Greyed out Games on Gamespy - Fixed in 1.1

[ÜberJumper]

When playing HW2 Multiplayer over Gamespy, you may see, or host, games which showed as Greyed out in the games list and are unjoinable.

This will happen for people with routers who have a non-public IP address assigned to their computers. So anyone whose computer has an IP address starts with 192 or 10, may see this problem. You may also see this problem if you have a second NIC in your computer which is directly connected the the Internet.

This is because Homeworld 2 sees the LAN IP, knows the game is behind a router, and therefore Homeworld 2 displays the game as greyed out.

To work around this, you can do the following.

1. Follow the instructions in the readme.txt in your Homeworld 2 installation directory for opening ports (see the second post in this thread for more info).

2. Play TCP/IP direct games from IRC or elsewhere.

3. You can also use a hacked DLL (by Drax of CORP) to work around the hosting issue once you have opened your ports. See the Third post in this thread for information on how to do this.

4. Change the IP address of your Computer's NIC to be a public IP (not starting with 192.* or 10.*). This would involve setting the LAN IP of your router to the same public scope as your NIC, as well as putting the right gateway IP address of the router into your NIC. (Thanks to Didlix and DemonDiablo for the heads up on this).

[ÜberJumper]

From the readme.txt:

Multiplayer Issues
Modem users may experience connectivity problems when playing Homeworld 2 on Gamespy while running a personal firewall (such as ZoneAlarm or Norton Personal Firewall). Disabling the firewall during play may solve those problems.

If you want to play a multiplayer game of Homeworld 2 and you are behind a router, you may need to do one of the following:

• Disable your router so that your machine is connected directly to the internet.
• Unblock port 6073 and ports 2302 to 2400 (these are the default DirectPlay ports used by Homeworld 2).
• Force Homeworld2 to use a given port number by using "-port ####" at the command line, where #### is between 1 and 65535.

If you still encounter difficulty in connecting to GameSpy, please allow traffic for at least the following TCP ports.

• 6667 (IRC)
• 80 (HTTP)
• 27900 (Master Server UDP Heartbeat)
• 28900 (Master Server List Request)
• 29900 (GP Connection Manager)
• 29901 (GP Search Manager)
• 13139 (Custom UDP Pings)
• 6500 (incoming, UDP, default roomquery port; can be customized with roomqueryport=<port #> in svc.cfg)

[ÜberJumper]

Here are the steps you need to do to use this workaround. By using this workaround, you assume all responsibility for any issues that may occur with your system. IE: Use at your own risk.

Note that all users attempting to join the game must have this file on their systems for it to work.

1. Open all the ports in your firewall and configure your router.

2. Make a backup of your gslobby.dll from c:\program files\sierra\homeworld 2\bin\release. You can just rename it (to gslobby.dll.org or somesuch).

3. Download this file and extract it to the c:\program files\sierra\homeworld 2\bin\release folder.


Once you have done this, you will now be able to host games for other users who are using the same fix. You will not be able to join or host games involving the unmodified gslobby.dll file.

It is recommended that you identify your game names to indicate that you have the GSLobby Fix (perhaps adding GSLF or something to the end of the game name?).

Note that you may need to keep a copy of the original gslobby.dll whenever a patch is released. I believe this will *eventually* be patched by Relic (whenever Sierra OKs a patch).

Thanks to Drax for hacking this (hope you don't get sued!) and Reaper of CORP for spreading the word. Originally linked from here.

[ÜberJumper]

Aracat cooked up a DLL and mIRC script to allow the automatic hosting and joining of Games from IRC.

See his original thread for more info.