So it's been nearly a year since my last post in the Fenngineer blog. Being busy with school, work, and other nonsense has led to a complete lack of posts. But I'm hoping to fill all two of you in on the details! This is probably going to get a bit crazy so let's quickly outline what's going to be talk about in this post.
To make this as painless as possible, I'm going to try to just hit the highlights. Being that I'll probably be typing a lot at work and not a home I suspect this will probably take me a few days to put together.
As part of our schools requirements, all students must do a Senior Design Project during their senior year. Parker-Hannifin's Chainless Challenge is an option our university has had since the start of the competition. In a condensed summary, the Chainless Challenge (CC) is a competition between schools to design and manufacture a bicycle that isn't driven via chains. Typically this is done through hydraulic pumps and motors since Parker is a major hydraulics supplier and developer. During a period of 7 months our team of 7 will develop a completely new design for our bicycle. We quickly learned that would be the only team to develop our own pumps and motors. Our team of 7 split into two groups. My group would develop a fixed displacement radial pump, while the other group developed a variable displacement hydraulic motor.
Tech Projects - Raspberry Pi
During the year, I purchased a Raspberry Pi for fun. The biggest thing I've been doing with it has been using it as a media player with RaspBMC. It was remarkably awesome, able to play my Wall-E bluray rip with no problems. It's currently being used with the RetroPi rom currently on it. I haven't had as much success with it, since I'm currently having problems with the video sizes.
Graduation!
As of May, I have officially graduated from Cleveland State University's Fenn College of Engineering, and received a full time job offer in the process. I am no currently focusing on passing my FE exam, and on track to getting my PE License.
That's all for now! Look for more in the future (maybe).
In my last post, MicroLAN: Hosting the Ultimate Small Scale LAN Party [Part 1], I talked about preparations for the upcoming MicroLAN, along with good practices and common mistakes. Mostly, these things come from mistakes I have made and experience I have gathered.
Last weekend, I held a MicroLAN event which had 8 people show up. Even then, things didn't entirely quite go to plan. So I shall include a brief addition to the preparations I talked about before. I will also talk about the actual event itself.
Preparation (cont'd)
A problem I ran into at the last MicroLAN event was that even though I talk the talk, I failed to walk the walk when it came to locating all the games that people wanted to play. Luckily, I did have a few back up and reserve games that seemed to work very nicely. I was able to organize a system that made installing these games a breeze.
Also, I failed to test play any games before the MicroLAN. Usually I will have a buddy or brother install the game, and make sure everything works well. I didn't do this and as a result, learned that the game required unique CD keys for every person playing on LAN (which is unusual for games). This essentially wasted 2 hours of gaming. I also learned that another game only supported up to 5 players in game type we wished to play. So this left us down 2 more games.
A good thing I did was have a few extra games in reserve. Freeware games like Nexuiz are a great idea since they don't require any special skills in trying to get a multiplayer game going. This combined with some classic back-ups like a personal all time favourite, Tzar, saved the LAN from becoming a mess.
The MicroLAN
So all the preparations are complete and you're ready to start the party. This is easier said than done.
There are probably going to be multiple people who haven't gotten the games installed yet. There are also people who are going to show up late. So what do you do? Do you not play a game and wait for them to get there and install everything? If you do this, you'll waste a lot of good gaming time. So why don't you just start playing the game? Well, by the time player X gets the game installed and is ready to play, everyone else might be done with it and ready to move on to another game.
So what do you do? In my experience, there are certain groups of people who want to play games others don't. This is the perfect opportunity for these games to get played. A small group of people could be playing Super Shoot'em 2000 while other's played Global Thermonuclear Warfare 4 and player X installs games. That way people stay entertained, and the big LAN games are held until everyone is ready. And this way player X might show up on time next MicroLAN.
You might also run into general problems like a game doesn't like a particular computer or player. It's nice to have a back up computer on hand for this type of situation. It's also nice to have older games available as well, as a lot of them are simple and tend to run on just about everything. A good example of that is the Tzar game mentioned above.
And that's the hardest part about throwing the MicroLAN. The rest of the night will flow easy. Ordering or making food, going from game to game, having fun, kicking ass and taking names. This last MicroLAN of mine was considered "The best LAN [I've] thrown yet." per a long standing gamer. I like to think it's because I've followed my simple rules this time (mostly).
The next day when the show's all over, it's time to clean up the mess
and kick back and relax for another few months until someone wants
another MicroLAN. And when they do, you'll be ahead of the game.
For the past 4 years now I've been hosting small LAN parties with groups of friends from around the neighborhood. These LAN parties typically have anywhere between 4 and 10 fellow gamers. Not big by typical LAN party standards, hence the reason why I call them MicroLANs.
MicroLANs are a fun way to get together and play the same online games you'd play by yourself, but with others. Because honestly, how much better is it after winning a game that you get to bask in the glorious hatred of the fellow players who are in the same room as you? A lot better (trust me). This is why I've been hosting MicroLANs for the past few years now.
I've typically hosted a MicroLAN twice a year. Once during the summer, and another during the Thanksgiving holiday weekend. In a few days I'll be hosting another one, which has prompted me to write about it. Hopefully following these few guidelines can help you start a MicroLAN party in your basement sometime soon.
Preparation
Intro
Typically, the preparation for a MicroLAN has the basic preparation of any event. Who, What, When, Where, and Why. But for MicroLANs there's an extra bit of Equipment that should be added to the list. There's no point in attempting to host an event you don't have the equipment to host it with. This will give you a quick over view of all the preparation you should look to do before your MicroLAN.
Who
This is probably the second easiest part of the list. Who are the people who are going to show up and play games with you. They're the n00bs you're going to frag. The biggest problem with the Who part is that they're affected by the subsequent When and Equipment parts of the preparation.
What
This IS the easiest part of the list. If you don't know what you're doing, then let me remind you. It's a MicroLAN party. Where you'll have lots of fun. Remember now? Good. Let's move on.
When
When is probably the most difficult part of the entire ordeal. Because you're hosting a MicroLAN, every person who attends makes a big difference. There's a big difference between a 6 person LAN and a 5 person LAN. My advice is to plan the event a month or two in advance. That way people have time to negotiate schedules and ask for time off if they're interested. Try to set a date in stone. Don't move it around because people then get confused or aggravated. If you can, take a general consensus for when people are going to be available. No point in planing it if 3 or 4 people are on vacation that weekend. In my experience, the more time, the better. You don't have to, but I enjoy creating "flyers" like the one below for the MicroLAN to post on social networking sites in order to attract attention.
Where
Another difficult question. MicroLANs take up a lot of space, so finding a venue with enough room for people might become challenging. Try to keep everyone consolidated in the the same room. If you're playing against someone in another room, you might as well be playing with them over the internet. Being in the same room together, getting to yell at your friend who's sitting next to you, getting to hear your little brother scream expletives as his space ship crashes, this is what makes a MicroLAN more than just gaming. It's nice to find a venue with enough tables, chairs, and power outlets. The latter is extremely important, so you don't end up daisy chaining power strips together. That was a mistake I won't be making again. It's also important to have easy access to internet. Below is a layout used to for a medium size MicroLAN. The room was 20ft x 10ft.
Why
An age old philosophical question which I will not attempt to answer here.
Equipment
Another big factor in hosting a MicroLAN is the equipment. By this I mean your networking equipment, your gaming equipment, and your guest's gaming equipment. First let's talk about networking equipment. For a small MicroLAN, you can probably get away with using your good old router at home. But for bigger ones (>4 people) you might want to start looking into buying a switch and some ethernet cables. With everyone wired into a switch, games lag less. This is particularly important if a lot of your friends bring laptops. They should still hardwire themselves into the switch because WiFi is slower than ethernet (depending on what type of WiFi i must say). Also, the more people using WiFi, the slower the WiFi becomes.
It's quite conceivable that you and your friends all have different types of computers and different level of graphics/gaming capabilities. This starts to become a problem when some people want to play the latest Maul of Duty game and some people can barely run Internet Explorer. I have not found the cure to this problem yet. We still play games published earlier than '05 mostly but we will run into a problem with who can play what. Just be warned of what could happen when people show up with their eMachine from '02. Building a gaming computer doesn't cost an arm and a leg if you want to get by and just play the game and could be spared the 1080 melt-your-mind-mode that a lot of games are coming with today. I just built a computer for my little brother for $304.95 (including OS).
Soon I'll be beginning my senior year at CSU and that means I'll be starting my senior design project. So I think I'll keep you guy(s) updated on how it's going and what exactly we're doing. Till then, I'll enjoy the rest of my summer at work. B)
So, Geeky am I? Well, for starters, I'm typing this on a new mini style keyboard that I bought semi for my laptop which will soon become a permanency docked PC. So, I needed a keyboard to go with it, and this was the cheapest USB keyboard I could get at my local Nerd Store. The Geeky part about that is that I'm typing up this post on this new keyboard for fun! trying to see how well.
