Can't Connect over LAN

[Tzarro]

Hello,

 

One of the things I have been most looking forward to with this game is the opportunity to play-test it with my buddies. By the time I managed to get them interested of course, the Kickstarter had already ended, so all I have is my one key to work with.

 

I tried using my account to be able to play with my brother over LAN, but whenever he tries to join, he gets an error message stating "player 'xxx' is already logged in" and gets kicked back to the menu. Is the player identity as far as the game is concerned bound to the game key? The Steam ID? Something else?

 

I would very much like to know the mechanism behind this error and if there is any way around it. The multiplayer is the most attractive part of this game for me, and I would love to be able to get my friends and family interested in it and work towards hunting down multiplayer-related bugs during this beta testing phase.

 

Thanks,

 

Tzarro

[RandomCommander]

It does indeed seem linked, sadly. How did you manage to use your own account to have multiple instances of Avorion working?

 

However the method, you could try changing the name of your steam account every time you log into the Avorion LAN, but that does indeed get tedious. Sadly, this is the best method I can suggest so far.

[Tzarro]

Thank you for the reply RandomCommander!

 

Once we discovered the error message in the client log, changing the Steam name was one of thr first things we tried. We even verified that it showed as being changed in the game options and options.ini file, but it still gave the same error.

 

Since we are sitting next to each other, I just had one computer using my account in offline mode while the other computer had my account logged in online. It would be understandable of this did not permit online play, but I have used this often to play other LAN games at my house, so I am curious where the issue is.

[koonschi]

The client identifies to the server with its steam ID, which is steam account bound and won't change when you change the steam account name. This is mostly for security reasons (Enables the server to use VAC, online lists, reliable identification of users, so no account stealing etc.) but it also makes the server nickname independent which is a huge plus.

 

I'd say, since you're sitting next to each other, you could try sharing the game via Steam family sharing. If you both play with Steam in offline mode, that should make it work. I believe it would use the Steam IDs of each user.

[Tzarro]

Hello koonschi,

 

Thank you very much for replying to this thread. Steam Family Sharing was actually the first method we wanted to try, however the way that this beta for Avorion is registered in Steam, it does not appear under "My Shared Games."

 

Would there potentially be some specific way to tag this release of the game in Steam to enable family sharing? If not, would it be possible to add a LAN-only hosting option such as "make open to all players" that disables this particular check?

 

Sincere thanks again for your assistance,

 

Tzarro

 

 

[koonschi]

Since the game is not released on steam yet, I'm afraid you're out of luck right now. This check is done by steam on a level that Avorion doesn't know about, so I don't have any influence on this.

[RandomCommander]

Sadly it looks like I have to agree with Koonschi, the only thing to do is wait. The Devs and the Beta Testing community are working hard on helping the game along to release, however! The wait should not be too long now.