LAN Party

Gaming is one of the most technologically-advanced software that uses some of the most advanced hardware that you can find. Think of your gleaming new P4 processor crawling when you try to run Return to Castle Wolfenstein at high resolutions just because you don’t have a powerful enough video card. Most games these days are multiplayer capable. You can play them over the Internet or over a LAN. Knowing current bandwidths in India, it is impossible and unaffordable to effectively play games over the Internet.

The LAN, however, is another matter. At speeds starting from 10 Mbps and higher, you can have a wonderful gaming experience with friends over a network. The network could be one in your office (if allowed and after hours, of course) or one that you can easily set up in your own home. When multiplayer gaming is played over such a network, it’s called a LAN Party, especially if the gaming is accompanied with lots of loud music, pizza, burgers, cola and chips! 

Any machine running Quake III can act as the server

So what is this doing in a peer-to-peer section of the magazine? There are really two reasons for this. Technically, these games are not really peer-to-peer. Most such games connect to one of the machines that act as a server to collate and process the graphics and coordinate the positions, scores etc for each player. However, since most such servers are also used by a player to play, the network can be thought of as a semi-peer-to-peer network. However, there is really nothing new in this. Many other peer-to-peer networks also have the same sort of functionality. A central server provides basic services (logins, file listing, etc.) and the actual work happens between the clients. 

The second factor is not technical at all. It is more to do with human nature. When having a LAN Party, the people participating and watching are drawn into the experience and become peers of one another for the duration of the play. I’ve had many LAN parties in PCQ Labs itself. The fast, furious pace of the game (which started with two of us sitting late nights), drew more and more people in.

Using the LAN at office is, of course, simple enough. All you need to do is install the game, order the food and drinks, get your friends/collegues together and get going. Setting up a LAN at home is also easy. However, you need to plan out a few things.

• How many players are you planning to invite?
• What kind of machines are there going to be–desktops or notebooks? Where are they going to be placed and sit?
• Which machine is going to be used as a server?
• Is there enough UPS or spike protection for all the machines?

There are also a few things you will need to run a successful LAN party. These are:

• A 10 Mbps network card for your machine
• A 8-port Hub to connect your and the other machines
• Enough network cables OR a single cross-cable if you’re only planning for one more machine (as an answer to point 1
  
  above)

You will also need a modern and stable OSs like Win2000 Pro or Win XP Pro or Linux. Do not use Win 95/9x/Me for this sort of stuff as they are not too good at the network handling part. 

If your machine is going to be used as the server, try to run a DHCP server on it so that all other machines are automatically configured onto the network. In Win 2000 and Win XP, all you need to do is turn Internet Connection Sharing on for any dial-up ISP you have. This sets the IP address of the machine to 192.168.0.1 and turns on the automatic addressing function. Any machines that start up using the same network connection as yours will be given an IP address in the same subnet. Make sure they have dynamic addressing on, however. 

Once this is done, install the game or games you wish to play on each machine. Start one up and configure it be a server. The menu option–Mutliplayer–in most games allow you to do this. 

Multiplayer lets you play in a variety of modes. These being:

l Deathmatch. The most popular and most fun type of multiplayer action. You get to ‘kill’ all your friends in the virtual world and blow them apart in many different ways. 

l Cooperative. This allows all the players to play the single player game together — helping each other out. This too is an interesting way of playing the storyline based game.

l Capture the Flag. This lets you create ‘teams’ of players into two opposing sides. The objective of the game is to steal the enemy’s flag and bring it back to your base, while at the same time defending your own flag from the other team. The team that is able to steal the flag the maximum number of times wins.

l Domination. In this teams are again formed between players and they must dominate, that is, capture a piece of territory and hold it for as long as possible. 

l Challenge. This mode gives each team a challenge or objective that they must accomplish in the shortest possible time. For example, your team might be given the task of infiltrating a nuclear establishment and destroying the missiles there. The other team tries to stop you from doing this. Once the objective is met or you fail, the other team has a go at the same objective while you get to stop them. The team that takes the shortest time to finish the task, wins.

As you can see, a LAN party can be a lot of fun as well as let you create a small, mini network for yourself, both technically and with friends. So don’t wait around anymore, go kill some of your friends. And I mean in the virtual world, of course!

Vinod Unny