Had a thought the other day and tried it out before I gave up.  I cant see why it wouldnt work, so maybe others could figure it out (unless its disabled somehow in the game!!) if I tell you what I did:

 

I set-up a VPN server on my LAN at home and my friend connected to my network from his house fine.  He was assigned a local IP address and I could ping and browse files on his machine!!

 

We then though of simply opening Empire at War and trying the LAN option as theoretically he is on the same network now.... BUT we couldnt see each other in the LAN lobby

 

Anyone else experimented with VPNs to try and get a LAN game working?  Or is this not possible?  I would LOVE it if this worked as I've only ever managed to get a few games working through the Gamespy method.  This would mean my friends and I could play a LAN game, but without any of them having to bring their machines round

 

Over to you guys....

yeah ive tried..

the frist day we tried using gamespy.. no luck.. so we tried this.. it hink we got it to work 2 times

Depending on your setup it may not be forwarding udp packets or broadcast packets (udp is what the game uses, and broadcast packets are need for the games to find each other).  Check out the configuration/documentation.

yeah ive tried..

the frist day we tried using gamespy.. no luck.. so we tried this.. it hink we got it to work 2 times

 

Did you get it to work via the VPN?  Did you use the built-in VPN system in windows xp?

 

SirNuke - What ports do the broadcast and UDP packets use for the game?

we used a program to set it up since i cant do that

and what we did is disable our internet when we got into the game so it would detect the programs ip.. then connect to the internet.. .. i forgot exactly how. .and the program did the routing to his computer.. he had no firewal. straight internet. and i had everything DMZ'ed to me

SirNuke - What ports do the broadcast and UDP packets use for the game?

 

It's not ports, different types of communication.

 

Somewhat Basic Networking:

Packets: Sections of data.

TCP: Communication that most of the Internet uses, since it checks to make sure all packets are recieved, and resends lost ones (this is completely independant of programs, and is implemented by the Operating System).

UDP: Much faster (less laggy to be more precise) than TCP since it doesn't check if packets are lost and instead the programs (in this case EaW) need to be able to handle lost data.  Since a majority of important programs use TCP, some VPNs might block UDP packets.

Broadcasts: Packets sent out that have no specific desitination, just that all LAN computers to recieve it.  This is how EaW and other computer games 'find' games.  Some VPNs are set up so they don't forward these.

 

What VPN server/client software are you using?

http://www.hamachi.cc/

 

.. their forums also have a topic on how people got it to work