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Google Engineer Builds Ultimate LAN Party House
Zothecula writes "Anyone who has a attended a LAN party — where people connect their computers on one network in one location to play multiplayer games together — can tell you that they can be both very fun but also kind of a hassle. Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person's house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun. With that in mind, it makes sense that one Google employee decided to bypass all that inconvenience and just build a house specifically for LAN parties, complete with multiple networked computers and TVs connected to game consoles."
I went to this LAN Party and everyone was wearing togas and drinking alcoholic beverages and making out and... and I didn't even see any computers anywhere. It was very strange.
Hope it has good ventilation and cooling. Nothing worse than a hot, smelly lan party.
...to have this much cash. By my standards, a LAN party is fancy when nobody's sitting on the floor.
"When information is power, privacy is freedom" - Jah-Wren Ryel
...I can tell you that unless everyone present is already vetted, there will still be problems. People will reconfigure controls, will bring their own peripherals and will unhook yours, will move stuff around that they have no business moving, etc.
There's a reason why arcade game consoles were the order of the day in old-school electronic arcades- there was one cord to plug them in, they were too heavy to move, and the controls were specialized to the game and fixed into place. They were a kiosk for playing games in the same way that an ATM is a kiosk for dealing with money and banks. They worked well because the user couldn't do much to screw them up.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
In the past you had classics of LAN play, like NWN1.
Now? Modern games remove the feature. Diablo 3 - yanked, so they can make you play through their servers. Same for many others. It's all about control. When games directly supported LAN play, it gave the players and the community control over their experience. It let them play without permission, and that is a thing that couldn't be allowed to stand.
LAN play was some of the funnest gaming to be had. Far, far better than trying to share a single screen on a console. But it's dying. Killed because we must ask for permission to play the games we bought.
Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun. Having to organize all your friends to each haul their usually-oversized gaming rigs to one person's house, ensuring they all have the same software, and inevitably dealing with one or more people having trouble connecting: not fun.
Then why not just make PC games that support a shared-screen mode for a PC connected to an HDTV? Then all four players can grab gamepads, sit on a sofa, and have fun. The downsides are that 1. it wouldn't work well for certain genres, and 2. publishers would lose the opportunity to sell multiple copies to a household.
"Playing games with your friends all in the same room: fun"
What about having a girlfriend instead?
That's not a house, it's an Internet Cafe that does mind having customers sleep over. BFD.
1) People are facing a wall, not each other.
2) There's no table central to all players, where pizza resides.
3) A single-line of players means players on the ends have trouble communicating verbally.
4) There's uneven lighting across the gaming spots, and it looks like more lighting behind the players than in front of them
5) Those chairs are not comfortable enough.
/you have to consider these things if you want to keep going all weekend
I swear they give me mod points to shut me up.
They should put these in cafes and spread them out all over the world.
Then again, I'm not a gamer, so I don't need a whole lot of power to do what I need to. My cabin is capable of running a couple major appliances, lights, TV, radio, vacuum cleaner, a couple laptops, but certainly not 12 X 500W (most likely) or more, just for computers, not to mention networking.
Your stove alone could use close to 6000 W when you've got it all running. It's not that huge a consumption. A dollar an hour.
Your stove alone could use close to 6000 W when you've got it all running. It's not that huge a consumption. A dollar an hour.
No, not mine. Not anywhere near 6000W.
But I've taken measure to reduce electricity consumption in the cabin, partly by buying lower wattage appliances. Solar panels are going into the mix next year.
518 400 pixels per player [...] 960x540
This assumes that the game is in a genre for which the screen would have to be split. One genre that does not require a split is fighting games, such as Street Fighter or Super Smash Bros. Similar to fighting games are things like Bomberman and Custom Robo (does this genre have a name?). Some other games have a vertically oriented playfield, using less than about 720x1080 even in single-player mode, and splitting the screen is not disruptive. These include building block puzzle games such as Tetris, as well as rhythm games such as Dance Dance Revolution and Rock Band.
They want their Internet Cafe back.
-TheDawgLives suckitdown
my basement has been like this for years. so what?
Well, for one I'd rather have all my 3 686 000* pixels for my gaming session
And zero pixels for the gaming sessions of the one to three other people in your living room who can't afford a gaming PC of their own. Perhaps they're still in school, not yet old enough to get a real job, and a neighbor family's kid has already signed lawn care contracts with most of the neighborhood. But then again, perhaps my viewpoint is skewed because I spent a couple years babysitting my aunt's children.
not have to fight over the least broken controller
At least in my family, recommending that visitors bring their own controller has been considered a lot more reasonable than asking them to disassemble the family's only gaming PC, take it out of the house, and buy a copy of the same game that I'm hosting.
Didn't these kind of go the way of the dodo, when we all got smartphones and dataplans? ...eh, uh ...I mean laptops and wi-fi?
GET OFF MY LAWN!
you've seen 'em all.
What, slow news day much?
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
I haven't hosted nor attended a LAN party in, well heck I can't even remember... at least a decade. The last time I even played a PC game with another person on the same segment was when we 2-manned Diablo II, and that was at least 3-4 years ago. It's just way too much hassle anymore.
Very occasionally we'll play a console game in split-screen, or for sports titles it's just one screen with different-colored markers for each player. 99% of the time though, we just play online with a mic headset or Ventrilo. The RL meetups are strictly for RL stuff, like food/drink, band jams, game day at the bar (an excuse to get away from our wives)... we just don't see the point in traveling to just play a quick video game when it's much more comfortable and convenient to do so online whenever the hell you're bored. At best, we'll make "play dates" to get a large-ish group going for certain games, like say Call of Duty or various racing titles that are best enjoyed while launching various hyper-offensive slurs at your drinkin' buddies. All that requires is an SMS or phone call, no tedious packing/driving/unpacking/wiring/breaker-flipping ritual.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
"Google Engineer oldest living virgin. Film at 11"
... the terrorists hate us?
The house won't be out of beta for at least 5 years...
in terms of each system having the same keys will lead to issues. Also with that you need to keep the hardware in each system just about the same.
They want their video arcade back
Your cabin might have a 100 AMP circuit, even down to 50 with some, my house is at 200, but newer ones these days are built with 300, even 500 AMP circuits. I'd have to get a 100 AMP upgrade if I wanted an electric car, which the electric company offered to comp me for, but I've got other needs.
Big Deal. I wired my home with cables also for where my computers will be around the house. I also have my computer connected to my TV, did that way back with my commodore 64.
Where is the store at?
This looks nothing more than a regular internet cafe made for gamers that are a dime a dozen, except it is in his house.....
so what if you get tired, you can crash on the couch.....the chairs don't even have any cup holders!!!!
That reminds me of the computer lab at Harvey Mudd College in about 1992-4. Low latency network, IIci Macs at the time and software such as Tank and Spaceward Ho! and others. Hmmm.
JJ
EE Nazi: it's amp, not "AMP". It's the shortened form of ampere, not an acronym for something.
Your post is good, but the repeated unit abuse just grated on my eyes!
My guess is - he isn't married?
Bow before me, for I am root.
LAN Parties are largely obsolete. Gamers all now have Internet access good enough for online gaming, and with Skype they can talk to their teammates too.
"That's either incredibly asinine or the most brilliant troll I've ever read. Not sure which." -Anonymous Coward
Unless he did his own network install :)
still an updates server and streamed SC matches, a heavenly step above your standard fair.
Hi Slashdot! I updated my Blogger/G+ profile to link back to my Slashdot ID, so you can see this is actually me.
I'm a little disappointed that the submitter linked the Gizmag article instead of the original blog post -- I think a lot of Slashdotters would have found that more interesting, for some of the technical details. Although, even that post is pretty light on details. I'm working on writing a more in-depth description of how I manage the machines. In short: Hooray for PXE boot, iSCSI, and LVM snapshots.
You'd also be interested to know that I ran several successful LAN parties with all the gaming machines running Ubuntu Linux and WINE. I'd estimate 70% of games worked well (although often not perfect) with this configuration. Sadly, I have recently given in and installed Windows, though the server machine obviously still runs Linux.
Here are some pictures of the server room, which Slashdot inexplicably won't let me link as HTML: http://goo.gl/BgFpT
Here is the back-story behind how I ended up with this house.
As I said, I'll be writing some more blog posts soon with full gory technical details. I'll try submitting them as a new story when they're ready, but you can also subscribe to the blog or follow me on G+ if you're interested.
Typical. With all the design and technical expertise these guys still can't manage to figure out how to put chips in a bowl.
there are always people that spend waaaaayyy more time on a multiplayer, so I can't even pretend to compete
Then don't play games with shitty matchmaking. Tetris DS used an Elo-style rating (albeit centered at 5000 instead of 1600) and would usually pair you up with another player with a similar rating.
"complete with multiple networked computers and TVs connected to game consoles"
i think ive been somewhere like that before.
and Collen Kelly (x twit network) went to work for for Google -