As someone else mentioned, NAT does address translation... thus, everyone on your home network has non-routeable IP addresses (i.e. 192.168.x.x) while to the outside world there is a single public IP address. Works cool... for OUTBOUND traffic.
For INBOUND traffic, it is a no-go. I suspect the game server is trying to initiate a connection to you. The problem is, the router has no idea where that inbound connection is supposed to go (we can go into a complete description of how translation tables work if you really want to). If you router has the ability to do a static inbound map for a certain type of traffic, or can set a default server, you can configure it to point to the machine you want to play the game on. The the inbound traffic would get forwarded there.
The inbound problem is why Active mode FTP generally will not work behind NAT... you have to use Passive mode. A number of other different programs act a tad differently (DCC under IRC clients, file-transfer in MSN Messenger, etc... anything that depends upon an externally initiated connection).
LthrOttr |
