Sharing cable, will Steam work?
 

I'm on Earthlink's High Speed Cable, and just ordered their Home Networking package that comes with a Linksys wireless router. I was hoping that in addition to being able to share files etc, my wife and I could both play on the same TFC server on our computers, simultaneously.

But, once set up, while both comps will be able to access the Internet via cable connection, the connection will ultimately go through one IP. No big surprises here, I guess, but my question is, will my wife and I be able to connect to Steam and play online at the same time through that one IP? I am not clear on whether the server identifies the player mainly by the IP, or their Steam user information.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Steam works fine behind a router. Most games will work as long as you aren't hosting a server and trying to get someone outside to connect to you.

should be able to without a problem. my wife and I played Diablo and Diablo 2 without issue.

Four friends and I regularly use Steam with a linksys router.

You should be gtg.

Yeah, you'll be fine. Me and my brother play CS/DoD/TFC etc behind a router.. and it works fine.

The only problems I've ever had with games behind a router are ones in which you are hosting.. easy enough to fix if you know the ports the games are coming on in.. a little port forwarding action. and any game that uses the direct play 7 api. i.e. AOE, AOE2, AOE2 expansion.. motorcross madness.

I've worked on these for quite some time and the reason is simply poor netcode design. The process is this:

You connect to the host. Your computer uses 2 ports in the 2000-3000 range if I remember correctly. Once connected the host uses 2 other random ports in that range to connect back to you. So for an 8 player game 64 connections are established. Thus part of the reason you get some incredible lag spikes while playing 8 player games.

While I have found a solution to get multiple people on aoe behind a router I can't get multiple people on behind a router into the same hosted game. It's wierd.

sorry for the tangent, but steam will work fine.. I'm using it now behind my linux firewall without a hitch.