Homeworld: Unbound 0.8 — only the host sets up a port

Homeworld sends every player’s orders to every other player, directly. That is the right design for a home network and it is the wrong one for the internet, where most people cannot be reached from outside without setting something up first.

Through 0.7 that meant every player forwarding ports on their own router to play a game with more than two people in it. Worse, a player on mobile data has no router of their own to configure, so they could not have joined at all.

Anything a player cannot be reached at directly is now passed on by the host instead of being dropped. The host forwards TCP 10500 and UDP 10600, and nobody else configures anything.

The game itself has no idea any of this is happening. It still believes everyone is talking to everyone directly, which is exactly why nothing about how a match plays has changed.

What is tested, and what is not

Two players across the internet works. It was re-tested for this release between a PC on home broadband and a headset on a phone’s mobile data.

More than two has never been tried. Nothing is known to stand in the way of it any more, which is not the same thing as it working — nobody has sat three machines on three different connections and played a game. If you try it, the host still needs those two ports and everyone else should need nothing.

The one limit that has not moved: you still cannot both be on the same home network range. Most routers hand out 192.168.1.x, and if both of you are on it, one of you has to change. It only affects internet play.

Also fixed

Players were addressed by the name their own machine knew itself by, which meant nothing to anyone else. The port a phone network hands out changes constantly, and once more than one player was involved, two of them could not reliably be told apart. Everyone now works out where everyone else actually is from the announcements they were already exchanging, rather than guessing.

It has gone to SideQuest

The app has been submitted to SideQuest and is waiting on approval. The build sitting in review is older than this one — the listing cannot be changed until that first approval goes through, so 0.8 will follow once it does.

Until then, and after it, the releases page is the place to get it.