Need For Speed Underground 2

[ScinteX 0]

Hey everyone.... lol u may remember me!

 

I could bore u all with what ive been up to but to be honest its really boring!

 

Anyhow, onto business.

 

NFS has always been a great game and of course i jumped at the shelves when i went to my games shop

 

Got home, installed it, and drove around the virtual world like some rude boy (minus the baseball cap).

 

After a few days i thought id try the online gaming. Out of habit I tried GameSpy but of course no games there since its all done through the game itself! haha so anyways I click on "online" in the game only to be greated with the following: "Connection lost, please retry, please make sure you are connected to the network", or words to that effect. Slightly puzzled, I read the readme.txt file (the one ur supposed to read striaght away :x )

 

It tells me to open up some ports on my firewall. So I browse to my router and do that. Thought it was strange since the router is normally pretty insecure with outgoing connections- its usual stance is to block everything from the outside world. So anyway i open up a few ports and try again. Still no luck....

 

Thinking that the game might be just lying (the error message was shown instantly so it looked like it didnt even try to connect to EA) I went onto the net in search of a packet sniffer. For those who dont know, that simply shows me the data that goes to and from my pc. The aim here was to run it and see if NFS was actually sending anything.

 

I came across AnalogX and tried that, since the download was a lot smaller than ethereal, and i couldnt be bothered to wait that long (!) for ethereal...

 

Installed AnalogX packet sniffer and hit the start button. Got a funky error of "Could not open socket"!!! Socket?? eeeek!!

 

Hmmm every other game I own works ok online (Renegade, Doom3, Joint Ops, TOCA, Soldner....)

 

Casting my mind back, I remember going to Steve Gibson's website- http://www.grc.com. Great site, I am sure many of u have been there. There is a program called socket lock on there. I used it because i had no need for raw sockets. At least i thought id never have a need. So i visit the page and it says:

 

"Please note that SocketLock is NOT meant to be used with the final release of Windows XP. This demonstration was only created to prove — without a shadow of doubt — that Microsoft can EASILY engineer a superior and secure solution to the problem of unnecessary raw socket exposure."

 

Ahh ok so maybe i have been too secure!! LOL

 

So I run the program and put everything back to XP standard.

 

Back to the sniffer... click "start" and get no error. Great so far....

Go into NFS and hit "online". The ****** thing works!! EA need raw sockets to get me gaming online??

 

I run XP SP2. A note from microsoft:

 

"We have removed support for TCP sends over RAW sockets in SP2.

We surveyed applications and found the only apps using this on XP were

people writing attack tools."

 

So now im really confused..... either NFS is an attack tool or i am really missing something here!!!!

 

Anyway the point is, if u play NFS Underground 2 and you cant get online, check to see if your sockets are ok on your install. If u used socket lock from GRC, go back in and enable sockets again.

 

 

[Mutasem Semakieh 0]

hmmmm..

 

That didnt happen to me at all.. I just clicked online and it works.I wonder what was going on inside ur pc

[ScinteX 0]

Its my over zealous (maybe?) lock down of my PC. I should not need windows sockets (full raw sockets) in my usual day to day activities.

 

Theres a real big arguement over the TCP/IP protocol and Windows sockets.... still after many years.

 

Some background info if u r bored:

http://grc.com/dos/xpsummary.htm

http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20010802.html

 

So as i said it is fixed now.

 

NFSU2 has however decided to crash on me a lot now. it was always a bit unstable but the 1.1 patch seems to have made the crashes more frequent. If i put the CD in my drive and let the game run it seems to increase the chance of it working more than if i launch the game from the desktop shortcut.

 

I just hope the next patch will fix my prob. Ive submitted a tech report to EA so you never know it might help! Thats with regards to the crashing. not the sockets thing.

 

But of course my main point was that if u use socket lock from GRC then you might well have a problem when u come to play online. Other programs might interfere too, like Zone Alarm.

 

Sometimes I think I should just not store any sensitive information on my PC, and leave it completely unprotected, unpatched and generally wide open. Then everything might run ok LOL

 

8)

[Mutasem Semakieh 0]

oh