Hi all! I'm still alive.
I recently unearthed my copy of Warcraft II, which is awesome. I've also made a slew of multiplayer scenarios, which is also awesome. What's less awesome is, while I can play other people over LAN, I have no good way to play against someone remotely.
I can play over LAN thanks to
this thing which emulates IPX, but there's no way to get it to communicate with other networks out-of-the-box. Also the source code isn't a complete mess, but, it's not exactly a joy to read through either.
So, to solve this problem, I've started writing something in Java which can take the UDP packets the IPXWrapper spits out and transmit them to another network(s). So far I can intercept packets the IPXWrapper broadcasts and then rebroadcast them on the remote network and vice-versa. This may be enough, if it gives the IPXWrapper instances the information they need to route packets between the two networks (I'll know whether or not this is the case later today), but it's possible I may have to find a way to intercept packets from the private sockets for each IPXWrapper instance (ie each running instance of Warcraft on the network). I haven't had a chance to fully test this thing yet.
I'm telling all of you this because I know some of you here will be better at writing something like this than me. Network programming isn't exactly something I'm an expert in (I had one class in college). That said, anyone have any advice or know of something I'm not accounting for? Would anyone like to help with this?
I can send people the source code if they want it.