LAN party advice

(fattakin) #1

Me mates are having another get together for ET, 5 pc’s playing online via Broadband - weve managed to do it 3 times before, and when you get the right server there are no ping problems.

This time i was hoping to do some offline play but this is something er havent done and im expecting problem, He has a router attached to his Broadband, should we take it off line and use that ( freeing it up for 6 machines ) or should we use a Netgear switch??

Are there ports to be opened or something?? If so, where do i do that.

I was going to use Highboys Custome Server generator as ive no experience setting up LAN games - anyone used it before??

Any tips / advice would be appreciated as i plan on getting steaming drunk and dont want to have to be the one who sorts out 5 other drunks PC’s!!

(SylverDragon) #2

Taking the router off line shouldn’t be necessary, if you have an extra hub just daisy chain it off one of the ports on the router. (remeber to use a crossover cable or uplink port, if the router doesn’t do auto MDI/MDI-X). Having done quite a few LAN parties at my house, including playing ET on and off line, I have found that a 10 MB/s hub, daisy chained off of my router, is just fine speedwise.
One thing to keep in mind though, some games seem to have a problem with LAN games, if you have the internet up and running. I don’t think ET has this but, I mention it just incase you run into it. We were trying to play Icewind Dale on a LAN and, for some reason, one of the computers would inexplicably refuse to connect to the server. After spending more than an hour troubleshooting the problem (even to the point of packet sniffing the network), we discovered that, for no real reason, his computer would start to connect to the server, then decided that the server was outside the LAN, and start sending requests out to the internet. Once we unplugged the router from the network everything ran fine. Never did figure out what was causing it, but at least the game worked, so we stopped caring.

(amazinglarry) #3

My only advice for a lan party would be to get EXTRA alcohol.

Heheh :drink:

And whenever we played off a LAN (that was not connected to broadband) we just used a hub/switch.

Anytime we were online we used the router… der. Heh.

whatever works I guess?

(fattakin) #4

Thanks guys, turns out our connection held the 5 machines online no sweat, (512kb BT)

So id like to aploogise to anyone that played against [VPL] on Insomnia and some other server on Friday night. We were wasted, the Wine and Sonny Chiba was flowing all nite… :beer:

At one point my girlfriend turned up!!, she was playing off my desktop- man she’s never touched a PC game in her life, but she got stuck in and even got a kill (after 2 games) Her mates thought they should join in since they were abandonded for a ‘stupid ghey LAN party’