Trying to wrap my head around port forwarding for Co-Op

[SpaceGhost]

Gday.
My mate and I want to play together co-op with me as the host. We're planning on using PWCG missions. We are both lifelong flight sim players and aviation enthusiasts, as such we crave maximum immersion. We play exclusively in VR, but my machine is not powerful enough to reliably perform on the public servers (regrettably, as we were really keen on Finnish Virtual Pilots). The presence of too many player pilots in close proximity will inevitably slow my game to a slideshow before crashing my game in VR. It works great when it's just my mate and I taking off and then flying in formation to the action, the closer we get to the action, the worse my performance gets, until freeze and CTD.

 

Co-op with just my buddy and I seems to be the answer, at least until I can upgrade my rig. I've been banging my head against the wall trying to figure out how to even begin with port forwarding. I've gone through many guides, many of which look very helpful, but the problem I run into is that my routers port forwarding page looks absolutely nothing like anyone elses and seems to even be missing some options that other people use. I have no option for "local ip" for example, and I do have an option for "remote host ip" where other people seem not to. My router is a Huawei HG659, I will provide a screenshot of my portforwarding page.

 

I know I need to forward ports 28000 to 28100 TCP and 28000 UDP and I think I know where those go. Do I just leave everything else blank? Sorry, I'm absolutely an ignoramus when it comes to networking. I've never had to even attempt this before. 

 

My understanding is that I need to put my ipv4 address somewhere in here (local ip I'd assume, going by other guides, but I have no such field here.) and the IL2 server address (which I'm not sure how to find?) somewhere else. My default gateway probably goes somewhere too. I am thinking remote host ip and external host ip must be gateway and ipv4 but I am not sure. But then where does the il2 server address go? Or will the server just use my ipv4? It's doing my absolute head in.

 

Again, so sorry for this terrible post but I'm completely out of options. I tried looking through guides and none of them looked anything like my router page, all of them had a local ip option, it's throwing me completely off. Of course my router has to be the one outlier that renders the millions of guides out there apparently useless to me. Or perhaps I'm just that stupid that I am not seeing something glaringly obvious (not unlikely lol). 

 

Cheers.

 

 

 

 

[JimTM]

Try creating these two port forward entries:

 

Entry 1:

Protocol: TCP/UDP (or "Both")
Remote host IP address: Router IPv4 address (get from ip4.me)
External start port: 28000
External end port: 28000
Internal host IP address: Your server IPv4 address 
(In the Windows search box, type "cmd" and press enter. Then in the "Command Prompt" window, type "ipconfig". Your server IP address is the value beside "IPv4 address")
Internal start port: 28000
Internal end port: 28000

 

Entry 2:

Protocol: TCP
Remote host IP address: Router IPv4 address
External start port: 28100
External end port: 28100
Internal host IP address: Your server IPv4 address 
Internal start port: 28100
Internal end port: 28100

 

Note that some people had various technical issues preventing this from working. Keep your fingers crossed.

Edited January 11, 2023 by JimTM

[SpaceGhost]

Cheers mate, thanks heaps for the help. I'll give it a go and when my mate gets on to have another go at it over the weekend I'll report back if it worked or not. Fingers crossed!