Organizing A LAN Party In India

Multiplayer gaming is catching up in India big time, the adrenaline rush that one gets while playing another live player over a network surpasses the experience of playing a game in its single player mode. Although racing ahead or fragging the living hell out of the AI controlled elements of a game are exhilarating, hearing your friend’s shouts and seeing the expression on his face when he gets fragged or pummeled takes you into a whole different dimension.

A LAN party is basically a group of gamers bringing their computers at one place and connecting them through a networking device, and then playing games with each other over LAN or simply share files with each other, being more of the former type. Although as easy as it sounds, it takes considerable time and planning to host a successful LAN party.

Here is a simple step by step guide to help you get into action with minimal hassles.

Planning

As mentioned above a lot of planning is required to host a successful LAN party.The most important aspect of planning is the venue of the party. One should decide on the place of holding the LAN party after deciding on the number of people who would be attending the LAN party. If there are not more than 5 – 6 people who would be attending the party then you can host it at your house too. If the number of people attending is larger than 8, then I suggest you hold it in a community hall or a big basement where everyone can settle in comfortably with their computers.

When you choose a venue, make sure that it has got sufficient power outlets, both 5amps and 15amps. Normally a 15amps outlet can support around 5 computers comfortably, so make sure you have enough of these, also make sure to get extension plugs so that the computers placed away from the power outlets can be plugged into without having to move them around the electricity point messing up their placement and Ethernet wire setups.

Also check out that there is decent furniture at the venue, if you plan to hold it in your house then you can easily put up 3 – 4 monitors on the dining table by placing the cabinets under the table and the keyboard, monitor and mouse upon the table. If you are holding it in a large hall make sure there are enough tables and chairs to fit everyone in comfortably. Of course you can always ask friends to get their foldable chairs and tables if you are short of furniture at the venue, but it is advised to have sufficient furniture at the venue, as carrying along furniture along with computers can get tedious.

Time and Minimum Requirements

It’s up to you to decide the duration of the LAN party. One can choose it to be on the weekend or other common holidays for a period of 1 or 2 days. Make sure that it is neither too long nor too short as it can get boring if it’s too long or messed up if it’s too short. Also keep in mind that other people stay around wherever you hold the party, and they would get disturbed from the sounds of shouts and gun shots eventually, so make sure that you do not exceed their patience limits.

Once you have decided on the venue and the duration of the party, a major part of pre planning gets over. Now all one has to decide are the games to be played at the LAN party, you must be careful while choosing the game cause everyone has their favourites, so you would have to decide the common games between them and decide on those. Basically you should choose one strategy game, a racing game, and one or two FPS games. Play various modes such as capture the flag, team deathmatch etc so that everyone can join the game and have fun.

Once you decide on the games make sure that the people coming to the party have computers which can run these games, and they have the games preinstalled on their PC’s, cause a majority of time would be wasted in merely installing UT2004 from each other’s PC’s. Hence it would be wiser if you would announce a minimum recommended hardware for the LAN party along with the games required. Other than these ask everyone coming to bring power strips and spike busters, power cables and Ethernet cards with them.

Once all this planning is done, you can publicize your party. If there aren’t too many people, then you can inform them about the venue, date and other rules by sending them mails, but if the number of people attending the LAN party is high, then it is suggested that you post it up on forums, or open up a registration page, get the attending peoples e-mails and phone numbers and inform them suitably well in advance. Make sure to get everyone’s confirmation on the participation, so that you can get to know the number of people coming.

Setting the Network

As everything is planned out and confirmations are received, one should get into the setting up of the network. As the computers will be networked, you would need to have a network switch to connect each PC with each other using network cables. If you don’t have a switch then you can pool in money with the friends and buy one, as the cost of switches have fallen down drastically, a 8 port 10/100 switch costs around Rs.1200.

A switch is preferred over a Hub as switches are faster than hubs. You can either ask everyone to get Ethernet cables of around 15 foot or get a pack of Ethernet cable and cut it as per need and use it.

Once you acquire the switch and the cables, setup a private LAN, class C network. A class C LAN is simple to setup without getting into the details of architecture and IP choosing. As most of the people to day use broadband internet their LAN cards are already configured for the class C network, for those who don’t have an Ethernet card, ask them to buy or borrow one. Now-a-days most of the motherboards come with onboard LAN cards so it should not be much problem.

On the day of the party, once the computers are placed and connected, check the properties of individual PC’s LAN cards, and then open the TCP/IP properties, here change the IP address to 192,168.0.x or 172.16.0.x where x can be any number from 0 -254. Each computer on the network should have a different IP address. In the subnet mask filed make sure that all the PC’s have 255.255.255.0 as this will tell the computers that they are part of the same IP set.

Once you do all the above on the computers, all the computers will be connected to each other and would be able to see each other in the network.

GO GO GO

It is advised to make sure that all the computers have the latest graphics card drivers and latest game patches. You can keep all the drivers and patches onto one computer and make the folder shared so that everyone can get them.

Once all the PCs are connected, all that is left to be done is to start up the game and launch it in its multiplayer mode. There are two ways to host a server, either you can ask one of the players to host a server on his pc and let the others join in to his server, or you can use a machine to host a dedicated server.

Depending on the number of players it is advised to hose the type of server. If there are around 10 – 15 players than a listen server is a good idea , simply launch the game, setup the time and frag limit, map and other details on the server and host it. If the number of players is quite large then it is better to host a dedicated server as it uses the complete resources of the computer in hosting the game resulting in smoother performance, the drawback however is that the computer hosting the dedicated server cannot be used to play the game. You can either run a dedicated server from within the game, or by using the windows xp command line option, the latter is advised as it uses fewer resources.

Sharing

Sharing is also a big time event of the LAN party. People share videos, softwares etc over the network. This can be done by using the inbuilt file and print sharing option or using LAN sharing software’s such as Borg chat.

To setup a shared folder, check the properties of your LAN card and install the file and print sharing services, once this is done right click on the folder you want to share and select sharing and security, in the box that opens up, check the box saying “share this folder”, type in a name and the folder will be seen on the network. If you want to use software for sharing files, then you can get many softwares such as Borg chat or Softros which are useful for sharing files over LAN.

Precautions

Once you talk about having a LAN party many people would agree instantly on the idea and it would seem that your party would be an instant hit, but few mistakes can ruin your party as much as the amount of time spent in thinking about it. Here are a few precautions you should take care of the following

Confirm the number of people coming to the party, it would really get awful if half the people who agreed to come; back out at the last minute. To avoid this, confirm with everyone a week before the party date and again one day before the party.

If you are pooling in money to host the party, then make sure that everyone pitches in equally and take the money in advance, so that you can spend the extra money on getting food and drinks.

Most of the time, LAN parties are noisy as hell, make sure that others are not disturbed by excess of noise, people tend to swear a lot, so it would be better if you warned everyone about not making much chaos. The last thing you would want is cops showing up at your venue asking you to shutdown as they got a complaint of excess noise.

Make sure that people play the games that have been announced, and not any other games which run only on a few computers, all it would lead to is, half the people installing the game from scratch wasting time, and the other half watching the game standing behind the computers that can run the game, this would eventually lead to people getting bored.

Final Words

Lastly there are a few but significant points that you must bear in you mind to make your party a success. Make sure that the venue you are hosting the party at has got ample parking place to occupy the number of people bringing in their vehicles, also check that it’s safe and secured. Next check that the venue has got toilets marked up well and indicate the way to them, otherwise you would spend quite some time explaining the others location of the toilets. Also the venue should have ample supply of drinking water as it is the most needed requirement, as for the food you can either order pizzas and burgers or simply get everyone to go to a nearby restaurant

Follow these steps and you would have a LAN party that everyone would remember for some time.

Karan Bajaj