skeletonbow: Honestly, I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for GOG to add their own VPN solution to enable additional multiplayer functionality with the various games in the catalogue. There would be DMCA related legal considerations that they'd have to endure which are not a concern to the end gamer setting up a VPN themselves such as Hamachi for example. There are several pre-existing VPN solutions (Hamachi, Tunngle) out there not to mention others which are widely known and used for this and the amount of effort it would take to whip up an in-house solution would be immense and gobble up developer man hours that are much more well spent working on Galaxy and other efforts things they already have underway IMHO.
Another thing is that lots of games work differently when ran over a real LAN versus a tunneled one due to latency as well as the MTU of encapsulated packets being smaller and sometimes causing problems. Sure, it works in a lot of cases but it's not a robust solution that a video game developer, publisher, or distributor is likely to adopt as an officially supported way to play their games.
Don't get me wrong though, I can understand the utility of such a solution being integrated into a GOG offered product such as Galaxy and why many people would love to see that. I just honestly don't think it is likely we'll ever see them do that because there are a lot of things they could have their developers finite resources working on right now and far into the future that would be of greater utility to a lot more customers than trying to compete with some of the pre-existing VPN solutions out there that are already the "go-to" for solving this problem. I'd much rather see GOG work with game developers to have proper GOG Galaxy multiplayer support added to their new games and/or retrofitted into older games such as Aliens vs. Predator that has support now for example.
If a game shows up here on GOG that has completely disabled multiplayer but it has multiplayer support on Steam, if I care about multiplayer I just buy it on Steam. Beats waiting to see if a DRM-free multiplayer solution will ever happen while the game is still relevant to me even if I bite my tongue having to do it to get what I want. :)
I knew it was a far flung idea and that the odds of it being a thing were essentially low, but I wanted to know how possible such a thing was, the obstacles, and all that to see the situation from a more informed position due to my lack of knowledge in how VLANs work and all that stuff, considering all that you said, I assume that if they were to pick up on this idea, it would at most be a back burner side project a long time after GOG Galaxy has been put out across all platforms with much higher priority features integrated first. also the idea was for games that are unable to play online anymore, I.E the servers the devs ran were shut down and cannot be used no matter where you got the copy from, if the game still has working multiplayer here or elsewhere, the feature would not be available because at that point I can see someone using a stolen copy and finding a way to get into it to play online with an illegitimate copy (in short, shut down multiplayer like Battlefront 2 or XIII = VLAN, games like Divinity original sin's Direct IP multiplayer or Grid's currently functioning online= no VLAN). so in the short run, I was thinking of it as a "my first VLAN" that just uses your account and a future friends list to setup things with less need for user input so people new to VLANs like I am still can have an easier time experiencing the classics that had awesome multiplayer that don't work properly anymore over the internet. my apologies if I happen to be missing how all of this works or if I am sounding silly, I've only used Hamachi a little a long time ago when my friend first introduced me to PC gaming years ago and he did all the setup work.
Understood, although I think you might be confusing some terminology there. :) When you mention "VLAN" you most likely mean just "LAN" or "VPN" or using LAN gameplay over top of a VPN. A VLAN is something else entirely, it is a virtual LAN which is a feature implemented on some higher-end virtual ethernet switches that allows multiple virtual LAN segments (broadcast domains) to co-exist on a single hardware ethernet segment. This is a cool hardware feature used in offices to be able to have one set of physical wiring but be able to essentially reprogram it so any given ethernet jack in a room can be configured to appear on a particular virtual LAN segment for traffic isolation at the broadcast level. That's not what we're talking about in video game context though... :)
For games that no longer have functional online multiplayer servers, or where someone wants to play the game without using a central service and the game does not have support for private servers or direct IP connections, but does have LAN play support, it is fairly popular to use Hamachi, Tunngle, or any other VPN software to set up a virtual private network connection either point to point on the end nodes (or in a mesh topology as is common with Hamachi), or even a more advanced setup with VPNs set up on routers basically bridging networks onto a single virtual broadcast domain over the VPN link. These solutions do work although they add a fair bit of latency that may or may not affect a given game's gameplay depending on how carefully the VPN software is set up to be used optimally, the impact of the additional overhead and the effects of a lower MTU. In practice I have found that most games I've tried are playable this way but usually with a noticeable increase in latency even when optimized by ensuring the firewalls are set up properly on both ends to port forward the zillion ports that are important rather than relying on NAT traversal fallback mechanisms that use STUN servers or other similar techniques. NAT traversal tricks done by Hamachi and similar are great conveniences for getting a VPN up and running without deep understanding of firewalls, or where one has no administrative access to a router, but they murder games with high latency.
I've found that using a VPN to do this can add significant latency even under optimal conditions, and that it can vary wildly from one person to another or game to another. I might set something up and get 150ms latency and someone here might do the same setup and say "I only get 90ms latency", and someone else 500ms... It can be very unreliable in the grand scheme of things such as a company having to support it - even if thousands of people out in the wild can legitimately claim "I do it all the time and it works awesome always". Those very same people wont have to be on the receiving end of tech support calls from 10000 gamers that it does not work well or at all for. :) Also, to get the best possible VPN setup to work with the lowest latency _requires_ that someone properly set up the router and firewalling in the most optimal way manually, because the fallback mechanisms are always slower, and that is a non-trivial thing to do for the average person out there, who expects a more plug and play experience.
From the perspective of a video game company, using a solution like a VPN to play games and to try to support such a networking solution and all of the complex ways it can be used on the diverse range of networks out there with corporate firewalls that block VPNs and or do other nasty stuff would be an absolute technical nightmare. That's actually why applications like Hamachi exist, because they simplified setting up VPNs to just work automatically under the worst of conditions found on the wire in random networks, but they do so at a cost of complexity and almost always performance and/or latency penalties unless they're manually configured the hard way by a skilled admin - not the usual case for the majority of end-consumers playing video games.
Nonetheless, us gamers want to have all of the options available to us to play the games we buy including a multiplayer experience that doesn't suck, so of course we're going to want to explore every possible option to hold on to that and VPNs are definitely one that can work with many games. Unfortunately VPNs truly suck even when they work and would be a complete total nightmare from a tech support perspective of a company like GOG, Steam or any game developer/publisher IMHO. I know if I ever made a game, I would definitely not have any official support for any VPN related network setups. I wouldn't do anything to stop people from using a VPN, but it'd be "if it works for you awesome, if not... oh look! An eagle!! -> /\/\
;oP
The best customer experience we can hope for is to have all original multiplayer features in games retained by the developer, and where that is not possible for them to add support for GOG Galaxy or some other solution that will work and be supported as long as possible without needing ugly hacks/workarounds. It's truly sad that most game developers gave up on providing direct IP support in their games because most of the code needs to be there to support any other kind of online multiplayer anyway. Hopefully that trend will reverse some day, although I wont hold my breath. :)
