VPN Gaming

Tired of playing the same game again and again? Are you sick of taking down those computer simulated players (bots) again and again? Are you missing your hostel LANs … or are you wishing that on your network there would be more people willing to play Counter Strike or AOE. Its true – there can be no substitute for the human mind.

Now a new cadre of gaming is here: VPN Gaming. A Virtual Private Network (VPN), is basically a virtual LAN over the internet; usually by the means of a software medium – a VPN client. The de facto standard for this is usually a free client-based VPN like Hamachi; which is free for individual users but limits the VPN connections to 8, the paid version can get you around 128 users.

If you are not technologically inclined, worry naught, these clients are pretty easy to install and use. So once, it is installed and you are online, all you need is to create a virtual network, give it a password (since you want to control who accesses your network) and ask your friends to join in. Voila!! Now you and your friends are on the same LAN despite being in different geographies. Its downhill from there on, just fire up your favorite game and ask people to join your multi-player game. Here’s a simple installation and use guide -

The installation is pretty much a click through process. The following are a few screenshots that can act as a guide for newbies. Remember, for the more security buffs, there is an option of disabling the more vulnerable services of Windows over this connection.

 

During the installation, Hamachi lets you choose which version of its services will you be availing. If you are just trying out the client or do not want to fork out money for the licensed version, then I suggest you select the non-commercial license. Once the software has installed, it will give you a small run though of the application, believe me its one of the shortest demos I have seen, and one of the most informative ones!!

This is how the application looks once it is fired up. Hamachi gives you a different ip address (it also creates a logically separate network connection on your machine). I have created one network and joined another network. Both of these are shown on my screen, any peers which are online and using Hamachi are also listed (in the screenshot none of them are online currently). The moment any of them is online, you can ping them as if they were online over a global ip.

Say hello to LAN gaming again :-)

Network Bridge

This is as a personal note to myself and to all you amateur gamers :)

Yesterday, I was at my sasural for some pani puuri and general chit chat. My wife’s cousin had also come-over. They have one desktop and one laptop over there, I had also taken my laptop over there. Enough for a mini-lan party :). So we were three gamers, with three machines and many multi-player games to play. The problem – how do we connect to each other and create a network? There are no switches available.

Fortunately, Ameya (that’s my saala) had a cross-cable through which we connected my laptop and his desktop. Then we took the other laptop and created an ad-hoc wireless connection on it, and connected that laptop to my laptop. So, my laptop was connected to both the machines on two different network interfaces viz., one lan card and the other wireless card. After this, I selected both the connections (in Network Connections) and clicked on Bridge connections. Thus a network bridge between the two connections was created allowing network traffic to pass between the two networks through my laptop. Voila!! The other laptop could now ping the desktop and vice-versa.

Star Wars

I think I have an overdose of George Lucas here. Watched the complete series. Then installed SW-Knights of the Old Republic: The Sith Lords. Saw lightsabers in my dreams last night.

May the farce be with you!! (Chennai style!!)

Sacred Underworld

Well, I downloaded the expansion pack as well ... and the installation of the same nearly killed my machine!! But the refined game is much better, the item drops are much more ... with 2 more character classes and more missions and more areas. I want longer weekends where I could play this game!! I also want to play this on Multiplayer!! I wonder if I could get my fiance hooked onto it, so that post marriage, we can play this on the LAN!!!

Please honey?!? - The trials and tribulations of an over-aged gamer and his family :-)

Sacred

I am a huge fan of role playing games, the ease with which you can get lost in them forgetting reality is simply awesome. Diablo series is just a case in example, more to follow that I played were Dungeon Siege series, KOTOR, The Elder Scrolls series (Morrowind and Oblivion), et al. Gimme any RPG and I will spend days on end happily clicking away at the monsters that otherwise would have spiralled the world into doom. I am a RPG-whore :-) (Sharma and Ashish, PG-13 levels reached??).

So, I could not help myself from downloading and installing the Sacred series (awaiting the release of Sacred2: Fallen Angel :-) ). The game is pretty much like a Diablo2, with a choice of six different races, and spells and different skill trees, et al. What sets it apart, and I feel it is the money making factor here, is the ability of the character to get into a non-linear game play style. What I mean by non-linear is that the player does not necessarily have to stick to the main game plot ala Diablo, but can go on the side plots and keep on playing them ala Oblivion. How cool is that!?!

The environment graphics are not that well done, slightly 2Dish but the gameplay is pretty decent. Kudos Ascaron Games :-) ... my weekends are booked!!

Diablo 3: The thing I have been waiting for

When I was doing my engineering (way back in 1999), one of my very good friends, Choxy told me of this original game CDs that his friend had gotten from the US. Now trust me, back then an original game CD was a big thing (it still is, but now you have torrents :-) ), and needless to say, Choxy with his awesome networking capability had those cds with him.

After meeting with him and getting those CDs, I was excited ... heck, I was jumping up and down and aching to just play the game. But how to make the game run without those CDs... that was the question. After much soul searching, I found the right crack (had to install the game twice before I got the exact crack!!). By this time it was night and my mother was heckling me to go to sleep (yeah, it was so back that I actually listened to my folks). You could say that this was the turning point ... once, the game started running, I said bye bye to a normal life, and the next 3 years of my engineering life were spent late-nights, surfing, playing, days - sleeping, eating.

I was hooked, and how!?! One of my best friends also got hooked to the game, so much that he used to visit my place just to play the game ... and boy he was a good player. During my CAT preps, I took his help in occupying the machine so that I would not play Diablo 2: Lord of Destruction instead!! So part of my MBA's credit is also due to Kombdi!!

After almost 5 years, Diablo2 is completely out of my system. Or so I thought, yesterday I learned about Blizzard announcing Diablo3 :-)

The craze is on.

Having the cake and eating it too?

Some display bug with the Solitaire of WinXP.

Nostalgia

It has been 2 years (and 2 days) since I have left the campus on the molehill. All the spirals are lying safely packed in my room, the strategies and ideas have given way to the practicalities of real life. Nonetheless, when I was reading Sumedh's post on CounterStrike ... a stream of memories rushed forth. Those hours of insane midnight gaming, those supercharged competitive section matches, those mid-game strategy sessions and counter-attack theories.

Sat today and played CS with a friend and some bots. It was not that great, but the nostalgic feeling is being rekindled with a fuzzy warm feeling about how we used to play CS in 2004-2006.

Sigh! Heres to days gone by.

Dual booting Linux with Windows

There would be probably zillion other pages on the blue nothing with similar instructions. Yes. But nothing beats doing these things yourselves ... blundering through some and still coming out on tops and saying ... whew!! I did it!! (ofcourse a little help from Google doesnt go unappreciated)

A lot of users go about the right way installing a dual boot system.

1. Take backup of your existing data
   
2. They will plan and create partitions
   
3. They will first install Windows (WinXP in my case) on one drive
4. They will then install Linux (Ubuntu here)
5. Then relax, and configure both the OSes as per their desires

This is the simpler version of doing it. Its the real man's way ... a no-nonsense approach to getting things done.

And now there is my way. I have been using this laptop for about 8 months now ... running it on Ubuntu. So after roughly about 8 months, I have a 5Gb home folder, some customized applications, some handy scripts, an up-to-date system ... and with what internet speeds are in India, I do not wish to re-update my system again. So I decided, that I will try to rescue the Linux after losing my master boot record (MBR). So this is what I did -

1. Installed WinXP on my 8GB FAT32 partition
2. Put in an Ubuntu LiveCD and booted through it to Gutsy Gibbon
3. Started grub and wrote that on the MBR. Now the windows was gone ... sigh!
1. For more detailed instructions, please visit Recovering Ubuntu after installing Windows
   
4. Started my actual Linux (whew!) and edited the grub configuration file
5. Made a manual entry for windows in this and booted
1. This is not easy as it sounds
2. You need to know on which partition of your hard drive was windows installed (for me it was /dev/hda4) ... the grub entry which corresponds to this is (hd0,3) ... keep that in mind (minus 1)
6. This was the exact entry

title Windoze XP
rootnoverify (hd0,3)
makeactive
chainloader +1

It works!

Why did I install Windows again? ... to play games :-)

N3tH@c|<

The mountain giant picked up a boulder and heaved it towards me. My female orc wizard ducked and narrowly missed the hulk of rock. I decided to take my Wand of striking and kill both the giant and the killer bee buzzing behind him in a single strike. The giant absorbed the magic and moved on to pick up the boulder for another shot. I smote off the killer bee with a couple of blows with my trusted +4 magic staff and turned to face the giant. The goliath had managed to pick up the boulder, now was the time ... I took out another wand of magic missile and let go its fury at him. No effect. I would have to kill this one by hand-to-hand. No matter. The staff was up for the challenge and my mithril coat was unharmed. A fast flurry of blows was exchanged the giant lay bested at my feet.

No, this is not a dream. Its one of my favorite games, NetHack!! This is a single player game released in around late 1980's ... the development of this game has been completely on the net ... and its a hack and slash game ... hence net + hack = nethack :-)

Everytime I play the game, theres something new that happens. The maps are different, the characters are many to play with ... and the game decides to behave differently on a full moon day!!

Just one more example of how a product has developed in a decentralized fashion over an open interactive medium (IRC and Usenets) to result in a customer oriented product.