I was contacted yesterday by Scott Kevil, who seems to be the leading mind on a program called GameRanger. This is how he described the program in the email to me:
On your profile, which presumably works for all games, (it was implied in the install but I don't think implicitly stated) you can actually have a friends list. These friends you can privately message, so as to make creating a game together fairly easy. Also, there is a lobby chat that appears to be for all the games so you could theoretically even get people who were planning to play a different game to come get a game with you or vice versa. There also seems to be specific lobbies for different genres of games, so the creators of the program evidently put a lot of thought into making it nice and streamlined.
Scott Kevil also said that people at GameReplays really appreciated the tool and that our own Age of Empires Heaven loved it too. Age of Empires Heaven'snews and review rates it fairly highly. Despite not yet testing the claims that you need not port forward to host/join, but having it installed and seeing how simple creating a game would be I feel fairly confident that this could be a very useful tool for getting games going on Empires. Especially so for forum parties.
"It seems to me the humour of Sails is so dry you could strike a match on it and it would be the humour that caught fire." - Friend of Old
I just thought I'd let you know about a new PC online gaming service I've created called GameRanger. Basically, it makes it quick and easy to play your friends online with Empires: Dawn of the Modern World (and demo), as well as most of the Empire Earth games.I have installed it and it, so far, seems to be a fairly cool program. It was a quick install, easy set up for the account, and I can see fairly easily that joining and hosting a game should be incredibly easy to do. However, I have not yet had an opportunity to actually try hosting or joining another person's game with the tool so whether it works more than simply the GUI I can cannot testify.
GameRanger has full lobby support for over 500 different games and demos (including Empires), without the hassles and headaches that usually happen with network connections (eg. routers & firewalls) -- the bane of RTS games.
I'm really excited to be releasing it, and hope it helps the community by allowing people to play that were unable to until now due to problems with opening ports, etc.
You can download it atwww.GameRanger.com
Please give it a try. Most people that have, loved it. GameRanger was released a bit over a week ago, and the official press release is here:http://www.GameRanger.com/about/press/64/
On your profile, which presumably works for all games, (it was implied in the install but I don't think implicitly stated) you can actually have a friends list. These friends you can privately message, so as to make creating a game together fairly easy. Also, there is a lobby chat that appears to be for all the games so you could theoretically even get people who were planning to play a different game to come get a game with you or vice versa. There also seems to be specific lobbies for different genres of games, so the creators of the program evidently put a lot of thought into making it nice and streamlined.
Scott Kevil also said that people at GameReplays really appreciated the tool and that our own Age of Empires Heaven loved it too. Age of Empires Heaven's
"It seems to me the humour of Sails is so dry you could strike a match on it and it would be the humour that caught fire." - Friend of Old
[This message has been edited by GoSailing (edited 11-26-2008 @ 12:30 PM).]