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Wireless LAN Party Tips?

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PixyJunket

n00b
Joined
Aug 30, 2006
Messages
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I'm throwing a LAN Party this weekend and this came up because I've now got a wireless router and a lot of my friends have laptops and we figured it would be pretty easy to run some gaming with that, so much easier than running wires and hubs all over the place. Well, it WAS easy to setup.. but just doing a simple one vs. one on Quake III brought up a constant "Connection Interrupted" delays on the non-host computer. This baffles me as Quake III should be able to run over a phone modem. As for my wireless router (a Linksys), I've seen no difference in speed or performance on my main PC than when it was wired.

So, do I need to tweak something or setup a special workgroup or something? Any tips would be appreciated.
 
Unlike the hard-wired ports in a hub/switch, the wireless bandwidth is shared amoung all wireless devices.

In addition if you selected LAN settings in the internet config of Quake III (at least I think it had an internet config), then it's going to be using a lot more packets on a shared connection (wireless). Although you might have the bandwidth needed for each computer, the router will get bottlenecked from the mass of packets from multiple machines on one connection.

Of course everything I just said might be wrong.
 
my connections gets slow when all three roommates are home at once. Gaming wouldn't be enjoyable. :( wireless LAN party just sounds bad.
 
100mb lan was super laggy at times at a lot of lans i have been to. Only way to go for no hiccups i think is 1GB router box wired. You wouldn't have to worry about if someone was transferring a massive file while your gaming. It use to be where everyones computer couldn't transfer at a complete 100mb but now its possible so routers not fast enough with enough overhead will get bogged down. ;)
 
this intermittent pause is the wireless zero service looking for wireless networks every once in a while. Disable this service while you game wirelessly and there will be no more 'connection interrupted' messages.

Now in windows XP this is easy, in Vista doing it does not fix the issue. Not sure why.
 
Conker said:
100mb lan was super laggy at times at a lot of lans i have been to. Only way to go for no hiccups i think is 1GB router box wired. You wouldn't have to worry about if someone was transferring a massive file while your gaming. It use to be where everyones computer couldn't transfer at a complete 100mb but now its possible so routers not fast enough with enough overhead will get bogged down. ;)
Click to expand...

Whoever set that LAN up is a freaking noob then because 100MB wired should be PLENTY even with massive file trading. Gig backplane maybe but certainly not gig to the desktop. Especially on windows boxes.

As for the wifi LAN, anything more then 2 computers will be rendered useless even on old games. You can try seperating the load onto different channels but the antennae will just get overwhelmed with such streaming in and out packets.
 
Wireless LAN just sounds like a bad idea. Tripping on the network cables, pulling the hub off a table and killing everyones game by accident is all part of the fun.
 
Wireless networks are not full duplex. With multiple clients you're going to run into the problem that devices either listen or receive and only one can use the channel at a time. I highly doubt you'll have a pleasant experience.
 
I'm not discounting the possibility that there may be issues with eight or ten computers running off a wireless router like that but having problems with TWO leads me to believe it's not simply a speed/packet/etc. issue. Revenicus' suggestion makes A LOT of sense considering the interruptions were extremely consistent (every 90 seconds or so on the dot, it felt). I will give that a shot and let you know how it works out, all of our computers are running XP except one Mac on OS X.

For the record, we had the same problem, same consistency, with PC to PC on official Quake III and with PC to Mac on ioQuake III.
 
Googling around it looks like WZC is a Windows thing, which could eliminate that as being a potential problem since the Mac was doing the same thing.. unless of course OS X does something similar, which I would guess it does. Does anybody know what it's called on the Mac? Or, should I just worry about the WZC settings on the host computer?
 
Just to follow-up, disabling Wireless Zero on the server's machine allowed us to play with no more connection issues, though we had some other random problems during the night unrelated to the wireless setup since I'm not really well versed in networking. In fact, I think the PCs/Macs we had on wireless had less issues than the wired computers. Just to let those that thought wireless LAN wasn't feasible know that it is.
 
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