So recently me and my brothers decided to get this to play over LAN (as in regular LAN, without anything external like Tunngle) and earlier we were trying to start a session. However, while they were able to connect fine, I wasn't able to. I tried to join a game but it remained on the "establishing connection" screen. After that I tried the other way around: I created a server, and both my brothers tried to join, but upon clicking "join", on their end, it froze for a few seconds and then threw a "unable to establish connection" error, every single time. To note, all three of us are running the exact same copy, with no modifications whatsoever, and on the same network in the same room, although while they're running on Win7, I'm running on Win8 with dgVoodoo. I did try running it without dgVoodoo, but the same thing happens. It's only on SWAT 3 that this has happened, as other games do work fine, and I've already reinstalled it a few times. I just wonder what exactly the problem could be.

Windows 8 and 10 seem much more strict and "protective" than Windows 7. My gut reaction is that your firewall built into Windows is the problem. If you have a router firewall then it is safe to try to connect to the LAN game with the Windows firewall disabled as a test.


The following website lists the ports that Swat 3 uses if you also want to try opening the ports manually:

http://www.gameconfig.co.uk/ports.aspx?game=swat+3

Seems that the Windows Firewall was the issue, but I didn't have to disable it; it was just something to do with the exceptions; it had SWAT 3 listed twice, for whatever reason, one marked for private connections and another for public ones, so I checked both and it worked.

Nice glad you got it working!