Web Server for AoE 1, 2 and 3 DE supporting LAN multiplayer 100% offline

Posted by apitman 4/2/2025

Web Server for AoE 1, 2 and 3 DE supporting LAN multiplayer 100% offline(github.com)

442 points | 92 commentspage 2

CursedSilicon 4/3/2025|

Does anything like this exist for the original Age of Empires games?

Battle.Net has "PVPGN" that covers Diablo 2 up through Warcraft 3, and the Westwood Online games (ish) but searching for an AoE equivalent turned up nothing

matsemann 4/3/2025||

I've LANed them "online" many moons ago by using software that made a virtual lan that we all installed and managed to find each other ingame. "Hamachi" I think?

apitman 4/3/2025|||

Check out Voobly. That seems to be a pretty big hub for people playing the original games, I think mostly patched versions of the originals with some nice features.

lightingthedark 4/3/2025||

I believe the originals just supported offline LAN play. I remember getting my friend to have his modem dial my modem so we could play together, no Internet connection required.

red_admiral 4/3/2025||

From memory, there was a patch that added a new-fangled option "internet" as well as LAN play. I remember the days of fiddling with port forwarding and then calling a friend over the telephone to read out my IP address for them to type in.

typh00n 4/3/2025||

We tried this at a LAN-Party in December and couldn't get it to run. I am happily trying it again for the next LAN-Party. Nice to see development on this project. :-)

apitman 4/3/2025|

Curious what your use case is as opposed to using the official LAN support? For me, I'm trying to get it working completely without internet, ie on a plane. It's so sad to me that built-in LAN requires an internet connection.

typh00n 4/3/2025||

not all participants had an official copy of the game.

while i think that it is well worth it, i am not the person who pressures other people to buy things for a single-digit-attendence one-time get-to-gether LAN-party.

apitman 4/3/2025||

What is the best option for playing LAN games over the internet these days?

Hamachi appears to still be a thing, but I would prefer something open source.

Tailscale sadly doesn't support multicast, which I'm assuming most games use for LAN discovery.

ZeroTier maybe?

ziofill 4/3/2025||

I'm not sure I understand: does one still need a copy of the game to play or is it self-contained?

pjmlp 4/3/2025||

I guess a few brownie points for making the case for compiled managed languages in games, nice work.

vkaku 4/3/2025||

Excellent.

This seems to work with the Remasters as well. Even better :)

Please add AoM support as well.

nurettin 4/3/2025||

Experimental

    * AIX

I wonder how they got an AIX.

mrweasel 4/3/2025|

Emulator maybe? It's a weird and intersting platform to target, but I suspect that it's because Go supports it, so it might not be to much hassle. On the other hand reading the article from yesterday regarding porting Tailscale, it might be more involved that I imagine.

nurettin 4/3/2025||

Yeah go supports AIX. In fact I remember it having bash, and a package manager so it felt like home. AS400 was an interesting platform. I was fascinated with their almost assembly like programs, alien UIs and decades old hardware. Almost got nerd sniped. Unfortunately, I was told to use java. The jar I tested on linux worked perfectly the first time, so I couldn't even learn anything.

486sx33 4/3/2025||

So how can I play AoE 3 the war chiefs online ?

CSMastermind 4/3/2025|

If you're okay buying it then the definitive edition is on sale with active servers and includes War Chiefs among other things.

There were some questionable changes to the names of things to make them more politically correct but the game play is better than ever.

bigstrat2003 4/3/2025||

The censorship really annoys me. I would've happily paid for the definitive edition (even though I already own the game), but I'm not willing to support a rerelease which changes stuff about the original game like that. If the devs want to make sure their new content is politically correct then fine, but changing the original content isn't cool.

whatever1 4/3/2025||

Voulomai

the__alchemist 4/3/2025|

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