I think we're going to need a little more information before we can give you a good answer to that.

What's your hardware setup, O/S, network connection, etc.?

Chris Bates
Lead scripter,
Stargate BFM: Freelancer

Usually swapping network cards does the job. Or, if you like fiddling with MAC addresses, and your NIC driver allows it, alter that instead.

To try to give you a bit more info:-

The IP address for internet-available servers is normally set by your Internet Service Provider (ISP), they can give you a fixed IP address if you ask them, or it will be a different IP address each time you bring up your server. The class (range) of the address will always be within the class (range of IP addresses) owned by your ISP.

On your LAN, the IP address can be changed in your LAN Network Connection setup, it doesn;t need you to change your LAN card's MAC address (Most can't be changed anyway as they are supposed to be unique WorldWide Names for each card and machine in the universe!)!

But if it works without you changing it then it's best left alone - Microsoft were not very clever when they designed this area of functionality in XP and it is not reliable that it will work immediately after changing anything!! Win 2000 and 2003 may be better, I don't know.

Be sure to check that your port 2302 is open in any firewall you have, this is almost always the biggest problem people hit. The help file in FL mentions ports 2300 to 2400, but 2300 to 2304 are used unless you change the start setting in FLServer to something other than 2302.

Lastly: Be aware that in XP, your LAN card must be connected to a switched-on hub before you will see the FLServer on your PC when you try to run FL on the same PC, even though the hub is not connected to the internet or to any other PC or server - the virtual (software) LAN "circuit" doesn't get enabled by XP otherwise, and you won't be able to connect to FLServer running on the same PC. It needs to see the hub handshaking with your LAN card before it makes the virtual connection. Windows 98 did not need this!! Again a step backwards from Messrs Microsoft MegaCorp!! It took me several days when I first installed XP to discover this, because when I was running 98 all was fine and I didn't think to plug into the hub!! If you don't have a hub then you must connect to the internet and make your FLServer available to the internet just to get a local game running!

Uggg!

Hope this helps a bit.

Roleplay: - the art of self-deceipt!