sounds cool but I play plenty of games and have hardware and software firewalls and never have problems with ports? By the sounds of it the users of your game would know how do operate a firewall. Just out of interest what percentage of your users asked for this?
Sadly, a very, very large number. While Cx users are technically inclined, there's a surprising number of casual players who may not have the technical acumen to forward ports, even with an illustrated guide.
We've had several users quit because they can't/won't configure their firewalls, so we needed an automatic solution.
upnp just isn't reliable- It fails in > 60% cases, according to some case study I can't find at the moment.
Hamachi won't work for the reasons above. Too Expensive, and requires both parties to have the VPN installed.
shame but at least you solved it. I hope you have the contact details of the players you lost so you can pimp out the new version to them when its ready :P
