After receiving many many questions about this, I decided it was time to put what little I know about multi-player Blade on the web site. First, unless you have a high bandwidth connection (LAN, DSL, Cable, T1, etc) forget about it. The bandwith requirements for the game are quite large, and even playing over the above connections will lag.

As with many online games, there must be a server and then the clients connect with the server. Starting a server is pretty simple and is explained in the Blade manual (For English, it is Page 31 "Arena Multiplayer Mode"). In addition you can start dedicated servers. See net.txt in your Blade directory for information on dedicated servers.

As stated above, read the section in the Blade manual. Basically, you select Join Game from the menu. Then you need an IP address for the server. Type it in, then select Search. If everything works, you will get a list of games that are started on that server. Select the game you want to join and press Enter.

Now the big question is "How do I get an IP address for a server?" or "How do I give people the IP address for my server?". There are a few ways of doing that.

• You can talk to another person (via email, ICQ, instant messenger, phone, forum, etc...). In this case, you will need to schedule a time that you will be playing figure out who the server is and get the IP address of the server.
  
  
• Codemasters has set up a Chat Room that you can use to exchange IP addresses.

In order to chat while playing, you must have the patch installed. The chat option was introduced with the patch. The default key is 'T' to start a chat, but it may be undefined. Go into the keyboard control options and you should see a "Send Message" item that you can assign to a key of your choice.

• I have never been able to play online. I put the IP address of a known server in, select search, and it comes up with nothing. I have not been able to figure out how to get it to work, so if you are having this problem, I do not have a solution for you. This doesn't happen for very many people but it does happen. If you know of a solution, then certainly let me know.
  
  
• You may see something about GameSpy support. GameSpy support was planned for the patch, and may have made it in, but GameSpy never got around to supporting Blade.