackled, thx to the reportingIP, the heartbeat messages, and the statuschanged messages. After looking into to game, I must say you did a decent job in hiding game-details, or at least make it hard to find them in a consistant way. I've seen 'random' locations for the chat etc.. I can handle all net- and memory related code, something I've done a lot for DeltaForce. My Question : Is there a 'heardbeat' query-message which generates the chat, or is there another way of getting it from the game? A plain *no* is OK, as long it's from one of the guys who *really* know it ;-)) If there is a possibility, but the details are to difficult or irrelivant to this forum, I don't mind being pm-ed about it. NedFox =TZW=