I am trying to play a multiplayer game with my brother, but we are running into a major problem and have not been able to find any successful workarounds. When I go into the multiplayer menu and have to choose a protocol, none of the options are available. He has not had any problems creating a game and getting started, but I can't even get far enough to find his game.

My computer is running 64-bit Vista and we have tried everything we can think of and everything we could find. If anybody has any ideas, that would be great.


On a side note (it's hard to tell if this is related or not), we also tried Icewind Dale, however with that I am unable to create a game at all. The menu just greys out after selecting to create a new game. I also cannot choose any protocol options in that game either.

Are you in windowed mode?

BG has lots of trouble getting multiplayer to work on modern systems. Try using GameRanger, lots of folks have found that it solved their problems completely.

Hi guys, thanks for the suggestions. I'm his brother so I'll be trying to work with any ideas that come up.

@olnorton: We saw how windowed mode tended to help with a lot of issues, so everything we tried, we also tried with the game windowed.

@bevinator: We have tried using both GameRanger and Hamachi. Maybe we'll give GameRanger another try, but it didn't help before.


The worst part of this whole problem is that I know other people have gotten the games to work fine on similar systems (that is, 64-bit Vista), but we have not made any progress. The issues with Icewind Dale are even more frustrating because he can't even play single player, so it is just a waste of space on his computer at the moment (not to mention the wasted money). I feel like there is probably a connection between the issues, but we have not found a fix. =(

Did he install the games in the default ProgramsFiles(x86) directory?

No, I knew about the problems Program Files folders have with games, so we installed them in a simple C:/GOG/ folder (for the record, we also tried reinstalling to a Program Files(x86) location, just to make sure, with no luck).

Did he turn off UAC, disable his antivirus, & run the setup program as administrator?
Download all the directX files. http://www.microsoft.com/download/en/details.aspx?displaylang=en&id=8109
The Web Installer only checks if you have the latest one.

We have turned off UAC, disabled his antivirus (even tried with the antivirus/firewall uninstalled as we were switching antivirus programs), and run the setup as administrator (I'll retry this one probably, just to be sure).

I found that DirectX installer and we installed that as well. I had been thinking it was DirectX, but when that didn't work I was really out of ideas.

Thanks for bearing with us here, we really appreciate it.