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Cities Skylines Multiplayer (CSM)

Preface:

Cities Skylines Multiplayer (CSM) is a mod for collaborative city building. A player has to create a server to share their city and clients connect to download the city’s save file and start editing. The player who has to start the server must enable port forwarding in order to accept client requests from other players.

We tried to do this, but we failed to connect since port-forwarding is blocked in Egypt.

So we used a service called Hamachi to create and connect to a virtual private network and bypass port-forwarding.

Steps to use CSM mod:

  1. Subscribe to the mod from here.
  2. Open the game -> Content Manager -> Mods -> Enable CSM
  3. Follow this tutorial to start a multiplayer server.
  4. Adjust the firewall to enable Hamachi

Limitations:

  • Hamachi despite having a very low latency has a very limited bandwidth so large levels may take quite a while to load.
  • Save files are not cached after clients disconnect, so each time a client connects to the server, he has to download the save file (save files can be very large).
  • Doesn’t have a version control feature. So you can’t revert changes back and maintain updates.

Suggestions:

  • The use of a tunneling service (e.g. Hamachi) can be avoided if we successfully use port forwarding. (For some reason all connections were blocked either by the router or windows firewall)
  • Implementing a version control system might be handy as it will allow us to use cached cities and only update the changes made.

Resources:

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