GAMESOC EXTREME LAN PARTY

To date this will probably be one of our greatest lan parties if all goes well. Will be a 60 player slapping fest in a hotel of someones choice.

Will be around 24 hours long, with no real prizes of such, apart from the odd round of pints (-:

GAMESOC HISTORY

GameSoc was started over the course of January 2000 by Kameel Vohra and Andrew Scott. At the time they were respectively half way through their 3rd and 2nd years. They decided to start a new Edinburgh University Gaming Society dedicated to multiplayer gaming after a number of frustrating small LAN partys the year before. The problem they found with an average LAN Party is the lack of reliable network equipment, coupled to people arriving with varying network set-ups already installed on their PC. By setting up a Multiplayer gaming society, they could purchase network equipment far beyond the ability of most individuals.

After some in fighting with EUSA and other University bodies, GameSoc was officially started on the 1st of February, 2 weeks after its first, well attended, LAN Party.

CURRENT - OVER THE SUMMER

We are about to have our second mini-LAN for the summer this week - see the title bar for more info - after our first, at Sandy's Place went stormingly. Big thanks to Sandy and his parents for putting up for us for the 48 hour gaming fest.

As mentioned above GameSoc's main aim is to provide a social and technical environment in which to play network games. This includes the provision of games servers and high speed network equipment. To summarise our current assets in the hardware department I'll use a summery of the network that we implemented at Sandy's mini-LAN.

For what turned out to be 12 of us, we had a total network bandwidth of over 1.3Gb/s (that's considerably faster than most hard disk drives) and 2 dedicated servers. 1 server was dedicated to game serving for games like Quake I,II and III, Half-life and Half-life counterstrike. The other was plugged into the network with a total of 400Mb/s of bandwidth and doing file serving - how often is it faster to download a game than install it off a CD-ROM?

By Freshers week we will have a new server - built party on members spare hardware - but mostly on a sponsor ship deal with Microsoft. The same deal that gets all our members a free Windows 2000 License, and GameSoc a free copy of Windows 2000 advanced server. The new server should hopefully be a nice sparkly duel PIII with about 256MB of RAM, enough to power over 60 of us playing different games.

Hope this gives you some idea about what Gamesoc is all about. Remember, if you feel the need to kill something, we're here to keep you out of jail ;-]