LAN modus and local IRC server

[mpielke]

Good morning,

first of all I have to admit that cncnet is a great work! I have been playing red alert in the late 1990s as a teenager and it is fun to play the same game with my kids now nearly 25 years later... I am currently upgrading my kids' computers from WinXP to Win10 and while red alert still runs fine on Win10, there is one minor issue that I am trying to get around now:

The LAN cnc irc server (which is started when selecting the LAN modus on the launcher and no other server is running on the LAN) requires admin priviledges to be run. Now I do not want to grant these rights to my kids user accounts and I do not want to give the admin password to them for obvious reasons. One workaround would be to use the online mode whichs runs fine or to start red alert without the launcher but I am trying to fix this issue for me to benefit from the great work of the cncnet lobby.

I do have a local IRC server up and running which I can use to connect using the online-modus (by setting the server in the server file). But I would like to set this server to be used when seleting the LAN-mode. The local IRC server I have is not the one from cnc as I have set it up on a small linux home server - I am not able to use the cnc irc server there as I do not want to change this linux system significantly (no .net, no mono, no wine). The current irc server is running in a docker image which works great without altering the system itself.

So the question is: how do I tell the cncnet5 application to connect to a certain irc server (the local irc server) when selecting LAN mode?

Best regards

Martin

[FunkyFr3sh]

Your solution should actually work fine, just connect to a local server in online mode. The games are peer-to-peer, that means you will still be playing a LAN game like this (hover over the players nickname in a game room, ping should be 0).

 

The LAN server requires a firewall inbound rule on windows, otherwise no one could connect to it, hence why it requires admin rights. You can just run it once as admin and allow it in the firewall or you can also add the firewall rule on your own. Afterwards you could force it to run as invoker via a compat mode:

 

[FunkyFr3sh]

11 minutes ago, mpielke said:

Just out ouf curiosity: would there be a way to force cncnet5.exe to connect to a certain (on local network but not the included one) IRC server when starting in LAN mode?

I.e. when starting in Online mode it would normaly connect to gamesurge unless overruled by server.ini in one of the subdirectories - is there a similar way for starting in LAN mode to override the start of the included server but connect to another IRC server?

regards

Martin

 

Nope, you can't specify the server in LAN mode, CnCNet will search for a LAN server in your network automatically. It would be possible, kinda, but you would need to write a few lines of code to answer the broadcasts.

[mpielke]

Thanks for the reply ... the hint with the registry entry just works fine so the included LAN IRC server runs without the UAC query on a normal user account! I need to remember this when coming across UAC queries on other games...

Just out ouf curiosity: would there be a way to force cncnet5.exe to connect to a certain (on local network but not the included one) IRC server when starting in LAN mode?

I.e. when starting in Online mode it would normaly connect to gamesurge unless overruled by server.ini in one of the subdirectories - is there a similar way for starting in LAN mode to override the start of the included server but connect to another IRC server?

regards

Martin

[hgjcool]

LAN modus use IRC server, we need it too.