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The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

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Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#81

Post by geekman7473 »

vaughnegut wrote: post #69
geekman7473 wrote: post #7

LAN parties aren't dead! Some of us are keeping the magic alive. I throw LAN parties at my house about twice a year. The hardest part, as i've gotten older, has been scheduling. Now I need to send save-the-dates 2 months in advance, and the length is capped at about 12 hours. When I was a teenager we would go all night :) I am moderately obsessed with LAN parties, so I built a file sharing tool for LAN parties specif…

Nice, I'm hosting a LAN party with friends next month, I might try this out. Thanks for sharing! Are there any plans to open source it?

For now, no. I would want to clean up the innards quite a bit before releasing the source, and it has already consumed so much of my time as it is. I also need to figure out Linux support as well before really "going public".

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#82

Post by atribecalledqst »

myself248 wrote: post #72
madrox wrote: post #47

This really doesn't capture the core element of early 2000s LAN parties. You spent hours debugging basic networking issues. There was that one guy who was less interested in gaming than convincing you to use his DHCP server on his OpenBSD machine. Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives. Passing around CDs to install games and the crack for it, since no game was ever owned by all. Fun fact: you…

> You spent hours debugging basic networking issues. And that was FUN, as long as you were enjoying the tinkering and not stressing about missing a game. > Everyone copying everyone else's mp3 folders on network drives. I think this is an under-remembered aspect, or at least, under-told. LAN parties were filesharing parties too, sometimes that more than gaming. (Which caused no end of strife with the gaming folks, un…

In college we had Mojo for downloading tracks out of other people's iTunes, for a precious little amount of time (maybe just a year or year and a half before they released an update that killed the actual filesharing). It was always fun finding hidden gems in people's libraries - learned about some of my favorite artists that way.

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#83

Post by doublerabbit »

thes1lv3r wrote: post #18

I volunteer at a yearly LAN party called The Gathering[1] in Norway, we pull about 5000 participants each year (about 3k of which have desk spaces, the rest are day or week passes without a desk). It's some of the most fun I have each year :3 It's unfortunately lost a lot of the early 2000s charm (which ive only experienced from videos and pictures), but we try our best to keep things local and give the best experien…

Stratlan UK is still going. It was a spinoff of Multiplay's i-series. Now independent and ran three times a year. The next one is in July, not ever had a chance to go but always heard the great things. Will one day.

As someone else said in this thread, my bed time is now 11pm so no more all nights for me.

https://stratlan.com/

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#85

Post by Dylan16807 »

mrob wrote: post #46
Dylan16807 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The millisecond added by Wi-Fi isn't changing the experience. Just avoid or throttle downloads while playing.

Average latency difference isn't much, but wireless's inherent sensitivity to interference makes the worst-case latency difference a lot higher. I don't want to lose a game because somebody in the vicinity turned on a poorly shielded microwave oven. If you're going to all the effort of getting everybody together in person, why not do it right and set up a wired network?

> I don't want to lose a game because somebody in the vicinity turned on a poorly shielded microwave oven.

You shouldn't be using 2.4GHz anyway.

And there isn't much else that's likely to interfere out of nowhere.

> If you're going to all the effort of getting everybody together in person, why not do it right and set up a wired network?

Sure, go ahead and buy a bulk pack of cables, but I don't think it's going to have a particularly large impact on a generic small LAN.

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#87

Post by Cpoll »

Sophira wrote: post #14
madanparas wrote: post #2

The article opens by saying LAN's chief advantage was "nearly eliminating latency" and closes by saying revival is as easy as sharing your Wi-Fi password. Wi-Fi and a wired switch are not the same thing. The one thing that made LAN parties technically distinctive is the one thing the revival pitch quietly removes.

There's a huge difference between the latency you get from connecting to each other via the Internet, and the latency you get going via a local network, even if that network is a wireless one. There's an even bigger difference between that, and going online via the Internet back in the days when LAN parties were really popular, because the most common method of connecting to the internet was via modem.

IME WiFi always adds ~20ms, which might be more than a server in your city (though realistically 50ms is a good number and 100ms is acceptable).

But I expect this number gets worse in a LAN party due to contention.

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#88

Post by bdavbdav »

geekman7473 wrote: post #39
bdavbdav wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this technically, but part of the magic was all setting up trestle tables, sitting in someone’s garage / outbuilding, and it all being a bit raw. I vividly remember cutting a hole in the side of a Shuttle XPC case to fit the fan of a GPU someone had bought over for me at one. That was all part of the experience for me.

I'm torn on this issue as well. I have fond memories of the janky setups, but also it is nice to actually have time to play games at the party. At some LANs, I've spent hours and hours just trying to get everyone in the game and playing. Plus with a setup like his you don't have to worry about finding older games that will run on the lowest common denominator hardware that people bring. As you said though, there was…

Yeah a few of us who used to LAN together picked up on this article independently. We all came to the conclusion most of us are on Macs now, and GFN seemed like the path of least resistance.

Re: The Forgotten Art of the LAN Party (2023)

#89

Post by bdavbdav »

xdertz wrote: post #68
bdavbdav wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I love this technically, but part of the magic was all setting up trestle tables, sitting in someone’s garage / outbuilding, and it all being a bit raw. I vividly remember cutting a hole in the side of a Shuttle XPC case to fit the fan of a GPU someone had bought over for me at one. That was all part of the experience for me.

He touches on this on the website and I agree with his statement > I do feel a lot of nostalgia for the days of trying to pack four people, four computers, and four monitors into one car on the way to a friends' LAN party, setting up machines on haphazardly arranged card tables with questionable seating arrangements, daisy-chaining power strips and network hubs. I'm a little less nostalgic for the experience of tryin…

Yeah a few of us who used to LAN together picked up on this article independently. We all came to the conclusion most of us are on Macs now, and GFN seemed like the path of least resistance.
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