Trying to run lan parties on class PCs for an event
It’s a university event with approval and everything but, I asked and I’m waiting for a response but I’m not confident they’ll let me whitelist games to run through their firewalls, I’m opting for something closer to a wlan party then, as I understand it you cannot host lan games by just being connected to the same router of wi-fi? So I tried making a hotspot on one PC (hotspotting of their own wifi which I figured would have the same restrictions as their lan, but maybe it doesn’t?) and having others connect to it, this works. I don’t have admin rights so I can’t install any tunnelling software or anything like that and sometimes the results are spotty, are there any tips I should know in order to make this go any smoother?
My proposed lineup is
Halo 2
NFS Most Wanted 2005
Quake 3 Arena (this actually works over the normal lan network for the class oddly enough)
Unreal Tournament 2004
Left4Dead 2
And there’s also PCSX2 which I would have loved to link up for gran turismo 4, there’s no solid documentation for new builds but for what people have figured so far it seems that needs tap drivers so it may be out of the question.
I’m also worried for some of the higher player count games like Halo 2 that having the hotspot be host to 16 other people would lead to instability, though this is something I’m gonna have to get IT to let me test. (Windows limits to 8 but you can raise it with 16)
I’m not entirely sure whether the lan truly doesn’t work in class cause of firewalls or what have you, but Halo 2 for instance can create and see games, but it fails when you try and join unless you use a wifi hotspot to connect. Same with most wanted. I’m hoping the lan thing is just a fib because it would be so much easier and foolproof.
Edit: There’s 48 PCs, they’re all in ones and the layout of the class is something like this
There’s 6 rows of 8 PCs with a split in the middle of the room for people to walk through
So one table has 4 PCs on them.
Everything runs wired to a network server in the room routed through the tables, but the PCs also have wi-fi of course.