One of the gifts I got for the boys this year is a desktop computer for the family room. They've been tinkering around on some old laptops, but I figured it's time for them to have something a bit more beefy. This new rig allows them to stream games onto the Steam Link without needing to use my computer, which is good. It also means that my two older sons can dive into LAN games like Torchlight 2, which my older son and I played many years ago.
Or at least, that was the theory. In practice, when I installed the GoG version of Torchlight 2 onto the better of the laptops and the new desktop machine, they could not see the games each were hosting. Commence approximately 2.5 hours of browsing forums, digging up articles on the Wayback Machine, tinkering with router settings, and futzing with firewalls.
In the end, though, I got it working, and I wanted to share my approach here in case any other poor soul finds themselves in a similar situation.
1. Allow the application to access your network through Windows Defender. This is kind of a no-brainer, but of course, it won't work if you don't. When you first run the game, it should prompt you to confirm whether to allow it through the firewall, so there's hardly anything to this step.
2. Your network interface priority must be configured so that your active network has highest priority. This was what caused my problems: I had previously configured the laptop so that ethernet would have higher priority than wireless. (Dear Microsoft Engineers: Why would anyone want that the other way around?) This was the root cause of the machines not being able to see each other in the game, even when unused network adapters were disabled. The specific thing to change is the metric of the network interface. You have to drill pretty deep down into settings, kind of like this:
- Network Adapters
- Properties of your network adapter
- Properties of TCP/IP v4
- Advanced Properties
- Metric
Really thanks a lot yo make happy i spend 4 hours and you have the real answer
ReplyDelete