Xbox 360, Hamachi, and long-distance LANs

CmdrFly

CmdrFly

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Cmdr Fly
Situation: Xbox in Vancouver, Xbox in Prince George. 1000km apart. We want to make them work together as if they're on a local network, so that if I host a LAN game of Gears it will show up in PG as a LAN game.

Hamachi: 3rd-party software designed with this sort of idea in mind, however intended strictly for computers and not so much an Xbox. Basically it creates a VPN tunnel between you and your peers, puts everyone on the same subnet, and allows LAN communications.

Thus far: one computer on each side of the connection is running Hamachi and operating as the VPN server. I have a static route to his subnet, and he has a static route to mine. We can ping each other's local IPs with no problem.

Xbox config: static IPs. Gateway points to the VPN server, DNS points to our respective routers. With this setup, the Xboxes have connectivity to Xbox Live though we can't test if they have connectivity to the other guys' network. Presumably yes, since the computers can ping long-distance by private IPs (192.168.x.x).

Problem: Games don't show up on LAN. This is where I'm lost - when Gears or any game looks for a LAN game, does it broadcast to subnet.255 or does it listen for broadcasts at subnet.255? Or does it instead multicast to subnet.254?

IP scheme:
Me: 192.168.0.0/24
Him: 192.168.0.128/24 - I know the subnet is off, this was required

It seems to me that, if these games do indeed use broadcast addresses to find/publish LAN games, that Hamachi is not passing the broadcast across our VPN.

Anyone have thoughts / ideas / critique? We're trying to avoid using Xbox Live since we only really play against each other. This should also help immensely with lag.
 
CmdrFly said:
Anyone have thoughts / ideas / critique? We're trying to avoid using Xbox Live since we only really play against each other. This should also help immensely with lag.
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A better solution... Just use Xbox live. You'll still have the lag depending on your friends connections to whatever "LAN" program you're trying to use. It looks to me like you're trying to set up a private server, in essence, and there really is no point in it considering what most private servers are used for. What you need to do is just play player matches and kick everyone who's not on your A list to play with and just have fun with your friends. Much simpler solution and frees up all that work and thought to do other things with. Also know, Gears has a fucked up, realllllly fubared, hit box so things you might think are lag, i.e. bullets to the face going through heads without hitting, are not.
 
Strid said:
A better solution... Just use Xbox live. You'll still have the lag depending on your friends connections to whatever "LAN" program you're trying to use. It looks to me like you're trying to set up a private server, in essence, and there really is no point in it considering what most private servers are used for. What you need to do is just play player matches and kick everyone who's not on your A list to play with and just have fun with your friends. Much simpler solution and frees up all that work and thought to do other things with. Also know, Gears has a fucked up, realllllly fubared, hit box so things you might think are lag, i.e. bullets to the face going through heads without hitting, are not.
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But then you need to pay for the Premium service, wheras rigging it to a LAN is free play.
 
I will not submit! Using XBLive would be the simple, sensible solution. Me & this guy are nerds who refuse to surrender to Microsoft's default configs. They must not prevail. Plus the monthly fee thing, seems pointless if we're only doing small games amongst buddies.

Sounds like a restriction in Hamachi thus far. Our static routes are IP-based, whereas LAN game searches are (I believe) ARP-based. Haven't tried putting both ends of the communication in the same workgroup, but since the problem is with the Xboxes (PCs communicate fine) I doubt the workgroup thing will work.
 
Chasym said:
and 50 bucks a year for live is a steal. its cheap as hell and its worth it.
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QFT. They have already come out with 2 new maps for gears (free download) and another few should be coming out pretty damn soon (should be free too). So content downloading is bomb, not to mention all the demos you can get. Also its just nice to be able to jump online and find a game if you want to play some gears but your bros are gone. Like Chas said, 50 bucks is nothin for xbox live. I used to think it was gay too but now with the 360 and that i play more online, mostly gears, i like it alot more.
 
If it was my Xbox, I'd be inclined to do Live. Sounds worth it. But I'm just the nerd they came to with their problem; I don't own an Xbox and the one on "my" network belongs to my roomie.

I'll check out XBoxconnect, never heard of it before. Thanks for the link.
 
XBL is so worth it, back when they released XBL you could get away with free XBL accounts on expired credit cards. After your account was expired it would continue to try carding a expired CC. They eventually fixed it tho. I tryed it on XBL on 360 and it worked but they sent me multiple emails and finally after 3months they said they were canceling the account and finally shut it down. They now want money to recover that account but I said screw that and...ebay.com had XBL cards for $30.

$50 for a 1yr membership is not asking alot. Essentially at one point they were using it in Iraq so people could communicate alot easyier and cheaper then using long distant call fees. If $50 a yr is a rip off then $13 for this game a month is a total waste.
 
It's not only a match making service like I pointed out in my last post. Its used for distributing content as well, such as updates, demo, trailers and other things. I think they even have HD movie rentals on live now which apperently is doing very well. Also its a great communication tool. I play FFXI on pc but if i know people who play on Xbox i can jump on live and voice chat with em.

It is still however at the core a matchmaking service as you said, but a damn good one at that. I love being able to hop on, or goto xbox.com and see what friends of mine are online and if so what games they are playing. I can be like "oh hey bobs on rainbow six and no one is really playing gears, i guess ill jump on R6 for a bit."

I think all of that is well worth around 5 bucks a month.
 
It may be worth 5 a month but I think that in the end.. demos should be free and matchmaking should be free and updates should be free, trailer should be free, just like for every PC game that's ever existed. Why it's charged for on Live I have no idea.

Expansions on the other hand... additional content has a value, assuming there isn't extra charges for it besides the 50 a year.
 
Firestreak said:
It may be worth 5 a month but I think that in the end.. demos should be free and matchmaking should be free and updates should be free, trailer should be free, just like for every PC game that's ever existed. Why it's charged for on Live I have no idea.

Expansions on the other hand... additional content has a value, assuming there isn't extra charges for it besides the 50 a year.
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demos are free.Updates are free. unless its a map sometimes. Trailers are free. Silver accounts which are free can access this content, But gold accounts get it earlier than silver.
Paid content is in stuff like movie rentals, gamer tiles, themes, some bonus content for some games, and arcade games.
 
yeh but it will be hardly as stable or nice, The lan programs are always have 10X more lag than anything, when i used it for mod games it was horrendous.
 
Only game I know of that charges for extra content over Live are the things for Oblivion. Ofcourse, you have to pay for those for PC as well.

I'd rather pay for a matchmaking service than get some low quality garbage one.
 
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Firestreak said:
So a serious question I have is... if you could get matchmaking free with silver, would you pay for gold?
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How can you even begin to call the Live service matchmaking while you defend your precious Second Life comming PSN "Home" to the death? You're going mad aren't you? Making no sense and all this good stuff.

Get the hell outta here, go back to your little shit turned PS3 sucks thread, and spank to the backs of your Blu-Rays there. If you wanna say something about this, copy and paste it over there, this isn't the place for you to be jelous of us Live users with gold accounts.

Cmdr, sorry. Anyway, to you, I see. I figured you were trying to just toy around and all but I just wanted to present a more sensible idea incase you were not.
 
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