Love, Peace & Shotguns

• all in all a good day – was nice not being on the operating side of things, so I could check things out
• Missingo joins the SOGC team as the newest admin for games and competitions
• It was far too warm in the venue, so much sweat!
• We discovered Cath’s Cakes over in St. Mary’s – quite an awesome pie shop
• My video card survived the day of gaming
• Sleeper – my LAN PC, is currently in a 95% optimal state for LANning, it takes me a single trip from the car to bring all my gear into the venue.

Props to the FragFest team for running the event!

– the SOGC is currently going through a rebrand; stay tuned for plenty more info.
– there’s a whole swathe of new back-end systems we’re working on

That’s all for now, folks

The last time I tried messing around with this, I used an app called TVersity which was okay – it worked, and did what it said it did. I recall just not having time to set it up – back then I wasn’t as interested in home media centres, being content with just accessing stuff on my PC – but nowadays, the lounge is becoming a more tempting room to hang out in (I think I’m getting old).

So, I hooked it up and again, TVersity works – straight off my Windows Server 2008 PC which stores all the media, so that’s a good thing. There’s a few nifty new features I noticed; I can now stream media straight to my iPhone or PSP as well, over the network – although that’s more great for sitting in bed catching up on the latest episode of Chuck or something.

I only really have one gripe – and it’s more from lack of experience in using TVersity — the way it organises my media is annoying. I’ll be patient and give it a bit more time, and I’ll probably post about the experience here. For now, it works and that’s all I was looking for.

You can check out TVersity at: http://www.tversity.com/

I’ve decided to use the phenomenal capabilities that Windows 7 Ultimate’s Media Centre offers – to try and stream stuff, in combination with hooking up my PS3 to the intertoobs so that I can watch everything on ABC’s iView as well. I have to say, I’ve been impressed so far, and it adds the novelty of me trying to add millions of mp4 converted TV episodes (from legitimate DVDs of course – these were originally to watch on my iPhone) — to a big media library in Media Centre so that my PS3 can see it all o.O

Fun fun

The first release at LANoWEEN 2 – involved a more technological side of implementation; users were able to register feedback, and sign up to competitions through the intranet site. Making the system actually pretty efficient; this wasn’t a feature complete site, but it took us in the direction we wanted to head, and feedback overall was pretty good based on several testers for the event.

The second release at ForceLAN – was a design based release. Which you can actually click that link to see. Here, the design of the site was pretty much finalized, and all that was left was to marry off the tech to the design and voila, we’d have a great site to use! Unfortunately that’s not the case, I’ve started advancing some of the work on the site and what could almost be called feature creep has started to occur.

I’m going to jot down a few of the features we’re looking at:

• live server status pages
• feedback forms with graphical summaries
• competitions control and results management

These three are the biggest features we’ve got at present, and are being very slowly worked on as we speak. The code is entirely raw and hand-written with none of the proper educated conventions of a real PHP developer (I’m a self taught PHP coder, so it’s not exactly pretty) – the one forgiving thing is that being a LAN based site, rather than a WWW based site means that optimizations are not as consequential. Client and User connection speeds are significantly greater than what is available online.

It’s not really noticeable to the crowd themselves, but I’ve started moving back from the frontlines as it were, and started managing the team and working on the servers to help boost the guest experience as much as possible. Leaving people with far better public rapport like Russell (Nokturnal) – and his superior sense of humour to the commentary is something I’m more than happy to do.

Our team’s structured in such a way that we have an enforcement group, a competitions group, and a support group. The three main areas of the LAN really. But that’s another post for another time

I know I’ve been extremely absent from the blog recently; I do apologise – in that time I accrued something in the order of nearly a dozen post drafts on a variety of matters. But really, things have been happening so fast, and so chaotically I never got a chance to finish any of them beyond a paragraph.

That said, I now think I’ll just wipe the table clean (get rid of all the drafts) and here I am ranting on something more current and related to the SOGC rather than bitching about DJ Hero and Modern Warfare 2; I’m going to stick to my guns and try to keep this blog more LAN organiser related, as well as semi–techgeek-gamer related. There’s three things I’m going to talk about in this post – more relevant to organisers than our gamer patrons; but for those of you who do stick around and read this, I hope it’ll still be handy or interesting info for you.

1. Live Mesh for our team files
2. Our ForceLAN Feedback form
3. Our new server: KANAKO

Those are all pretty geeky and ambiguous titles… allow me to explain.

1. Live Mesh

I’ve been doing public LAN events now, for just over 1 year now. And in that time, the SOGC itself has managed to grow it’s folder on my hard drive into nearly 3 gigabytes of documents. These are full text documents, or spreadsheets or presentation files and PDFs. Creative assets such as video media, photos, image source files (photoshop files) and images themselves, are all stored separately.

The problem is that these documents – are all over the place across two laptops, 4 desktops, 3 USB sticks and a few removable hard drives. Initially, files were pretty easy to keep track of; but what has happened now – is that files are getting confused, different versions are buggering up and so forth.

What do you do to solve this? Initially I looked into SVN server software. The SOGC owns two dedicated servers; so installing some SVN capabilities onto either of our servers is fully viable. The problem is tricky configuration, and should the need ever arise for other managing crew members to access these files; I’d possibly be left with tricky configuration troubleshooting situations which I have neither the time nor patience for.

I happened to stumble across the Microsoft Live Mesh beta. This is one of Microsoft’s ventures into cloud computing.

Basically it’s a tiny 2mb app that you download, and it lets you right click on folders and share them across all your other PCs which you’ve added to your ‘Mesh’. This way, your files automatically update whenever they’re changed, and the next time you logon or turn on the other machines, they sync right away.

You get 5GB free; so it’s quite spacious for documentation and so forth.

2. Our ForceLAN Feedback form

Some of the more observant have noticed that we’ve moved across to a feedback form that’s based in Google’s services. Seriously superior to whatever we’re coding as a solution at present (not for long though) – but it provides nice looking graphs, and content is fairly easy to make/customize.

Part of the Google Docs suite, it works fantastically – the only problem being that it’s for pre and post event forms only. Unless your event has a serious and stable internet connection that you can rely on.

3. Our new server: KANAKO

Kanako, the newest addition to the SOGC family – performed fantastically at ForceLAN; although she wasn’t being used heavily. We encountered a mysterious issue actually; during the event none of the hosted servers would appear in-game via the game’s built in server browsers. Users could still manually connect, without a single problem, however. This is an issue I’m still investigating.

For my first ever configured game server proper, it performed well, and everyone seemed to be without issue for the event.

Just that one hiccup and we could fix so much, so easily…

I have to admit, I’m supposed to be quite the gamer; yet recently, it seems I haven’t done any gaming apart from polishing off Uncharted 2, and randomly lurking around in Aion. So yesterday, I was doing the usual soul crushing chore of my credit card balances and noticed that I have an active subscription to Xbox Live, Gold. I decided I would take a moment to see what all the hullabulloo was about and actually get some gaming done on a console, which is practically unheard of for me. I grew up playing the PC, sure, I had the Nintendos and Segas everyone else had, but for me, gaming was on the PC as soon as I touched Doom back in … ’94? Since then, I had never taken console gaming seriously or given it any real credit.

So, I decided that “today will be the day” (actually, last night) to try out Xbox Live – and see just how well it works. I also chose to use one of the more popular games, Gears of War 2 in horde mode. This plays out just like Invasion in UT2004, or the ending scenes in L4D where it’s you guys against the masses.

There was a secondary ulterior motive to my little venture into the realm of console gaming (specifically XBOX gaming) — the SOGC is looking into implementing gamer medals and conjunctively, research into a way to rank our members in terms of gaming skill and competitions is also becoming of interest. (The team will probably murder me for disclosing that feature prematurely. So if I disappear… D: )

It is with confidence I can say, Xbox Live works – it’s quite a good system, and easy to use. It’s multiplayer for the brainless, bottom-of-the-barrel fucking idiots who can’t figure out PC multiplayer for crap. More importantly, it’s fun. The matchmaking system works somewhat well – considering I was unranked in all games, and had never been online in Gears of War 2 prior to this (mind you there was a fucktonne of patches to download) – and I was quite intrigued by it.

Microsoft uses a Bayesian applications to their ranking system to determine matchmaking – it’s a good system, well grounded in maths and social theory – called TrueSkill. It’s an alternate form of social engineering – a field of study I find myself greatly interested in – by all regular standards, sports nowadays and any other form of competition generally use something called the Elo rating system. I won’t burn all your time by digressing into the rating systems, I’ve linked both the whitepaper and the wikipedia article on the systems respectively – they’re interesting if you’re into all that background stuff.

These algorithms unfortunately only work for match-making systems; unfortunately with the SOGC – we’re grounded entirely in a Tournament format of competition. One day however, I’d like to implement a ‘Challenger’ system into our competitions; but for now – I think this may be just a pipedream. So last night’s foray into competition, tournament and gamer ranking formats was unfortunately, while educational, still unsuccessful.

I did learn however, that Xbox Live is pretty fun – it takes all the thought and effort out of having to game; just like how fast food takes the effort out of cooking food for yourself and instead gives you the convenience of slowly killing yourself. Xbox Live does that to the technical skills of the gamer population. I’m wondering if it’s a bad thing.

So far, it’s been pretty fantastic; we’ve now got sponsor bio pages (down the bottom) and more excitingly, a new photos link at the main menu at the top of the site. This is great as that was one of the missing things from our site since this new version went online. For us at present; the next big thing is working on a corresponding theme for the forums. I’m branding our current design theme ‘charcoal’.

It’ll be a fairly straightforward port of the current SOGC site (I hope) – so stay tuned for some interesting developments on that front.