5 replies to this topic

[Boo72]

My son and I are trying to play RA3.  We've downloaded everything according to the instructions, got everything set up, we can login, chat, set up a game and change the game settings, but as soon as we hit the Begin button, we get an immediate error:

 

Connections are in progress, or connection problem detected.  Please wait for the connection to finish or kick the player that has the connection problem.  Connection in progress 1-2

 

And we are stuck.  Both running Windows 11, both using the recent release on Steam's Ultimate Collection.  We've tried the Options.ini file change, making sure the firewall wasn't blocking it, tried Send Delay activated and the IP selected, but still the same thing each time we try.  I'm not sure what more to try here.  Its unfortunate as the desire to play this online with each other was the reason we bought it.  Without that, it is kind of wasted.  Hopefully someone has the fix for us.

[SniffyMuffin687]

Same problem here. Haven't found a fix for it yet myself.

[shadow147]

This smells like a firewall issue. I know you said you checked it, but one thing I noticed with Generals for instance is that Steam configured the Windows firewall to allow inbound connections for Generals.exe. The game has DRM in it however, and the process that's actually doing the connections is in Game.dat. So I'd suggest you check your inbound firewall rules again, make sure its actually allowing the process that is listening for connections.

 

Find the process listening for connections:

1. Ctrl+Alt+Del -> Task Manager, or taskmgr.exe. Enable the Process ID (or PID) column.
2. Start Powershell (from the Windows Start -menu).
3. Issue command: "netstat -aon | findstr LISTENING", where the line in the middle is a pipe character.
4. Go through the list, compare the PIDs in here with the ones in taskmgr.
5. Once you find the game processes listening for connections, make sure these are allowed in the firewall. Also check the protocol, unless it is already set to Any.

If you want to log things blocked by the Windows firewall, execute this in an elevated Powershell:

auditpol /set /subcategory:"Filtering Platform Connection" /success:disable /failure:enable

Then view the Security log in Event Viewer.

 

Issue the command again with failure:disable to disable logging.

Edited by shadow147, 11 March 2025 - 04:46 PM.

[Boo72]

Thanks for the reply.  Went through that but we couldn't find anything that was being blocked.

[shadow147]

I haven't played or even seen RA3 myself, so if there's some "trick that everyone knows" then I wouldn't know about it.

 

The only thing I can think of would be to run Wireshark on the hosting computer and have a look at what is actually happening in the network traffic. Is a connection attempt made, is there 2 way communication, is there a 3rd party involved (for instance for server browsing or NAT traversal), and so on.

[astra1993]

It seems that you're sharing the same Internet connection on both systems. In this case, one system must have the correct port forwards configured to point to it, and the other system must use a VPN.