2) Why won't they allow an online mode where you can hook up with anyone, but not talk (or are confined to standardized questions/comments)?
I'm assuming it will be similar to how they've done wifi DS titles. You can either choose to be matched up randomly with people, probably based on either some ranking or geographical area, or play directly with people on your friends list. It's also conceivable that, depending on the game, it might be like how Club House Games for the DS works. In that case, you can select certain predefined messages to send to people ('Good Game', 'Thanks', etc) if they are random people, but if you are playing with your friends, you get access to the Pictochat interface where you can draw pictures, and otherwise put in whatever you want.
This should work well enough in facilitating gameplay with people you know, but also mitigating the trash talking 12 year old syndrome that seems to plague XBox live.
I have an old FreeBSD box running 2.2.7 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 3.2 yet) and have had only a few problems. Most of those, however, i was able to get around without too much difficulty, too. 1. Quake*.* - No problems here whatsoever, and have never needed to tweak any settings or configs to make it work. It just does. As for servers, Q3Test, and if i'm not mistaken, Quake2, will let you specify the port to use. All you do is use NAT'd port forwarding ability to redirect all connections to a given port. Certain games (namely baldurs gate) use DirectPlay, which can use an entire range of ports. BG used a random port between 2300 and 2399. So what did i do? Port foward 100 ports;P A minor inconvenience, but you shold be able to figure out what ports need to be redirected without a lot of hassle. 2. It is not possible to make an FTP connection between an ipmasq'd/nat'd box when you yourself are nat'd/ipmasq'd. What i do in this situation is rely on a wonderful proggie called Sharity light (available in the freebsd ports collection;P). Just telnet to the box that's doing the nat'ing, and use sharity light to mount a shared directory on any machine on your network (including fat32 drives. woohoo!). Then just FTP to the site that has the files you require and watch as it automagically downloads to your hard drive. You could even turn on a screen session if you need to close the telnet proggie for whatever reason. Very convenient. 3. DCC's, etc. Occasionally i have DCC problems, but i think, again, this is only for 2 boxen that are both nat'd. If neccesary, you could install an ftp daemon on the machine that is behind the net, and port forward a port (say 1234) to port 21 (or any port, if the daemon supports changing the port) on the box you need to send/recieve files on.
Hope that helps =) I absolutely agree that NAT rocks a whole lot... it'd be insane if i didn't have it, since my cable provider charges $10 per extra IP.
Slashdot Mirror
Unreal Tournament-esque Shock Rifle, anyone?
2) Why won't they allow an online mode where you can hook up with anyone, but not talk (or are confined to standardized questions/comments)?
I'm assuming it will be similar to how they've done wifi DS titles. You can either choose to be matched up randomly with people, probably based on either some ranking or geographical area, or play directly with people on your friends list. It's also conceivable that, depending on the game, it might be like how Club House Games for the DS works. In that case, you can select certain predefined messages to send to people ('Good Game', 'Thanks', etc) if they are random people, but if you are playing with your friends, you get access to the Pictochat interface where you can draw pictures, and otherwise put in whatever you want.
This should work well enough in facilitating gameplay with people you know, but also mitigating the trash talking 12 year old syndrome that seems to plague XBox live.
I have an old FreeBSD box running 2.2.7 (haven't gotten around to upgrading to 3.2 yet) and have had only a few problems. ;P ;P). Just telnet to the box that's doing the nat'ing, and use sharity light to mount a shared directory on any machine on your network (including fat32 drives. woohoo!). Then just FTP to the site that has the files you require and watch as it automagically downloads to your hard drive. You could even turn on a screen session if you need to close the telnet proggie for whatever reason. Very convenient.
... it'd be insane if i didn't have it, since my cable provider charges $10 per extra IP.
Most of those, however, i was able to get around without too much difficulty, too.
1. Quake*.* - No problems here whatsoever, and have never needed to tweak any settings or configs to make it work. It just does. As for servers, Q3Test, and if i'm not mistaken, Quake2, will let you specify the port to use. All you do is use NAT'd port forwarding ability to redirect all connections to a given port.
Certain games (namely baldurs gate) use DirectPlay, which can use an entire range of ports. BG used a random port between 2300 and 2399. So what did i do? Port foward 100 ports
A minor inconvenience, but you shold be able to figure out what ports need to be redirected without a lot of hassle.
2. It is not possible to make an FTP connection between an ipmasq'd/nat'd box when you yourself are nat'd/ipmasq'd. What i do in this situation is rely on a wonderful proggie called Sharity light (available in the freebsd ports collection
3. DCC's, etc. Occasionally i have DCC problems, but i think, again, this is only for 2 boxen that are both nat'd. If neccesary, you could install an ftp daemon on the machine that is behind the net, and port forward a port (say 1234) to port 21 (or any port, if the daemon supports changing the port) on the box you need to send/recieve files on.
Hope that helps =) I absolutely agree that NAT rocks a whole lot