Connecting in Multiplayer

[SonicTitan]

Finally convinced my brother to buy AI War (he doesn't play RTS's, generally). For whatever reason, I can't get him to connect to my game as a client. His screen just says "connecting to server" endlessly, and never connects. We're using the same ports, turned our firewalls off, and all the rest. Is there something I'm missing? I'm a bit of a networking noob, but this is frustrating. I can't connect to his either, though when I'm acting as client, it acts like his game doesn't even exist.

Any ideas?

[keith.lamothe]

Hmm, firewalls are a common issue, but if those are off...

Are you in the same building, behind the same router?  That is, are you dealing with private IPs or public IPs?  One way to tell is to run ipconfig from the command line and compare that with what comes up if you browse to http://www.whatismyip.com/ ; if they're different your computer is probably reporting a private IP.  If your brother gets exactly the same IP on whatismyip then you're presumably both behind the same router and can direct connect via your private IPs (as reported by ipconfig).

[x4000]

Sometimes there is more than one firewall running on your machine, and you might not even know it, for instance.  For example, I've seen folks that were intentionally using Zone Alarm, but also had the Windows Firewall running without really knowing it, and then also had another firewall from the Norton Security Suite that they didn't even know existed, etc.  Sometimes it's as simple as something like that, but otherwise Keith's comments would be the first steps.