Slashdot Mirror
Wi-Fi Gaming
JeremyZiff writes "Wi-Fi Toys is a featured article on ExtremeTech that shows you how you and your friends can run around your city and play six nifty games with a Wi-Fi connection. From games like Capture the Flag to Treasure Hunt, you'll never look at Wi-Fi the same again."
But I'm still waiting for wireless dodgeball...
I already know i'm going to hell, now i'm just trying to get cable down there.
These games come in many forms, such as a "fox and hounds" game, capture the flag, or a treasure hunt.
In the 1973 Woody Allen comedy, Sleeper, it was cigarettes that turned out to promote health. Now, we have instances where video games promote physical activity.
I think (hope!) that we'll be reading in Wired about a young entrepreneur who turns this into a viable business, either as a service, where games are hosted professionally (as in MMORPGs), or as a product, where games are purchased and played on a peer-to-peer basis (as in most retail games). Perhaps I'm looking at this through rose-colored glasses, (I miss playing laser tag as a kid), but I think this has the potential to turn out some fantastic stuff.
___________________________________
Inago Rage - Create and Fight in an Indie-Developed First-Person Shooter
We're indie. We're working on our 14th game.
TFA is kinda neat, includeing some geeky fun that encourages real-world social activities. It mentions "safe" war-driving, as in always having a passenger who operates the laptop for the driver. A lil too geeky for me, but still a lot more fun than configuring a wi-fi setup.
The eternal struggle of good vs. evil begins within one's self.
If you combine that with one of those real-life Roleplaying games that use entire cities as their playground, it might actually be fun to try. I can almost see all the geeks bumping into each other...
Wow. What an excellent way to turn a simple typo into a soapbox for your own offtopic political views.
Moderation: +1 Self-Serving
Is there a 'main site' which possibly lists AP events going on around the country? I'm wondering if there are enough people who already partake in these events locally so that I could contact them instead of trying to pioneer the effort myself.
Only slashdot geeks would go to that extent to play video games.
Running around playing a CTF game instead of ACTUALLY playing Capture the Flag with REAL PEOPLE...
Makes perfect sense to me.
Jonahweb.com has stuff.
Just wait until one of these games causes an auto accident!!! LEGIONS of paranoid mothers and anti-gaming groups will call for the end of Wi-Fi because it's too dangerous for the children, THE CHILDREN!!!
One step closer to my direct cerebral connection into WoW while I'm autopiloted to and from work, groomed via robot, and fed intravenously my suppliment of caffeine and nutrients. Life will be grand.
called "Get the the neighbor arrested".
It's real easy - we each pick a victim, we each point our little waveguides at our victim's AP, and we each see who can get the cops to show up and arrest the victim, first.
Perhaps not today, but I'll wager that by end of year... the above joke won't just be a fiction, and it scares the willies out of me for some reason.
help me i've cloned myself and can't remember which one I am
Lancaster Uni in the UK experimented with a 'Real Tournament' game using toy guns, ipaqs, wifi, gps, gprs and an electronic compass. Info here: http://www.mobileipv6.net/rt/handsets.htm/ The users position and direction is shown on the screen on a predetermined map and the user can fire at another user depending on the compass direction etc. If the user roams out of wifi range, IPV6 automatically hands off to GPRS. Clever stuff.
...shows you how you and your friends can run around your city
My what?
I read Slashdot for the articles
I can see an opportunity in these guys give them six weeks.
"all through my house i set up traps, it seems like the rats have a map, so now i feed the rats crack" - Donald D
Okay, hams have been playing fox-hunts for decades, and 802.11 is just another digital mode. What's the breakthrough here?
Try setting your phone number as the SSID and see who calls. (Works best with a throwaway number, of course.)
This is a good way to advertise geek gatherings. A pocket-sized AP perched near your local 2600 meeting works fine. As far as I know, Notacon, the technology conference is planning to toss a few APs up around Cleveland with SSIDs along the lines of "IfYouCanReadThisComeToTheHolidayInn".
I'm a bit dismayed at the lack of technical sophistication displayed by TFA. Battery, inverter, adapter, accesspoint? Most APs take straight 12v in, and are quite happy to run directly from a battery. That's much less wasteful and noisy than the roundabout method. The WRT54G/GS rev 2.0 is stable down to about 4.5v input, long after the inverter would've shut itself down.
Many modern APs have enough brains to act as a pretty sophisticated standalone server too, without an uplink. With an extra meg of storage, you could run a telnet BBS or whatever, right on the AP. Or you could be sneaky, and implement a rolling SSID, or FakeAP, or have the thing hide itself when it hears a NetStumbler probe frame, so only Kismet kids can find it.
For antennae, I'd like to see some experimentation with equipment that has diverse receive capability. Mounting a dual-antenna adapter in the focal plane of a dish, so the antennae are slightly right and left of focus, could create a "stereo" antenna. With appropriate software to read signal strengths on each one, you could drastically ease the task of finding an AP.
As long as you're driving around, why not contribute to the PlaceLab location-aware database while you're at it?
Isn't this essentially the kind of thing the Nintendo DS should be able to do?
See how many pages you can split your article into in order to increase ad impressions.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"