In order to play ThudGame, port 8080 needs to be allowed outgoing through your local firewall.
No incoming ports need to be enabled, and the application doesn't need to run as a server.
This means you don't need to set up the whole "port forwarding"/"IP Masquerading"/"Virtual server" malarkey.
This also means you don't neet to click "allow this to run as a server" in your zonealarm or anything.
So, for most people, under most network configurations, it should just work. Port 8080 is almost always allowed out anyway, which is why I used it.
1) Some large office networks limit the outgoing ports, and include port 80 in the ones they restrict. Others put a http filter or http proxy on port 8080. In which case, your first port of call is the system administrator to get them to upen port 8080 unfiltered for your machine.
Clearly, speaking to the system admin and asking them to poke holes in their carefully managed firewall just so that you can play "silly games" may not always be successful, and they'll tell you to make it work through the permitted ports. The alternatives are sparse.
2) Wait until I have a HTTP tunnelling version of the client. Could take forever, though we may actually get some funding for that part, which would be jolly nice.
3) Techies only: a) Find a port you CAN connect out on, unfiltered. b) Set your hosts file to think that game.thudguild.com is 127.0.0.1. c) Set up a forwarding proxy on your local machine to forward port 8080 to the external machine through the valid port in your firewall. d) Set up a port forwarding rule on a machine outside the network (eg your home machine or router, perhaps) to port forward that port to port 8080. e)
4) Find a port which you can work through, let me know, and I'll see if I can make the client try to connect on that port too. I would really rather restrict this to as few ports as possible, for security and commonsense reasons.
