Multiplayer Setup For Myth II

(this article is part of jason_ac's Intro To Myth guide. Visit the guide for more info)

Myth offers online and LAN-based multiplayer, for competitive and co-operative play.

Gate of Storms
Gate of Storms.net came online in 2013, and that is currently where most are playing Myth II: Soulblighter. An account is needed to play on GoS.

Crows Bridge
In early 2021, Crows Bridge.net became the latest metaserver to pop up for Myth II. The plugin must be downloaded at the Tain before one can sign up for an account.

GameRanger
GameRanger.com supports both Myth: The Fallen Lords & Myth II for Mac users, but has a much smaller userbase.

Other Servers
If new servers come online, you may learn about them at the Project Magma home page, or by checking their forums.

While players on multiple servers make counting the community size hard, some details are available. A good way of measuring changes to the size of the community over time is by looking at participation in large yearly tournaments which involve a substantial portion of the Myth community. The 2007 Myth World Cup fielded 24 teams, down from a historic high of 96. Additionally, at its multi-player online peak, when the online community still operated from Bungie.net, 10-20 of the online rooms would be full, each containing anywhere from 1-30+ players. Currently, the third-party servers have only a few rooms containing players, generally considerably less than 100 players online at any given point in time.

Bungie.net
When the game was brand-new, the official game server was Bungie.net ("bnet") from Bungie Software. Once the game moved into the phase of being supported by a volunteer dev fan community, other servers took over when bnet was shutdown on March of 2002.

Playmyth
Playmyth.net was a popular server from MythDevelopers that supported all three Myth. It was one of several servers that took over after Bungie.net stopped running. On October 2, 2007, PlayMyth.net was taken offline after it was repeatedly hacked.

Mariusnet
Mariusnet was once the only server to support all three Myth games as well as Marathon, an earlier online game by Bungie. Mariusnet went down for good sometime after early 2014 when the hardware that ran the servers got damaged during a move.

Registration
You do not need to register for Gate of Storms, you can play as a guest user. However, if you register, you can track your play stats, people can message you when you're offline via private message, you can post in the GoS forum, you can play in tournaments, and no one can steal your name and pretend to be you online.

To register, read the GoS FAQ.

Server Sign-in

 * Launch Myth II, choose "Multiplayer Game"
 * Right above the "Login" name box, if the server does NOT say Gate of Storms, then click the "Server" button at the bottom and choose Gate of Storms
 * Login using your ID and password.

You can learn more about the login screen by reading the original Myth II manual or the Myth Starter Guide (although some things in in these sources will be out-of-date).

Once you're logged-in, you can single-click to highlight your name in the player list, click the "Stats" button, and there are a few fields you can fill-out about yourself, if you like.

Servers
Currently (as of early 2021) there are two servers: Gate of Storms and Crows Bridge. If more come online, and you go onto one server and find few people, you may want to check the other server.

The server websites also have ways for you to see who's online without signing-in via Myth. For instance at Gate of Storms, the menu bar control in the far upper right corner will show you who's online in each room lobby.

Server Room Lobbies
Once you're online in a server, you start off in a particular room lobby. If players are in another lobby, you'll have to change lobbies. In the upper left corner is a banner telling you the name of the lobby you're in, how many players are in the lobby, and how many games are in the lobby.

To change lobbies, click and hold anywhere on the lobby banner to see the other lobbies. Click-and-drag your mouse pointer and release it on the lobby you want to switch into.

You can learn more about the multiplayer interface by reading the original Myth II manual or the Myth Starter Guide (although some things in in these sources will be out-of-date).&lt;/nowiki&gt;

The Game List
Games listed with:

o White text: Available for you to join

o Gray text: You can't join because the game is either in-progress, full, or closed to additional players.

o Red text: You can't join [yet?]. It may be a different version of Myth than you, though more likely it's because you are missing an expansion (plugin) that the game requires, either a map or a unit tagset.

If you try to join, you will get a message telling you what plugin you are missing. If you click the small arrow it will search The Tain (but only the Tain, it won't search other file archives) to find that plugin for you and take you to its web page in your browser.

You will then have to download the plugin and install it (which usually just means dropping it into your Myth II:plugins folder).

Autohosting
If the game you're joining is an autohosted game, it means the person hosting the game is not playing. To learn more, read the Autohost article.

Hosting Games
When you are hosting, other players around the world are trying to send Myth game data "addressed" to the Myth program running on your system. Without the proper setup, when the game data arrives at your home, your network doesn't know where to send it to. So it never gets to the copy of Myth running on your computer.

In order for other players to be able to join a game that you are hosting, your firewall and router have to be configured to open "Myth's port" (allow data to come in via that port), and send data coming via that port to the computer on which you're running Myth. "Myth's port" is port number 3453.

I can't tell you exactly how to do that. I don't know exactly how your Internet is setup, what hardware you're using, what OS, etc. Even if I did, I don't know everything (even though I can generally figure-out everything ;) ). But I'll give some general info here. Once you know a bit, perhaps post on the Myth forums the details of your setup, or on a computer tech help forum somewhere.  Hopefully you'll achieve success.

A first step is to know a little about your own network. Do you have a router (you probably do)? It's what routes data between the Internet and all the devices in your home...all the computers, smartphones, gaming consoles, etc.

Is your router built into your modem, or a separate piece of hardware (i.e.--Linksys, Netgear, Apple Airport, Belkin, etc)? etc.

One step might be to call your ISP. Ask them if your modem has a built-in router and/or firewall, and where can you find instructions for working with them. You can explain to them that you need to setup a port forwarding so you can play a game properly. It may be that your modem has neither a router nor firewall built in, so you can just hang-up and read on.

Even if you know your router is separate, calling your ISP can be useful anyway. You may find out about other issues that will cause you problems. Like perhaps they block some data before it even gets to your home.

If the router is a separate piece of hardware, you're probably going to want to find instructions/documentation on how to work with it.

Once you think you have everything set right, you can test it. See Testing Your Setup

Firewall
The firewall issue is often the easiest to fix. And some people don't even have a firewall. If you do have one, then it intentionally blocks most network traffic, to prevent hackers from infiltrating your system. You have to allow Myth data to be passed through to the Myth application.

For many people that have one, their firewall is a Personal firewall, just software that is running on their own personal computer. It could be built-in to your OS, or 3rd party software (Norton, McAfee, CA, etc).

They usually have pretty easy to use interfaces. For instance, in Mac OS X, you'll normally find firewall options in System Preferences:Security:Firewall (or some variation of that). You can just add Myth to your settings as an app that should "Allow incoming connections".

Port Forwarding
A router gives Internet service to all your devices by giving each device on your network a temporary, local IP address. When Myth data comes over the Internet to your home, addressed to port 3453, you need your router to forward that info to your computer running Myth (& only your computer...not your smartphone, etc). You do this by setting up "port forwarding"/"port mapping". In order to do that, the router needs to know "where" your computer is on the network.

Normally your router hands out addresses in a variable (dynamic) fashion. So you can't be sure "where" your computer will end up in your internal network. Unless you change your setup to make sure your computer always has the same address (give it a static, unchanging address). Then you'll be able to tell your router what address to forward port 3453 data to.

There are many ways to do that, some better than others. I'll offer a few ways, but these aren't the only ways.

Address Allocation Method
Pros: This is the best way to do it Cons: Although it's easy to setup, you'll have to research to figure-out how to do it with your router

*IF* your router supports some form of "static allocation" of IP addresses, that can be a great solution (including for laptops). It's just a way of setting-up your router so it always gives the SAME address to your computer everytime. It's easier to setup than the "Static IP Method" below, and it's more flexible, less "fragile". So setup a "static allocation" of address, then setup a port forwarding/mapping.

As an example, if you have an Apple Airport router that isn't too old, it will support "DHCP Reservations", which will do exactly what you want. Learn how to set them up here. Once you have a DHCP Reservation setup, you can now tell your router what address it should forward port 3453 to. As an example, instructions for setting-up port mapping using Airport Utility 6 are at the bottom of this page.

Static IP Method
Pros: This process is pretty well-documented on how to do it Cons: Many. Read below

The good point about going this route is, someone has documented pretty thoroughly how to set it up, no matter what OS or router you're using.

The bad sides are:

It's not good for laptops. It binds your laptop to that 1 network, and you'd have to reconfigure your laptop to use it on wi-fi when you're out traveling.

And whether desktop or laptop, it's a slightly "fragile" setup. If you change the internal setup of your network, you might have to re-do these steps. Or if your ISP changes certain things on its side (like DNS Server address), you'd have to fix your setup. It may never break, or at least not often, but it's a possibility. If it ever does break, your computer may well lose all Internet access until you fix it.

There are a number of steps to set this up. None of them too complicated, but it might feel hard, because there are so many steps.

If you want to try this, follow the advice here. If some of those instructions don't exactly match your setup, hit the forums or Google to figure it out.

The Cross-Your-Fingers Method
Pros: Easiest to setup Cons: Semi-flexible, but when it breaks, fixing it is a pain

If you play on a laptop, you may not want to mess with a static IP setup. And if you have an old router, it may not allow Address Allocation. So what do you do?

If you ALWAYS turn on your router & devices in the same order everyday, your computer should always get the same address everyday. For instance, my old Airport router is at 10.0.1.1, and my computer, which is the first 'Net device I turn on each day (I leave my phone Wi-Fi off until my laptop is on), always has the address of 10.0.1.2.

So, just rely on that, and go ahead and setup a port forwarding/mapping in the router.

The downside is if this ever gets screwed-up (like you accidentally turn on your game console first or something), then Myth hosting may never work again, until you get the addresses fixed. Although at least everything else will still work (including the Internet on your laptop).

When I've had to fix mine, I've had to power-off all other 'Net devices, power cycle the router, temporarily re-configure my laptop to force the desired static address, power cycle the router again, then set the laptop back to DHCP, verify the address is still right, then power-up my other devices.

Testing Your Setup
If you think you have it setup correctly, start hosting a game, then go here and test to see if your game is accessible. Or, slightly less easy, test it here (here you'll have to enter the port #, 3453).

To learn about autohosting, read the Autohost article.

Changing Myth's Port
If you want to have more than 1 computer hosting, they can't all use port 3453. The router is only going to forward that port to 1 computer. But you can have the other computers use a different port, and setup forwarding for that port. To change Myth's port, create a poweruser.txt file in Myth's Preferences folder, and put this in there:

[Net.Hosting]

PortNumber=3454

Use whatever numbers you decide...3454, 3455, etc.