R.E.A.R.M. club Thread - R.E.A.R.M. - The Unofficial Classic HW 2 Expansion mod for Homeworld 2

Ok I want to start an R.E.A.R.M. club of sorts. The ideal is that we will go online with the mod through GameSpy or other third party online service that are compatible with Homeworld 2. Then we will play the game while chatting about the mod like strategy, ideals for the mod, and general likes and dislikes. I just want to start the community around this mod to play with it agenst one another ( me ). We will use the west server (in game just hit multiplayer then game spy) as the meting lobby. Rules NO HAZING NOOBS!!!! The ideal is to play and talk about the mod. If you want to start a game do so I won't stop you. I will start a secondary thread to serve as a chat room outside of meetings.

This thraed is to decide on a time (I am thanking on friday do to the fact that it is when I have free time to do this) and to post ideals for propaganda to get the news out, and general ideals for the club. The other thread is for the community to chat about the mod.
this is a work in progress and healp is needed

Edited by: CHsnake5050

1) I don't understand the duplicity, the second thread is for talking about the multiplayer game experiences and this is for talking about the whole concept?

2) Since I've never used Gamespy as a program/utility, whatever this thing is, I don't uderstand the way you're planning to play those games. You're not talking about the ingame gamespy multiplayer, but about the gamespy used as an external application right?

3) So this is how it works? You have this thread and you'll wait for peaople to come? I'm affraid you won't get much attention this way. When you told me about it, I thought you have some solution. Don't get me wrong, the R.E.A.R.M. club is a really great idea, but one thread isn't a club, not to mention that these moddb forums here aren't much visible.
Do you know what I mean? When I tryed the Xfire thing back then, it didn't work at all, but at least it was some kind of solution.
For such solution you need a base. I understand that this moddb R.E.A.R.M. homepage is the best base R.E.A.R.M. actually has, using some external site or application could be contraproductive, because all the people are here, that's absolutelly right, but this thread is not really a solid base. If you want a multiplayer club, you could use some section here, more visible than this. It would definitelly deserve a post into a news here to let people know where to go and what to do, where to communicate. But you are currently in "Your work/Other". Maybe it could get a new forum section, to at least place this thread into a right place, maybe moddb group, I don't know. Since there really is no other (good) homepage aside of moddb, it would probably be the best to stay here in moddb. I'm not sure where, but probably not there.

I though we will be discussing here about how to make this work, how to create a system. This has a few steps in right direction, for example playing every friday (although you should start by poll asking if friday is the best, because since you didn't specify a time, you can't be expecting people to have a time in friday in any timezone, while some have evening and some are still at work/school), but I don't think this is a systems.

Edited by: Pouk

I do thing that we should start SOMETHING along these lines though. The problem, of course, is that there probably isn't enough people following REARM to actually be able to put together games of more than two people (at best). But I think this needs a second shot now. The first thing to figure out is what client to use. Hamachi is what I've seen used the most, but Pouk found Xfire, and I've heard of others as well. I don't know if GameSpy has HW2 servers at all, let alone HW2 mod servers... so do they CHsnake? I would put my imput into which client should be used, but I actually have no experience with any of these third party clients. All I've ever done is LAN, and direct IP address connected games.

Edited by: Hell_Diguner

Hamachi. I remember I was using Hamachi once. It could be built around Hamachi, it's pretty simple and easy to use, you can chat there, you can see who's online and yet it's a tiny application. I could start that. It's much better solution than XFire (at least to me), because XFire was way too "noisy". This little programm won't bother you at all and it will even show you what to do when you first start it. When I put it like that, I've convinced myself that it's a pretty good idea.

Then I'll make a news article about it, I'll modify the mod info with the Hamachi login and password and we can hope we'll have at least a few people occasionally meeting themselves there.

It maybe isn't much, but it's in fact enough to have something actually working. We'll have a network people can connect to, see if anyone's online and just play. It's certainly better than this forum club ...thing, because it's centralized, "official" network, you don't have to ask on the forum where's nobody anyway.

Hamachi then? I'll have to google it (and download it). I was thinking of taking it further though, and saying in the description to log into Hamachi on a certain day that folks are supposed to all try and play at once. I'm also inclined to say that we would get more people to come on (at least for the first time) by claiming some sort of tournament that starts at a particular time... and then deciding how complex the tournament should be by seeing how many people show up.

Hamachi seemed to be the program that most RNF-frequenting HW2 fans decided was the best option of all the choices (although this was a while ago).

I agree with H_D (sorry if you don't like the abrev. but unless you hate it that's how I'm going to type your name from now on, I'm way too lazy to type that each time! Feel free to abrev. mine if you so choose.), having some form of Tournament would be good to...formalize things, allows a bit of control over proceedings, that way you may get more usefull feed-back from the participants too, instead of it being a messy free-for-all.

Just fyi; Mololu has had the good idea of instigating a Screenshot Competition Thread over at Path To Victory; Moddb.com.

Late answer as always. But better late than never I suppose.

Hamachi that is. I'll finally find some time to do do it.

Tournament: That's a very nice idea, but I can tell you now that it won't definitelly be me who'll organize it, no time for that, but I like it.

I know Mololu has the screenshot competition, I could do such thing as well (although I hate to copy something). But I'm saying for months that I could make some kind of video competition, because I wanted videos (I'd also like people to upload them to youtube for example. Firstly because for me it's a free presentation and secondly because I personally just couldn't make video with some crappy music while on youtube they seem pretty popular for example). But I don't know how to motivate them.

EDIT:
I just learned there's a limitation for 16 clients unless I'll buy a full version. That's stupid.

EDIT2:
I created a network, login is REARM, password is homeworld, I'm gonna try if it works with my second PC.

EDIT3:
Yes it work, I'm just fighting myself. But it can't be official with only 16 players. But let's take it as a testing phase, so feel free to join.

Edited by: Pouk

I think there are a couple of HW2 folks that have purchased (monthly?) hamachi, and a while ago they were touting on RelicNews to join in games from any mod since they have the ability to host 200+ people, and they spent money for the community. I honestly don't know if that's the case any more though.

EDIT:

While searching the forums, I found this: Forums.relicnews.com
"I guess i'm way behind everyone.... cause i just found out that everyone is using comodo.... so... i made a comodo server for HW1" -June

GameRanger: Forums.relicnews.com
"You should find this far simpler than Hamachi." Though the thread says nothing about HW2 (or mods), but only HW1. In this thread, it seems that there are occational HW folks that actually log in (still, in 2010)

...and the list so far of game hosts are: Xfire, Gamespy, Comodo, GameRanger, & Hamatchi

So.... I'm guessing it comes down to figuring out which one is used the most by HW2 players. I think I may -gasp- reactivate my RelicNews account to post up a thread asking what online game host a HW2 mod should use.

EDIT 2:
Lol, my account there doesn't even exist any more.

EDIT 3:
Found another, WON2:
En.wikipedia.org
V4.steamlessproject.nl
It appears to have been created specifically as a substitute for Steam, so I don't actually know if it would be good for HW2 games (or if there is any HW2 community there). Found it from this thread (near the bottom): Forums.relicnews.com

Edited by: Hell_Diguner

I think I shouldn't be pitching into the REARM discussion like this but I've run across some deadly issues with HW2 online:

1) cracked and non cracked games will logically not work together making match-making a real pain in the ass as not everyone seems to have the original CD anymore.

2) localized versions are not intercompatible meaning player A with the english version can not play player B with the german version. This is really the killing issue but can be worked around.

3) vista uses IPV6 by default which screws up bigtime when used with HW2. it can be disabled manually (force IPV4). I think this issue is true for Windows 7 too but haven't tried any of that since my laptop died so I don't know. You may want to inform people of this ahead of time though.

4) using a mod not packaged into a big file seems to result in an online fail every time though this may also be related to something else - I can't say for sure. This should be simple to solve but is incredibly painful for testing.

Wish I could help on the VPN client issue but I don't really know of any. Wish you all the luck with this though... I'm still praying I'll get to play hw2 online someday.

P.s. Pouk - don't see the issue with the screenshot competition. Just cause I started one shouldn't stop you from doing the same. If we go down that track we might as well both stop modding homeworld 2 as we're building off the same game meaning we end up using similar ideas to begin with.

I do go out of my way to avoid copying anything you've come up with (though I can't say for things you've planned but not shown). I guess that's just all part of the problem of creating more or less simmilar (tending towards less) mods for the same game.

Edited by: mololu