how to find online players?

[JonahJ]

Hi,
i'm new to this game and am not a programmer. how do i find people to play online with? it says to enter the IP adfress of the game you with to join... any help would be greatly appreciated, can't wait to play!!

[Geoff the Medio]

Hi,
i'm new to this game and am not a programmer. how do i find people to play online with? it says to enter the IP adfress of the game you with to join... any help would be greatly appreciated, can't wait to play!!

You may have some unrealistic expectations about the current state of the project. FreeOrion is still relatively early in development, and isn't a balanced, polished playable game yet. If you're looking to play just for fun, you'll probably be disappointed.

There's no centralized place to find people to play (or rather test) FreeOrion with. There also are few people doing so regularly, so it will be difficult to find anyone interested without arranging ahead of time. We should probably eventually start using the IRC channel (see the freeorion.org main page for a link) to arrange test games, but for now it's not practical to do so due to lack of people willing and able to do so.

If all that's not a problem and you still want to play a game and have someone to do so with, you'll need to be sure that one of you has an computer that can be seen on the public internet to act as the server. That might involve some IP forwarding on a router, depending how you connect to the internet, and being able to find out your IP address. You can google finding your ip address for your particular operating system, though make sure you're finding the IP address on the internet, not your computer's address on your router's local network, if you're using a router. Then, if router port forwarding is set up, you can have someone else connect to your freeorion server and play a game. If you don't want to host a server but just want to connect, then someone else will have to set up a server for you to connect to and give you the IP address.

It's also possible to set up a dedicated server on which you can launch the freeorion server process and then connect to it from any internet-connected computer. Since you say you're not a programmer, I'm guessing this isn't something you have access to or knowledge about how to do.

There's no FreeOrion master server set up where games can be registered or that can be used for matchmaking. We're not at the stage of development where that would be appropriate yet.

It's much easier to set up a game on a LAN, however. In that case, you should be able to see another computer hosting a game and connect to it without needing to enter any further information. I'd suggest trying that first.