Newbie - Seeks Help Setting Up Multiplayer

[Ussuri]

Hi Folks, first posting here so any advice is appreciated.

A bit of background, back in the late 90's myself and a number of colleagues used to play the original Quake across the network at our office. Over the years we all changed jobs and companies and moved on. However, recently we have been trying to get three laptops linked up so we can play deathmatch again. This is where the problem lies. We have been unable to get the machines to see each other.

We have tried using a hub, direct machine to machine connection, setting up a home network between them, specifying IP addresses, and general playing around with the LAN settings, but to no avail. We have managed to get the machines to see each other across a network but the never find any quake servers.

This is driving me nuts, any suggestions?

Thanks in advance.

[Phenom]

Try trying "connect speaknow.quakeone.com" in the console and let us know if it connects to that server, also specify your laptops better plz, pc/mac?

[Ussuri]

Hey, thanks for the reply.

We wont be able to connect to the URL because there is no internet connection available (Its a house with no phone line or wifi connection).

The machines are all old pc's. One is an IBM thinkpad, the other an IBC, the third is a Tosh desktop (Equium). All use XP. All three are running Quake installed from disk and Proquake (downloaded from here).

I guess we need to set up a Quake server somehow (woould that need to be a fourth machine, or could we use one of the ones playing).

In the office, it was easy. Multiplayer > TCP/IP > Search and the games appeared.

[Mr.Burns]

Hi Ussuri,

Perhaps the first thing to do would be to ensure you have the latest proquake clients by downloading them from this site (which you seem to have done). I believe that in some cases this can sometimes help as the author (Baker) has built in some network fixes.

You might then consider using a very simple model first of all such as setting up one pc as a dedicated quake server by adding a -dedicated 8 flag to the corresponding quake command line. Note the ip of your Quake server, this will probably be something like 192.168.1.nnn, and fire up quake on your 'client' machine. Go in to console on your client machine and type

connect 192.168.1.nnn

where 192.168.1.nnn is the address of your quake server. See if you get a connection to your server and also note if the server notes any attempts by your client to connect.

Sometimes firewalls can get in the way and you may need to slightly reconfigure your firewall on the quake server to allow add the quake executable to accept connections.

I'm no quake expert but hopefully this might point you in the right direction


Kind regards

Monty

[Ussuri]

I will give that a try. Im sure I can rustle up another PC from somewhere.

[Zop]

You should see if the computers can ping each other. Do "ping 100.1.1.1" from the console (and use your IPs). If the pings don't work, then there's a network problem.

Quake uses UDP, which can be blocked by firewalls like Burns said, so you can probably disable windows firewall completely if the computers aren't going to be on the internet. Open the connection in the Network Connections control panel, click properties button, then click the advanced tab. You should see how to turn it off at that point.