Myself and a friend just recently reinstalled H&D 2 as well as the Sabre Squadron add-on and was wondering if anyone else here would be interested in doing any cooperative sessions? I figure the best way to go about it is to meet on the SimHQ Teamspeak server and then we can organize the game from there.

Unfortunately H&D 2 Co-op only supports up to 4 players so it will be a first come, first serve basis!

I wouldn't mind having a go as I never played it online. I will have to see whether I have the add-on still and let you know.

Very curious what you think of the MP quality and experience when you get it going. Will you post some observations later?

I've played H&D 2 online a ton of times before and it's really a lot of fun. Unfortunately only the missions that came with the Sabre Squadron add-on support cooperative play. There are also head to head deathmatch modes in H&D 2 but I never cared for trying those. For me, Co-op is the bread & butter of H&D 2 MP.

I do have the SS addon and have installed and patched up to 1.12. Shame it doesn't support widescreen resolutions though like Mafia does.

Thanks for those links newman. I'll grab those missions now.

**Coot walks slowly away with his cold silenced sten dragging pitifully on the ground behind him**

You got H&D2 as well Coot?

And we all know the Delisle is the silenced weapon of choice

Yeah. We tried to get together for coop today but nobody could connect to eachother.

Oh, and where was my invite?

I did some online research and it appears that Windows 7 has an issue with H&D 2 multiplay. H&D 2 uses DirectPlay 8 and apparently Win 7 doesn't like it very much. Something else that we may want to try Coot is for everyone to run H&D 2 in Win XP compatibility mode and see if that works.

Sigh, the pitfalls of trying to play older games on Win 7.

Ok Panzer. Just let me know when you want to try it. I was wondering if we might trying all in the same compatablility mode.

If we get it working we need a fourth man Mace. It would have only been Jedi, Panzer and me so that'd be great if we can get it working and arrange a time that'll work for everyone. Plus having a Brittish fellow on comms will make our experience more authentic.

Yup, it would be awesome to have Mace come on board! I'm going to test out the compatibility thing tomorrow and I'll let you know what happens.

Last night... errr..this morning for me... Eugene and I fired up H&D2 SS. Neither of us could ever see each other's server, and MOST of the servers we saw in the browser didn't let us join (kicked back to the main menu). Maybe they were running the 3rd party maps and we only had the stock maps.

Both of us on XP, BTW.. so it probably wasn't that Windows 7 DPlay thing. We both opened up ports 11001-11003 TCP/UDP on our routers but that didn't seem to help either.

We finally did get into a server running one of the Libya maps and successfully ran around getting ourselves killed. Two others joined the server, who had actually PLAYED the game before and went around completing the objectives.

It ran nicely, though. Graphics dated but not too bad. Kind of like the Original OFP (which we still play and enjoy) and the Rogue Spear generation of the R6 series.

The highlight of my evening was tossing a grenade into a second story window to get a Sniper that had been nailing us. I won't mention the suicide by a similar grenade toss that went short...OOPS I just did.

Any ideas on the connection issues?

EDIT: Saw some other references saying to open ports 11001-11004. Doubt the extra port is causing the problems, but hey, you never know. Often the game selects a random port in the allowed range. The dialog for connecting to a specific IP defaults to 11001 for initial connection, but maybe all 4 are necessary to see a server in the list.

Hope we can get her figured out.

Oh Dear... looks like a common issue with routers:

http://www.hidden-and-dangerous.net/board/index.php/topic,874.0.html

Might be worth exploring the HAMACHI route which has worked well with other problematic games either in TCP/IP mode using HAMACHI IP's or via LAN mode in the HAMACHI virtual network..

Well, rumors of server problems were greatly exaggerated! Tonight newman (aka kramer) and I connected right away and played through a mission. A 3rd random guy joined since I didn't PW protect, and he was a great asset having obviously played before (almost cheating, I say! ) We had a seamless MP experience completing the BREST mission. Lots of fun! Not sure if it was opening the 11004 port or if Eugene was just having some issues on his end the first time.

Anyway... it works and was great fun.

That's great news.
Did you try connecting to any of the open servers? No more getting kicked back to the menu?

I still got kicked out of most of them. Maybe it is a custom vs. stock map thing.

Also, newman doesn't have a router which maybe made a difference. Usually, though, routers cause a problem more when HOSTING rather than joining as a client, and it seemed that I could host just fine.

Maybe that extra port helped, or there was something going on at your end the last time.