Can I set Starcraft up for a direct connection?

[I4AT]

I just wanna play with a friend, can I get SC to direct connect between the 2 of us rather than going through Bnet? The lag makes the game unplayable, I'm hoping taking Bnet out of the loop will help.

 

[BD2003]

Originally posted by: I4AT
I just wanna play with a friend, can I get SC to direct connect between the 2 of us rather than going through Bnet? The lag makes the game unplayable, I'm hoping taking Bnet out of the loop will help.

The connection between the two of you is set up by battle.net, but all of the gameplay data doesnt go through bnet. Taking bnet out of the loop absolutely will not help.

 

[I4AT]

Really, are you sure? So you're saying Bnet is basically just a matchmaking service, once the game actually starts it's P2P? I guess it must be just the way SC's netcode is written then, cause it's pretty much the only game I've got that lags so horribly.

But what about the whole bnetd thing that went on back in 02? I thought the whole point of that was to allow people to host games on their own servers instead of going through Blizzard's to reduce lag?

 

[LeetViet]

Yes, you can. I used to play direct connection through a "null modem" serial cable and dialing into the other person's computer (no internet required).

Start looking here: http://www.blizzard.com/support/?id=msc000p

 

[I4AT]

Yeah I'm aware of the ability to play over LAN, but unfortunately we aren't in the same household so we need an online solution.

 

[SonicIce]

Theres modem to modem if u have dialup. I think there might be a tool to emulate IPX or UDP over the internet but I never looked into it. Bnet shouldn't add any overhead once you're in the game. Does it lag really bad? maybe one of you are blocking some port?

 

[I4AT]

Nah no dialup, we've both got cable, although mine is wireless but I have a 6dbi booster for my card and another booster connected to the router itself. We've toyed with Hamachi for other games but were never able to get it to work, never actually tried it for SC though.

The lag really is bad, but I think it's all me. I usually can't host games without people getting the latency error, but I can join other people's games fine. Once the game actually starts there will be intermittent lag throughout or sometimes it'll just slow down to a crawl for minutes at a time. The weird thing is we play Warhammer Dawn of War all the time with no lag issues whatsoever, and I believe both games use port 6112. In Warhammer I'm able to direct connect to him though, using his IP.

I've got DMZ enabled for my computer, I've forwarded all the ports, added exceptions in the Windows Firewall. Some days we can play lag free, a lot of times we can't. Most of the time we just play against computers, but every once in a while we'll try a random 2vs2 and it'll lag like hell until the other guys leave, then when it's just us left the lag will settle. But then again I think we've gotten an occasional lag free 2vs2 game going, I dunno, I honestly think Bnet is just a hit or miss pos.

 

[MarcVenice]

Lag can be caused by slow pc's as well. The game will only run as fast as the slowest PC in the game. But it sounds like you worked out all the port stuff, perhaps try playing without using wireless?

 

[Lonyo]

www.hamachi.cc
LAN over the internet.
(You only need the basic version, which is free)

 

[Farmer]

Originally posted by: Lonyo
www.hamachi.cc
LAN over the internet.
(You only need the basic version, which is free)

QFT. Get an old version (1.0.0.0) if it doesn't seem to work for you, as the new versions do have problems with many games.

It's just a really easy to use VPN, so you make a server, your friend joins it, and it's essentially as if you were on a LAN. (Hamachi installs a virtual network adapter).

So, essentially, any game with LAN functionality you can play as if it had direct IP functionality.