Hi, I have seen some old posts related to this, but little to no detailed information, or answers. I'm guessing lan multiplayer isn't common these days. So I will try to give as much information on the problem here.

So me and my friends have laptops with the origin ultimate collection, and like playing generals zero hour together in lan multiplayer, and have been for many years. Still think it is one of the best, and most fun multiplayer experiences out there, but over time we have found custom maps harder to get working properly.

I'm running a current windows 11 machine, and another friend windows 7. When one of us downloads a custom map(say from cnc), then hosts the game, clicks play, a screen comes up showing map being sent to other players. The receiving map progress bar fills in, then changes to preparing progress bar, which immediately stalls out, and an abort timer begins. It's like the maps are not being sent and received properly.

The funny thing is we can all download these custom maps individually and play them fine in solo skirmish mode, but having them downloaded doesn't seem to make any difference for lan multiplayer. It's like the game is only pulling the map information from the multiplayer host, and starts creating a duplicate map folder beside the original downloaded map in the documents folder/maps.

Now the files that do get sent, and received by players are sometimes random. Like it may be .map and .str, or .tga. It's like the game sends one or two files across then decides to quite. One map that didn't work, we all deleted the .tga graphic file, and it randomly started working in multiplayer, although the mini map graphic wasn't displaying in menu screen. Unfortunately that fix didn't work for other maps.

I've tried turning off anti-virus program, but doesn't change anything. We have all checked our IP addresses, and everything matches there. Appears to be some kind of network or synchronization issue with host. We have all tried hosting game but same problem no matter who's machine, or operating system. Of course the official zero hour maps work fine in multiplayer games, apart from the odd disconnect message thing that can pop up 15mins+ into a game.(Still annoying, but not as prevalent).

Feels like there should be a simple solution. As I mentioned earlier we have been playing this game off-and on for years with different machines, and originally, most older custom maps worked, there were still those that didn't, but it wasn't the majority. I don't know if it's partly to do with how modern maps are being created, but I would really like to know how to solve this. Thanks for your input in advance.

Okay. For some reason installing maps individually wasn't working for us either. Although could experiment more. A temporary work around for anyone interested that has been working for us is deleting all other files in the maps folder except for the .map file. Seem to stop the game from getting confused with other files, and maps seem to work.

One of my mates has an amd laptop, and it is having some weird issues every now and then with the game, but we got something working.

lol Thanks man. We have actually had no problem since deleting the extra files in custom map folders. So are fine with continuing to do that.

I had recently run into this problem as well. I had fixed it by removing additional folders within the file destination (it should be Maps/[MapName]/[MapContents]) and renaming map's folder names to be identical to the tga and map file name (example: if the map and tga files are named "To Infinity", the map's folder cannot be named "to infinity" only "To Infinity").