My Lan Party

[PZEROFGH]

no A/C your going to need a lot of heavy duty 300cfm housefans

 

[Harper]

Next month. January. Right in the heat of summer.
I hope you have air con. Otherwise encourage people to bring some fans along.
Last LAN party I host, we had 16 computers around the house. And the room temp was rather warm.

Get every install games before coming to the lan party.
This includes any mods you wish to run too.
And make sure people are familare to the games. Like I have seen people throw hissy fits just because they have no idea what they are doing.

Assign every one an IP Address too. Eg. 192.168.0.x before showing up.
Make sure every one has the same workgroup name too.

Get every one to do a virus scan on there computers before showing up. Desable any firewalls programs. Like Norton's Internet Security is a pain.

Start early. It will take about at least 1 hour to get every one seated in your house.

What is your seating and table arrangement's like? I used to have a fold up table just for lan parties too.



Actually this thread got me thinking that now that I am a scout leader, I got an entire hall at my dispossal if I wanted to host my next lan party.
I just have to fill out paperwork first.

 

[waynejkruse10]

no A/C your going to need a lot of heavy duty 300cfm housefans

Its not really that bad, we dont even have ceiling fans, only one little fan which we rarely use. We usually have a nice breeze where i live.

What is your seating and table arrangement's like? I used to have a fold up table just for lan parties too.

2 computers on my desk, 3 computers on a big wooden table, 1 computer on my old computer desk, 1 laptop on fold out trestle table.

Start early. It will take about at least 1 hour to get every one seated in your house.

Everyone will be coming around 1pm and staying until 1pm the next day.

 

[PP Mguire]

Harpers got good points. I totaly forgot about having their networks setup before hand and freiwals and that much. Hopefully though if they are brazin enough to go to a LAN party they wouldnt be dumb enough to take a virus to it lol.

 

[waynejkruse10]

yeah, im going to send everyone an email once they have confirmed that they can come. The email will say whats happening and the time etc. And you should disable firewall and scan for virus's before you come. And install all the games possible before coming.

When setting up gaming LAN's, the best command is Ping in command prompt. Its so **** useful!

 

[gimli of gloin]

i got so over nortons stupid messages i just unistalled it at one of my lans

 

[Harper]

> Set Up Time = < Gaming Time

Harpers got good points. I totaly forgot about having their networks setup before hand and freiwals and that much. Hopefully though if they are brazin enough to go to a LAN party they wouldnt be dumb enough to take a virus to it lol.

It some thing that I hate doing when I go over to other people lan parties.

I loose on avarage about 60 to 90 minutes of game time setting up people onto the network. Followed by another 60 minutes installing games on people computers.
It also does not help matters where you are the only person that offically "knows every thing about computers" as you got about 8 of your other freind bugging you about one issue or another at the same time.

Last time I got stuck in this problem, I grabs a notepad and started issuing out numbers to every one that had a problem.


Also for those Windows XP users, before going to a lan party, or setting up the network, create a restore point.


A few other points,
- Make sure every one is running the same patch. And make sure you have the patch avalable for players that might not be up todate.

- No CD Patches are a good idea too. Personally I do not like taking my oringal Disks out of the house unless I need them. They are also good if you do not have enough copies of the game to go around.

- Multiplayer Demos are still fun to play. You might have a smaller selection of maps. But at least every one does not have a financal obligation to purchase a game.
Last lan party I went to, most of the game that where playied where Multiplayer Demos. And we had a ball.

- Do not have a hissy fit if the game you want to play is not getting playied. Last lan party we were running, I had my house mate get the shits with every one else as we were playing more UT2k4 as appose to Jedi Accademy. I told him "Every one else here is having fun here. Either join in on the game, or find yourself a single player game for a little while until we are done."
I have been a few lan parties where the game that is being playied for a while did not interest me, (or in the case of CS, the game causes me to have epilepic like fits), so doing this time I quietly play a singler player game while I am waiting for other people to finish playing the current game.

 

[waynejkruse10]

I loose on avarage about 60 to 90 minutes of game time setting up people onto the network. Followed by another 60 minutes installing games on people computers.

That is something i dont think i can avoid. 7 people, and only 1 of them keeps a "copy" of most of my games on ISO which is very useful for lans just dumping a copy of the ISO and Alcohol or Daemon Tools for quick distrobution. The fileserver is going along nicely, and somebody from the LAN will be lending me a 80gb Hard Drive which will be put into a Windows 98 Celeron 466mhz with 128mb Ram . So everyone can take the required files/patches before they arrive. The good thing about my lans is that most people have a bit of a . Usually there is one or two people who are not able to network, but still the other 3 or 4 are able to so the network is usually set up within 45 minutes. What i do is usually write up some pieces of paper with the persons name, their IP, the subnet mask, and gateway and stuff like that for them to easily set up. And once they have finished the networking we name the players with the [#1] or [#2] if the machines are 192.168.0.x.

- Make sure every one is running the same patch. And make sure you have the patch avalable for players that might not be up todate.

Yes, i really should prepare for this downloading files and whatnot a few days before the party. With CS will be all playing the same "haxxed" version. UT has their latest patch which is very useful as after you install a patch, it no longer requires a cd to play, and its a legit patch. Stuff like AOE and Warcraft we wont bother updating with patches (unless they dont work) we will get a whole bunch of no cd cracks though.

Do not have a hissy fit if the game you want to play is not getting playied. Last lan party we were running, I had my house mate get the shits with every one else as we were playing more UT2k4 as appose to Jedi Accademy. I told him "Every one else here is having fun here. Either join in on the game, or find yourself a single player game for a little while until we are done."

Hahah yeah. Ill tell you going to happen. All 7 people arrive, we set up the network and EVERYONE wants to play CS. Then i say "what about warcraft or AOE or UT2k4?", but nope, they want to play CS while they do impressions oF FPS Doug from Pure Pwnage (the whole BOOM HEADSHOT thing). They will probably play until around 12 until they go to bed except mabye 3 or 4 who will stay up and play a long game of warcraft or AOE. Everyone who is coming LOVES CS

 

[PP Mguire]

WE played CSS at DFWFrag. It was really fun.

 

[Harper]

Another word of advice. What ever shared Pr0n, WaReZ, MP3 or Movie directories that you may have... unshare them.
Nothing is worse that a freind of yours deciding to chew bandwidth just because they find your private porn collection is more interesting that the LAN party.


Also, if you have spare computer that you can set up as a dedicated games server (maybe a KVM too), it helps.
I have noticed that if you are playing and being a server at the same time, your game perfermance goes down. Especially if you are playing A RTS and every one is going in for the final attack.

They will probably play until around 12 until they go to bed except mabye 3 or 4 who will stay up and play a long game of warcraft or AOE.

I find that WH40K : Dawn Of War is a really good and quick RTS. Especially the way where it forces you to go into combat if you want any more troops.