I'm not exactly sure what this feature is supposed to do, but I've had some weird experiences with it...
It seems if I click on the 'Join Game' button Soldat connects as normal, but if I double click on the server's entry it forwards through the lobby server.
Before I get into the strangeness, I'll explain my situation - me and my brother have a LAN set up, with me being the gateway to the 'net. So, he was playing soldat, and I finished some stuff and decided to join him. He didn't know what server he was on though, so I loaded Ethereal and started sniffing some packets to find the server's IP and port.
"It'll be easy", I thought. "I'll just look for stuff originating from port 23073 or sth".
But, there WAS nothing coming from or going to port 23073 - my brother was sending stuff to port 1313 or something on the server.
I thought that seemed strange, but I loaded soldat, joined that IP on port 1313 and sure enough it worked fine.
Now that I'm repeating this I can't be sure if this had to do with the lobby forwarding feature or not, but I'm pretty confident the next part does :)
So, me and my bro are playing, but when you share a dial-up connection you tend to get ping kicked ;)
We move around servers for a while, and we come to Internode (which I suspect was the first server we were on, being in Australia and having the best ping for us, as well as a fairly low [IMO :P] ping kick level)
We joined the server, and inevitably, one of us was ping kicked. Then, I tried to join the same server, but by forwarding through the lobby... and, it Worked! We could continue playing the forwarded version, and when we got ping kicked from that our ban had worn off from before :).
What I did notice, was that we were actually connecting to different games when we connected by different methods (straight Join game versus forwarding through lobby). That is, if my brother joined a game by forwarding through the lobby, and I joined the same server WITHOUT forwarding, we would not be playing together.
This all seemed kind of odd, so I thought I'd bring it to the attention of people who might know what is going on :)
It seems if I click on the 'Join Game' button Soldat connects as normal, but if I double click on the server's entry it forwards through the lobby server.
Before I get into the strangeness, I'll explain my situation - me and my brother have a LAN set up, with me being the gateway to the 'net. So, he was playing soldat, and I finished some stuff and decided to join him. He didn't know what server he was on though, so I loaded Ethereal and started sniffing some packets to find the server's IP and port.
"It'll be easy", I thought. "I'll just look for stuff originating from port 23073 or sth".
But, there WAS nothing coming from or going to port 23073 - my brother was sending stuff to port 1313 or something on the server.
I thought that seemed strange, but I loaded soldat, joined that IP on port 1313 and sure enough it worked fine.
Now that I'm repeating this I can't be sure if this had to do with the lobby forwarding feature or not, but I'm pretty confident the next part does :)
So, me and my bro are playing, but when you share a dial-up connection you tend to get ping kicked ;)
We move around servers for a while, and we come to Internode (which I suspect was the first server we were on, being in Australia and having the best ping for us, as well as a fairly low [IMO :P] ping kick level)
We joined the server, and inevitably, one of us was ping kicked. Then, I tried to join the same server, but by forwarding through the lobby... and, it Worked! We could continue playing the forwarded version, and when we got ping kicked from that our ban had worn off from before :).
What I did notice, was that we were actually connecting to different games when we connected by different methods (straight Join game versus forwarding through lobby). That is, if my brother joined a game by forwarding through the lobby, and I joined the same server WITHOUT forwarding, we would not be playing together.
This all seemed kind of odd, so I thought I'd bring it to the attention of people who might know what is going on :)