Help me play Quake 3 Arena over a simple LAN with my son

Factual Questions
1

Feeling kind of frustrated at this point as my normal goof around unitl you understand it problem solving methodology is not working in this circumstance. Games run fine on both PCs in single player mode, but I can’t parse how to get them to “see” each other over the simple home LAN so we can do multiplayer.

Son’s PC running Win ME hooked to network via wire to router/switch

Dads PC running Win XP Pro hooked to network via wire to router/switch

Network is a basic WRT54G Linksys wireless/wired router + 4 port hub-switch with another switch/hub attached to it to allow more than 4 wired connections. Works fine. WAN port of router is connected to cable modem to all all connected PC broadband net access. This also works fine.

Under multiplayer and network option in Q3 Arena I’ve tried all sorts of settings but can’t seem to get the games to “see” each other over the network.

Any suggestions appreciated. Step by step instructions especially
appreciated.

2

Can the XP machine see the ME machine via “My Network Places” on the desktop?

If not, IIRC, there is a network wizard with XP which will set up an ME machine to do so.

3

One thing to check is to make sure Internet Connection Firewall (under the Advanced tab of the network connection properties) is disabled.

4

astro, I’m guessing that Quake 3 wants a working TCP/IP connection to play over a network. I haven’t set up this particular game but that’s usually the way. I’m guessing you can also play over other protocols like IPX but I’d advise sticking to TCP/IP.

Is either of the machines running Zone Alarm? That would explain the disability to connect.

Can each machine “ping” the other? Go into command prompt on each, and type “ipconfig” - that will give you the IP address. It should be 10.something.something.something for a home network (192.168.something.something is also another common one). For a private network, 10.* or 192.* are the norms, but it can be anything.

Assuming you have each machine’s IP address, can each machine “ping” the other? Go to command prompt again from one machine and type

ping xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx

where xxx… is the IP address of the other machine which you got from ipconfig.

If you can ping, Quake 3 should be good to go for multiplayer - pick one of the machines to be the server, then go to the other machine and tell it to connect to the server’s IP address.

Good luck and happy fragging :slight_smile:

5

Pick a machine for your server. On that machine, go to Multiplayer, and hit space to stop the game refresh. Then click on Create, and pick the map you wanna play. Hit next, and change the settings on that screen to whatever you want, just make sure dedicated is set to No. Then click on Fight. That does it for the server.

Now, to get on the server from another machine, go to multiplayer, and select local servers. Your other computurs server should show up in the game list. If it doesn’t, you can try hitting Specify and manually enter the IP address of the other machine.

Make sure that both computers are running the same version of Quake 3.