Good day! I am an old school player of Outlaws / MSN Gaming Zone from back in the day. Also a previous MSN Gaming Zone sysop (miss those days!).

Anyway, reason I came here to post this was because we (our discord community) would love to play on Voobly however the 'Game diagnostics tool' is unable to recognize the GOG / Steam "versions" of this game.

I understand that the staff are very busy and I would like to volunteer my time to work on this problem. I have some coding and reverse engineering experience (modding old games etc).

If that is a possibility that I would be allowed to assist, what would be the process required for me to help?

Regards,
Nathan

Welcome back fellow Member Plus. Those GOG games often break the original game and won't allow to play on Voobly. I'd prefer that we could get the original game working... in order to achieve this, who could give me the original game of Outlaws from the late 90's?

Thanks for the quick response! Long shot... Do you ever remember a fella named NibblesNBits? That + was freaking amazing. Always on top of every incident that came in and was a good mentor to me when I was just starting out.

Anyway I did some searching in our community and I came across a couple of CD files. I uploaded them to my little server,

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There are also some patches that go with it too but I have to track those down.

Users have tried getting the CD versions to work before and GOG/Steam was just much more appealing with the pre-work (nglide) completed already and allowed for a lot more new users. GOG is what most of us run as it's 'olwin.exe' matches the CD versions whereas Steam's 'olwin.exe' is several bytes larger (I assume encryption ? but I never really looked into it)

How does Voobly search for outlaws (or any game really) to verify a version? (I'll understand if you can't answer that for privacy reasons)

Let me know if I can be of any help

We use the Direct Play GUID in registry.
GOG removes them from all their games and changes the game's binary which removes the ability to use the host / player join parameters. We will probably end up figuring out, how to get the game working again using the original CDs you linked above and then writing a self-help article that explains the community how to install the game, so they can play on Voobly. We are doing this for AOC for the past 15 years as well.

Good old times, I loved our Canadian Tech Team. Until a few years ago I was still in touch with Dale / Cyberdad and from time to time I have a chat with CanEh / Gary.

I also brought back MPHQ: [You must login to view link]

Interesting, I didn't know that.

I'll need to research this registry / DirectPlay ID a little more.

Would it be possible to bypass the DirectPlay ID? Outlaws can use command line switches to join and host games. What we have done in the past is create 3rd party launchers to make it easier to download user made maps and launch the game. In fact I have a discord bot that utilizes the command line switching to host games.

For instance, to launch a network game using winsockets,

olwin.exe /netdriver lecwsock.dll

or directplay (which we don't use anymore since not everyone can use NAT traversal. We have been using ZeroTier's software and it works pretty awesome)

olwin.exe /netdriver lecdp3.dll

and to join,

olwin.exe /netdriver lecwsock.dll /join ipaddress (I have to test the ipaddress section again, its been a long time)

Let me know what you think, thanks!

What I need are the launch parameters for host, as well as the launch parameter for players -- if not the same as host's launch parameter. If you don't want to use NAT-T, that's fine, keep in mind thought, that we have to write a proper self-help article so new players can find it in the welcome message of the game lobby and easily install the game. If ZeroTier already works with GOG we perhaps should stick to this game release.

Are there any players in the Outlaws community that would step up as voluntary staff that would interact with the community? In the past we have made the experience, even though we have spend countless hours into setting up a new game or fixing an existing game, none of the players have shown up on Voobly to play this game. Really frustrating and it literally has happened with every game we added in the past and the person requesting it disappeared at some point.

Dang, no way! I recall a CyberDad. Not sure if it was the same guy but probably! That's awesome. I started out as !CreatureNo9 when MSN had the entry level positions for those that weren't 18 yet. (I was 16). Then MSN later on removed the entry level and just automatically upgraded everyone to a +, so overnight at 17 I became a sysop.. I just kept my mouth shut and did the role lol.

Dude, I saw that! Thanks for bringing that back! If you ever need more members for some helping I can make myself available.

Did you guys build these lobbies / website / memberplus from scratch or were you able to get some of the code?

I am impressed

Voobly is soon 20 years old and every single line of code was written from scratch. I brought back MPHQ in 2015 when we started our own Member Plus program on Voobly based on the good old MSN Gaming Zone protocols and values.

We have been noticing a trend with ISP's, european especially that are double NAT and it's a pain in the neck getting ports forwarded. My ISP (I live in northern Alberta) uses a VPN into a major telco so I have to additionally for my own static ip to get NAT. We just gave up when we found ZeroTier.

Here is a site that I host for a friend of mine that outlines the ZT, [You must login to view link]

There is also another emulation software, DREAMM that works with the CD's. I haven't extensively tried it, but I have installed Dreamm then ran the GOG outlaws from it and it worked.

Absolutely. I would join up as voluntary and I can think of 3 or more people that would help out as well from our community.

100%. I know the feeling. I have made some software and it doesn't get used, gives me a tear in my eye lol.

We are relatively active in our discord group. Usually a few games every couple days. Mind you, there isn't a whole lot of players - 8-10 in a match. There are probably 40-50 that rotate in and out over the course of a year.

Feel free to check it out [You must login to view link]

DAMN! That's frigging impressive. Well damn done on bringing back the experience. I can't imagine the feat that would have been to take that project on

I haven't seen a double NAT setup on ISP side in Europe yet, though I have seen that many times with Indian ISPs. Anyway, our experience with NAT-T and only having to forward a single port was good and has served us well in the past 13+ years.

ZeroTier reminds me of Hamachi and I see privacy, as well as security issues with such a solution. Anyway, please register at MPHQ and post [You must login to view link]. Thanks.

I have only really tested extensively with a friend from Italy. He had 2 internet service providers (in the process of switching), both wouldn't allow port forwarding. We tried a few different vpn options, such as Hamachi and wireguard. They would work on 1 ISP but not the other. When we tried ZT, it worked on both of his ISP's so we stuck with it. I can't remember the name of the service provider for his double NAT but it iirc it was a reseller.

I haven't looked at your NAT-T yet but I would not be opposed. I tried originally to DLL inject Outlaws and successfully had traffic routing through one port but I still needed forwarding so I sidelined that project.

Will do. I just registered Once I get home from work I'll sit down and do the enrollment.

Thanks for your help. Let me know how I can be of assistance.

Nathan

Hi Chris,

Since you put me on the path of the DirectPlay ID's I have done quite a bit more digging into Outlaws.

So far this is what I have found...

I ran linux + wine + CD Outlaws (it would fail during setup). So then I ran linux + wine + gog setup to place the files (success). This allowed me to install the original Outlaws patches afterwards while I watched what was happening in the registry.

Note:
CD version of outlaws contains a SETUP.INS file. Inside there are registry values corresponding with directplay. The directplay GUID is set to "GUID". It isn't until patch 2.0 where the GUID is now registered as {014616a0-0e53-11d1-bb72-444553540000} . As well, in GOG's Outlaws directory there are *.CMD files that contain registry values, however they missed the reg keys from SETUP.INS

On my windows machine, I pushed the registry of the original outlaws 2.0 (I still can't install original outlaws on win 11 so I am using the GOG). Now I can join the High Noon lobby but when I click on "Host", Voobly crashes with no error message. I feel like I am getting closer to a working product though!

Would you have any ideas of anything I could try?


Here is the registry values from the CD version SETUP.INS, modified for my GOG installation,

Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DirectPlay\Applications]

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\DirectPlay\Applications\Outlaws]
"CommandLine"="/lobby"
"CurrentDirectory"="c:\\gog games\\outlaws"
"File"="olwin.exe"
"Filename"="OLWIN.EXE"
"Guid"="{014616a0-0e53-11d1-bb72-444553540000}"
"Path"="c:\\gog games\\outlaws"


Note : CommandLine = "/lobby" - this /lobby doesn't work on my VM's or windows when run from the commandline. It gives an error, "GetConnectionSettings: LECDP3 : This application is not properly lobbied". I tried changing the value to "/host" but Voobly still crashes.

This should do the trick:
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