LAN07 (Contd)

Finally I have uploaded the photos onto Flickr (which is an awesome site, but thats for another blog). The pictures are located in my filespace in the LAN 07 Set.

From those photos I remembered a number of other memorable events during the day.

* At the height of everyone arriving and plugging in, we started up a game of dawn of war, the GPUs/CPUs started going full bore and suddenly....Poof! Out goes the power. We tripped the fuse from the amount of power drain of 14 machines on one circuit. So I had cables running all over the place to make sure we connected machines to as many different circuits as we could.

* We went to bed around 5:00AM Sunday and I made everyone else's bed before I turned in. Of course Doug completely misses the pillows/quilt on the recliner and sleeps on the desk...only after he stays up till 6:30 making trackmania maps.

* Watching 5 guys surrounding a 22" inch screen playing NHL2007 was hilarious. The game itself looked average, but Ryan and the boys went mad playing it and their enthusiasm was infectious. Before long entering the backroom was impossible as there was an entire crowd of girls and guys watching these five mad hatters play Ice Hockey.

* People at LANs bring their own idea of what to play and often these can be a surprise hit. Case in point the ridiculously simple Toblo, which is a free fast-paced CTF style game. Or Bid for Power, the DragonBall Z quake 3 mod. It only takes one Evangelist to make everyone play an ancient game like Starcraft1 again (thanks Dilan).

There were a few other interesting things I learnt from a technical perspective:
Using Bittorrent as a way of sending the files around didn't quite work. The main problem was BT is great if I had all the necessary files first so I could convert them into torrents and could start seeding. But the time required to turn something into a torrent and then host it and get people to download it was greater than someone hitting a share and downloading it.

Fraps slows your machine down to buggery. The only time I found FRAPs would work and not be an hindrance was on my dual-core machine, where I'm assuming one core is Frapsing and the other is going to the game.

Running multiple games also will slow your machine and I think it always will regardless of hardware. I had SupremeCommander and Trackmania running. Now trackmania isn't a GPU heavy game, but once running beside SupCom, it was 5fps all the way. Truely quite poor.

Broadcasting people using VLC and a webcam is extremely easy to setup and can be completely useless to do at a LAN unless we're talking a large enough crowd to act as an audience. If we could have people playing and then you could go, I want to look at Jacks screen and it did a Picture in picture of his game interface, THEN we're talking something interesting. Also significantly more difficult to implement.

And finally, I relearned the skills of putting together a video using captured content and Adobe Premiere & Virtualdub. But thats for another blog on another day.