Half-Life LAN Games Without WON
John Morgan Salomon
I first posted this question about 6-9 months ago, and thought that
maybe now I might have a bit more luck with it:
I've been trying to get LAN games together with some friends across
different IP segments. We're spread across 4 class B ranges and 3
continents. We've got a few people who've bought the game and would
now like to play with each other.
The trouble is that we all work in a major financial institution,
heavily firewalled from the outside world, and in any case, at least
half of our internal addressing scheme is 172.16.x.x and 10.x.x.x so
it wouldn't route.
This translates into the need for a local dedicated server, which
cannot receive anything from WON. No keepalives, no key authentication,
nothing. It's been about half a year since I played, so I don't know whether
there exist any workarounds by now. Can someone maybe give me some
tips in this area? I've looked around and can't find anything obvious.
Thanks very much for any help,
-John
ps: If anyone from Sierra reads this, the mandatory WON thing for
private games is very silly and is preventing a lot of people in my
suboptimal network situation from playing against friends.
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Ben Cottrell
> ps: If anyone from Sierra reads this, the mandatory WON thing for
> private games is very silly and is preventing a lot of people in my
> suboptimal network situation from playing against friends.
Yes, but you have to remember that Sierra doesn't want people pirating their
game.. and if they allowed anything more than a LAN to bypass WON authentication,
then I expect people would soon find workarounds so that they could play internet
games without having a legit CD Key.
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John Twernbold
>Unfortunately, Sierra doesn't seem to have realized that decent
>bandwidth does not come as cheap in Europe as in the US for private
>individuals, and so a lot of people rely on work LANs for gaming in
>the evenings...
Broadband isn't universally available in the US, either. It would
appear you've forgotten our country is as big as your entire
continent, with vast open places where cable modems and DSL simply
aren't available.
As for LANs: they usually don't stretch over "4 class B ranges and 3
continents". If you can't run a LAN server on your LAN and must
instead use an internet-based dedicated server, then the solution
isn't for Sierra to compromise their CD-Key authentication process,
but for *you* to communicate with your IT department and make the
game work with your firewalls.
What I can't figure out is why you're using an internet account from UC
Berkeley when you claim you're in Europe at a "major financial
institution"?
--
Bold
aka John Twernbold
jtwernbold (at) yahoo.com
Ben Cottrell
> Yes, exactly. And this kind of workaround is what I'm looking for.
> Having actually bought the damn software (not really a given these
> days) we want to play. Unfortunately, Sierra doesn't seem to have
> realized that decent bandwidth does not come as cheap in Europe as in
> the US for private individuals, and so a lot of people rely on work
> LANs for gaming in the evenings...
well, I think the problem is that you don't want a LAN game.. you actually want a WAN
game... and the 2 things are somewhat different. so, I suppose valve *Could* add an
extra option for WAN gaming.. however, i'm sure it wouldn't be too difficult to
create a patch which would fool HL into thinking an Internet server was actually a WAN
game server... and then people would be able to get into games without a legit copy
of the game..
John Morgan Salomon
John Twernbold <jtwer...@remove-this.yahoo.com> wrote:
>Broadband isn't universally available in the US, either. It would
>appear you've forgotten our country is as big as your entire
>continent, with vast open places where cable modems and DSL simply
>aren't available.
No, but it's far more available in major urban concentrations than
it is here. Even flat-rate dial-up is an exotic, expensive phenomenon
in Europe. And it's not "my" continent, I'm from the US.
>As for LANs: they usually don't stretch over "4 class B ranges and 3
>continents". If you can't run a LAN server on your LAN and must
>instead use an internet-based dedicated server, then the solution
>isn't for Sierra to compromise their CD-Key authentication process,
>but for *you* to communicate with your IT department and make the
>game work with your firewalls.
They do very often, for larger companies. In fact, most of your
larger, multinational conglomerates will use some sort of internal
international network (even if it involves VPNs over "open" networks).
Opening up firewalls is not an option for financial services companies,
especially not for something as "frivolous" as games. In addition, if
you'd read carefully, you'd have realized that I explicitly mentioned that
even if monkeys did fly out of my ass and someone would open a firewall
for games, it would raise massive havoc with internally routed private
networks (10.x.x.x, 172.16.x.x, 192.168.x.x). And yes, I know that isn't
RFC-compliant, but I didn't design it either.
Frankly, I don't care about what Sierra compromises or not--this just makes
it less convenient for me and my friends to play our game. Like anyone with
half a technical clue, we can circumvent this, but I was hoping to maybe
avoid the effort. This kind of thing simply makes me tend to exercise
my choice as a consumer in the future and not buy Sierra games.
>What I can't figure out is why you're using an internet account from UC
>Berkeley when you claim you're in Europe at a "major financial
>institution"?
Have you ever considered that people post news/read mail/use the internet
outside of work? As Mr. Cottrell will confirm, the CSUA allows people
to retain their accounts after graduation, so I often use it for personal
matters. And don't be snotty, I asked a legitimate question.
>Bold
>aka John Twernbold
John
aka John
John Twernbold
>Frankly, I don't care about what Sierra compromises or not--this
>just makes it less convenient for me and my friends to play our
>game.
Looks like you'll have to find another game to play.
I'm not sure what you expect Sierra to do; they've repeatedly said that
their CD-Key system has worked *very* well, and they're quite pleased
with it. Many (if not most) other large software companies are
following suite (id Software, etc.) And if you look at Sierra's sales
figures, you'll see why! The number of sales they'll lose to players
like you (i.e. people wanting to play games on multi-continent
LANs/WANs) is dwarfed by the number of pirates that have been forced to
buy the game if they want to play. In the year and a half I've been
regularly reading and contributing to this group, I've only seen one
other person with this problem (he was trying to play over a WAN for
the US military). However, I've seen literally *thousands* of software
pirates looking for CD-Keys.
Feel free to exercise your choice as a consumer, but don't forget that
Sierra and most other companies won't compromise their security and
copy-protection schemes for a very small minority of people with very
unusual needs, such as yourself. After all, the problem really isn't
with Sierra--it's with your networking situation. Don't forget that
Sierra never promised multiplayer support for unusual setups like
yours.
Beavis
"Ben Cottrell" <ben.co...@virgin.net> wrote in message
news:3A32AC77...@virgin.net...
cant run a server behind a firewall without opening ports for the game. It
is too bad that those who bought the game cant use it in this situation, but
it it possible to run if you can open the ports. This, in my opinion is not
Sierra's fault, it is just the way it is with any server behind a firewall.
Tekken-Prime
to buy TWO copies of the game (Lost the first copy in a fire, along
with box/reg/etc)).....so that I could play online, and 8 other
buddies also spent the $30 to get the game!
My suggestion is to host a Lan Party at Berkeley, since that's what
you really want to do......Or play Quake 2, since it doesn't have this
'problem'........
Looney D
WON key but there are less servers but if you and your friend wanna play it
is exelent I used it for Red Alert 2 :)
"Tekken-Prime" <Tekke...@nospam.yahoo.com> schreef in bericht
news:qe1r3tgj212m3uhbs...@4ax.com...
Ben Cottrell
really have a LAN.. I don't think the word "LAN" really applies to a network
spread across international borders :) ), HL supports up to 4 (or is it even
more?) people on the same CD Key
Tekken-Prime wrote:
> Actually, there is a way to do it....but I ain't telling, since I had
> to buy TWO copies of the game (Lost the first copy in a fire, along
> with box/reg/etc)).....so that I could play online, and 8 other
> buddies also spent the $30 to get the game!
--
Tekke...@no-spam.yahoo.com
within our company could play over our internal network (fire-walled)
via IP from Cali, Florida, etc with the server located in NY.
I fully respect Valve's reasoning for CD authentication AND I fully
support their policy, but it's a drag when we (as a group) have over
15 distinct purchased keys/CD sets and can't punch thru our corp
firewall to play. So I came up with a solution that doesn't modify
the code in any way but allows playing over several distinct subnets