Congrats on hitting those user numbers and the magazine articlse - all very cool! I look forward to seeing this project progress.
Quote:
UPnP doesn't always work perfectly, is not necessarily helpful for network savvy users, and will only ever be used by players who host a game. The plugin itself crashes on some systems unless a certain Microsoft C++ redistributable is installed, and this crash happens on game startup, even though many users wouldn't have needed to use it.
It's extremely useful, for sure, but causes enough problems that it could have users give up on KarBOOM without even being able to try it if it crashes on startup.
With these in mind, the next version of KarBOOM will not use the UPnP plugin, but will come with a separate application that does to let the user open and close ports. The plan is for the player to be able to launch this application from KarBOOM when setting up a host (which will use command line options to set appropriate default values); if the application crashes, it won't take KarBOOM down with it.
I find it works fine on some of my machines. But on my new windows 7 64bit, freshly installed, it doesn't crash the game but it doesn't open the ports either(defaults to the "no upnp enabled router" error). Even though this router works fine with upnp on other computers.
Since I need a similar solution to Silas. I am willing to pay you to license your work for use in Silas if you can get this working solid in Karboom? Something like this is very important to let users easily host games.
I am also wondering, what errors have users told you about your current upnp config and startup crashes? All the information helps as I really need a solid solution for my game or I might just have to retract to the dark ages of making users open ports themselves. Which I really don't want to do.
