Please walk my friend and I through multiplayer, step by step?

[TSED]

A friend of mine bought AVWW tonight when I was all "oh sweet AVWW2 came out" and then described both this and the situation with AVWW2.  We were going to play AVWW1, but we discovered we could not get our games to communicate no matter what we tried.

After the initial bout of "make a server" / "connect via internet or IP address" / "it didn't work" happened, we began googling stuff.  Port forwarding had the exact same problems (though we're not sure if we did that right), so we went and got Hamachi.

After two hours of fiddling with Hamachi, installing the LogMeIn software as well, etc. etc., we had made no progress and he called it a night.  I personally am pretty out of my element in regards to all this internet behind-the-scenery stuff, so I don't even know if I'm describing what we did correctly.

Anyway, would anyone be able to walk us through step by step?  It'd be greatly appreciated!

[Mánagarmr]

Direct IP/Internet
As far as port forwarding goes Portforward is your best guide for everything. Find your router/modem make and forward a port. (Only the one hosting need normally do this, unless the game is peer to peer.)

Once you've forwarded a port, ALL players need to go into their settings in AVWW and change the network port to that port. That tells AVWW to use that port for connecting. After that, it should work.

Hamachi VPN
Hamachi sets up a Virtual Private Network (VPN), or a virtual local network, so once Hamachi is set up and all the players have connected to that network in hamachi, your computers will treat that network as if the computers were sitting on the same LAN. Some games require that Hamachi is the first network adapter, so to do that, do the following:

Go to Control panel. Under "Network and internet" click the "view network status and tasks" now on the left side panel under "Control Panel Home" click "Change adapter settings". You should see Hamachi in this folder. press alt to bring up file menu and under "advanced" click "advanced settings". there u go ... now select hamachi and use the arrow on the right to bring it to the top of the list.

Once that is done, start up AVWW and choose to play on local network (LAN). Either way should work.

[x4000]

Beyond that, just make sure that the games are also allowed Internet access through any software firewalls you have. Sometimes antivirus software has a software firewall that you might not even realize is running.

Also, once you are in hamachi with your adapters properly ordered, make sure that the client tries to connect to the host with the 5.x.x.x IP address that is the hamachi virtual address of the host computer.

[TSED]

Thanks for your help!

We didn't get it today, either, though we know why.  Turns out the port that Hamachi is TRYING to use is closed on my end.  (SSSSHHHHAAAAWWWWWW!)

The plan is to forward that tomorrow, and while I'm at it I might as well forward AVWW's regular ports.  Again, thanks for your help! 

[Mánagarmr]

The plan is to forward that tomorrow, and while I'm at it I might as well forward AVWW's regular ports.  Again, thanks for your help! 

Remember that you can use almost any port in AVWW, as long as you set it up in the options menu.