Help! BGTutu TCP/IP Multiplayer Problems.

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Me and my girlfriend are attempting to play BG1(tutu)-BG2 over the internet (both, currently, unfortunately, long distance, on separate routers). I have looked around all over the internet and sorcerer's and can't find much help; I have played BG2 via LAN before, and had it working, but TCP/IP is new to me(regarding baldur's gate). I would really love to solve this soon so we can start playing together, as she's never played the games, and I'm sure she'll love them...

Now down to the nitty gritty:
I am running on Windows XP, her on Vista (I've read that this can cause problems, but also that people have successfully done it), both of us are using Linksys routers. Both of our computer's are not behind firewalls (though our routers are).
We both installed the games at the same time and in this order:
Baldur's Gate
Baldur's Gate II
Baldur's Gate II: ToB
Baldur's Gate II: ToB v26498 Patch
Baldur's Gate EasyTutu
Tutu Degreenifier
Tutu BG1 GUI

Both of us have tried to host the games, I've tried using both external and internal IPs for both of us to no avail(I was not sure which was appropriate). We always get the dreaded "Cannot connect to game session." message after a two-three minute wait. I read on EasyTutu's 'readme' site that it is perfectly compatible with multiplayer (that it simply uses the BG2 method.) I was wondering, is it possibly the BG1 GUI that is giving us trouble? I don't see why that would be, but I can't think of anything else.

Perhaps there are ports we need to open on our routers? I don't know where to start looking as I've never tried to do TCP/IP games before. If anyone could give me a quick checklist of things to do to be able to connect to each other, or if some one could point me to a BG2 multiplayer connection guide-esque deal, I would be greatly thankful!

Edit- Oh! Another thing if this could be a problem, I didn't think of it till now; she normally plays in windowed mode and I in full-screen. I don't know why this would cause issues, however, I have read that all other options should be the same. We made sure our graphical options and that our AI settings were all the same and such.

Edit2- Update: we're now using Hamachi and can see eachother's servers, however, when we try to connect we still get the "Cannot connect to the game session."

 

Bg/iwd(1and 2) on vista will need to start in windowed mode or they will crash on char arb screen. Will be back with more info on non local LAN multiplayer if I can find anything while fiddling with my own router.

Best of luck!

*edit for troubleshooting purposes , could you try a game on vanilla bg2 tob?

 

I've never tried connecting via Tutu. Although, sometimes Hamachi is suspect at connecting. My brother and I play IE games (IWD,BG1,BG2,ToB,IWD2) all the time via Hamachi and sometimes it takes a few times for him to connect to me. Make sure the connection protocol is set to "TCP/IP" and connect using the Hamachi IP address.

 

A Solution that Worked for Me

I know this thread is over a year old but I was having the same problem trying to use tcp/ip over a wireless LAN. Since this is one of the first threads that popped up on google when I was searching for a fix I figured I would post the solution I found.

THE PROBLEM:
I could not get my computer and my brother's laptop (both running win7 and EasyTutu) to get in game. Same problem as above that the one joining would attempt to connect for a while then say "cannot connect to game session." I tried playing with the configuration settings, connecting through Hamachi instead of our LAN, removing firewalls, opening ports, etc. Nothing I did could get it work and I soon realized that the problem, for me at least wasn't just in tutu but also happened in BG2 when we tried to connect to play a clean unmodded version of ToB. So on a whim I tried GameRanger to see if anything different happened that could help me figure out the problem.

THE SOLUTION
Somehow, and I have no idea why, GameRanger gets around this problem. (Hamachi since it just creates a virtual network but you still have to connect manually did not help me at all.) Which is great for playing BG2 regularly but doesn't by itself solve the problem if you want to play tutu.

Fortunately tutu uses the same name for the exe file as BG2 (BGmain) so it is possible to trick GR into thinking that tutu is actually BG2 (GR has different entries for ToB and SoA so I used ToB but SoA should work as well). You can do this but going to options screen (either under edit in the main window of friends in the friend window) and looking under the game tab. Click bg2 ToB and then browse in the lower right corner. Then go to your tutu folder and select BGmain.exe. Make sure both computers do this then connect to the game via GR and it should work. At least it did for me.

PLEASE NOTE: I was using EasyTutu for this to work. Using the original BG1Tutu actually should be easier in theory since it (from my understanding anyways) runs off the bgmain.exe that is already in your BG2 folder so there is no need reassign the file path in GR. However EasyTutu lived up to its name as was much simpler to install and this solution, once I figured it out was really easy as well.

Of course both computers need to be running the same version/mods/etc for this work and I found that I have to run in windowed mode to avoid a crash (while my brother does not for some reason). Anyways I hopes this helps someone. Good Gaming to y'all!

 

Nice that you finally found a solution that worked for you!

Ancient games + today's networks = massive hair loss, usually.