nat woes.

[valcree]

I've got several husband/wife teams of friends who'd like like to play on my eqemu server. The problem is that most of these players exist behind a nat router. I know that there is usually a way to get a public ip to computers that exist behind any sort of nat. Even if it is nat being maintained by the ISP. I would much rather have the eqemu server be able to handle clients coming from the same ip.

I realize that there's a huge issue with authentication, because login/zoning is currently only being done by ip address. I've put a bit of work into this problem, and I got around that. I have had the same ip address log into different/multiple accounts. I also handle zoning properly, so when a user zones on one account/character they remain on that same account/character after they zone. Those were pretty easy fixes... And it works rather well allowing one person to own multiple accounts..

When I tried to have two clients behind a nat(hence the same external ip) connect the second client experienced huge network lag. I would assume that this is due to packet conflicts between the two connected clients. I know two clients can connect to live even when they are behind nat. I haven't dug into the networking part of eqemu yet... Anyhow I was wondering if you guys could give me an idea of how much of a rewrite it would be to modify the networking to deal with two clients coming from the same ip.

Thanks,
'cree