Joining a BMS server

Adapted from wonko's discord instructions.

BMS is at its heart Falcon 4.0, and Falcon 4.0 is an old game — its idea of getting a multiplayer game going is quite literally from an another era. As such, joining a multiplayer game has its own set of BMSism and quirks that can cause a seemingly straight-forward process to be slightly less than intuitive.

Connecting to the server

As a prerequisite to playing BMS online, you need to open up (and/or possibly forward in your router) the following port:

• BMS needs UDP ports 2934 and 2935 to be opened/forwarded.
• IVC needs UDP ports 9987, 9988, and 9989 to be opened/forwarded.

The installer should have set the correct permissions in the Windows firewall as part of the install process, and any reasonably modern and user-friendly router will open the necessary ports automatically, so in most cases this requires no manual intervention even in cases when you want to join a server with non-standard ports.

However, if you have a more restricted router setup, you may have to adjust these manually. The same goes if for whatever reason you want to run the game and IVC on non-standard ports — the process for this is described in the manuals, should it ever be needed.

The phonebook

In keeping with its 20th century simulationist pretences, BMS does not have a “server list”. Instead, it has a “phonebook” to deal with your “comms” needs. To join a server you need to add and connect to it via that phonelist.

In BMS, the process is this:

1. Click Multiplayer
2. Enter a server name, then the Server IP address and (optionally) Server Port number from the server information provided by the host (in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:nnnnn). If no port is provided by the server information, it is running on a standard configuration and a port number does not need to be provided.
3. Set Network Bandwidth. Most commonly, this is 2048 up and down.
4. Unless the server is not running IVC, which should be exceedingly rare, leave the two IVC buttons turned on. Enter IVC IP address and IVC Port number from the server information provided by the host (in the form xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:nnnnn). If no port is provided by the server information, it is running on a standard configuration and a port number does not need to be provided. If the IVC server has a password, enter it here, otherwise the password field can be left blank.
5. Click Save.

Connecting

With the server saved in your phonebook, you can connect by:

1. Click Multiplayer
2. Select the Saved Server in the phonebook list.
3. Click Connect

You should see this window if connection was successful, including to IVC, and you COMMS button at the top of the screen should be blinking to indicate that the chat window is active and has a new message in it:

Troubleshooting

f you see this message, check IVC IP, port, and password then retry (may require closing BMS and the IVC client, then restarting BMS). You may also have set your bandwidth too low for the connection to work reliably. Again, make sure you have both up- and download set to at least 2048 kb/s (and of course, that you have that much bandwidth available).

Joining the campaign

Joining an online campaign works much like joining one locally, except that instead of loading a save file, you pick an online campaign from a separate tab.

1. Click Campaign.
2. Click Online.
3. Click the campaign name, commonly called “[Host]'s Game” or something similar.
4. Click the relevant squadron in the list. Commonly, well set-up campaigns have custom squadrons with easy names to find and indicate which you should use as a starting point, such as “PLAYERS JOIN HERE”.
5. Click Commit Online
6. In the Rules of Engagement window, click OK

If your connection to the campaign was successful, you should see the Campaign UI:

From here, you are ready to join a package or creating your own to get flying.