The game isn’t without its flaws however. One of the biggest ones is that there are no hotkeys, you have to move your mouse to the top of the screen to select new plants. There is a solution to this – AutoIt, the Windows automation tool that has been helping me in MMOs since Star Wars Galaxies. It is able to simulate any input (mouse movements, keyboard presses) and has basic support for hotkeys.

I’ve put together a script for AutoIt 3 that will set up hotkeys on the top number keys to correspond to the 10 seed slots. You can view the script here.

• Plants vs. Zombies Hotkeys Script
• AutoIt3

As technical manager, I’m pretty much in charge of making sure the LAN side of it works. This includes servers, network, wireless and all the websites (written by ChicagoTed) and supporting systems. Admittedly it’s not an impressive a job as doing a similar task for the UK’s largest LAN Party or DreamHack but it’s still a nice challenge.

With our first event over and done with, it’s good to finally sit back and relax and now go into some detail and analysis of what we did, where we went wrong, what we got right and how we’re going to improve.

The Network

The core of any LAN party, the network is the second most important thing at a LAN after power. At epic.LAN we provided network for approximately 85 PCs, servers, laptops and consoles. The network consisted of the following:

• Netgear 48 port gigabit switch
• 48 port Cisco 3500 10/100 switch
• 16 port Cisco 3500 10/100 switch
• 24 port 3Com Superstack gigabit switch
• 3 x 24 port 3Com Superstack 10/100 switches
• Extreme Networks 48 Port 10/100 switch

One of the Cisco switches and the 3Com’s were provided by Jester who helps run DreamLAN and is technical director for QuadV. As you can see, this a ragtag bunch of switches from 4 different manufacturers. Unfortunately for epic.LAN, we’re still small and expanding so for epic.ONE it wasn’t possible to purchase the switches we’d have liked to have.

There were only a few problems with the switches. Firstly, one of the 3Com switches proved to be unreliable on some of the network ports, so was swapped out for the Extreme networks switch. There was a minimal customer impact to this, which was good. Far more problematic was the Netgear switch we were using as our core switch. We had a power cut to the venue in the first couple of hours of the event, this caused a problem with the Netgear switch and it stopped working properly. 70% packetloss and 500ms ping replies were seen across different ports within the switch. We had to swap it out for the gigabit 3com switch. This sorted out the problems and from here on, the LAN was fine.

The ultimate plan is to have 100mbps switches at all the desks, with 2 trunked 1gbps copper uplinks to the core switch. This would give every person 100mbps to the core network, which should be fine for now. We should be able to have this implemented for epic.TWO which will reduce our reliance on borrowed equipment and allow us to thoroughly test all the kit before.

It turns out that the Speedtouch routers have some settings built in for handling SIP which is great until you try and use another SIP phone on your network. The fix is to disable whatever it is trying to do and it turns out, this is easy!

1. Use telnet to connect to your router. If running Vista, you’ll need to install Telnet through Add/Remove Programs otherwise, you can use Putty.
2. Type in the following commands

connection unbind application=SIP port=5060
saveall

3. Change the configuration on your VoIP PBX so the phone is configured to be behind NAT

The phone should now just start working. This was tested with a Speedtouch 585. Polycom IP501 VoIP phone and the VoIP PBX is Asterisk provided by Voxhub.

We thought that this was it and Red Alert 2 was dead, however, Scorpio9a has released a patch. The patch makes Red Alert 2 use IP instead of IPX and I’ve tested it and it’s working under Vista! How to get it working?

1. Download the patch: ts_ra2_lanpatch_1_00.zip
2. Extract it to your Red Alert 2 directory
3. Edit ra2.ini and change the ‘NetCard’ setting in the [Network] section to 0 (If you have more than 1 network card, you may need to try different values)
4. Run Red Alert 2 and choose ‘Network’ and you should end up in the lobby!

Some common problems you might come across are:

• Network button doesn’t do anything and just returns to the main menu
  You haven’t selected the right network card, just edit ra2.ini in the Red Alert 2 directory and change the NetCard setting in the [Network] section.

• You can’t see any games or connect to someone else’s game
  Make sure you’ve allowed Red Alert 2 on any firewall like Windows Firewall or Zonealarm. Also make sure everyone is running this patch regardless of operating system, otherwise they might be hosting an IPX game which your IP broadcast can’t see!

If you find this post helpful or have more problems/solutions, then please post a comment and let me know and if Scorpio9a reads this – if you come to a UK LAN Party, let me know and I’ll buy you a drink!

The music is very reminiscent of Lost with places where it rises to crescendo while zooming in on the characters. There’s a hint of borrowing from Heroes with the captions. Normal captions like locations, etc. are 3D text inserted into the scene, similar to the comic book style captions on Heroes and this works well, even if the captions do look a little like the Lost logo.

When an international flight lands at Boston’s Logan Airport and there are no signs of life, FBI Special Agent Olivia Dunham, a scientist, Walter Bishop, and his son Peter uncover a deadly mystery involving a mysterious plague and a series of unbelievable events.

Moving on to the storyline and plot, this is engaging and entertaining. Definitely your typical setup for an ensemble TV sho, introducing the characters and setting up the basic interaction between them all. Anna Torv puts in a great performance as Olivia, bringing some emtotion to the character. Some great acting as well by John Noble but you’d expect that from him.

In closing, I think it’s a good pilot and it shows a lot of potential for the series.

• Fringe at Wikipedia
• Fringe at TV.com
• Official Website

Arrival

Better directions are needed. Possibly speak to the AA about the event signs or the local council about permission for temporary signage.

Car parking stewards were a bit abrupt. Your first introduction to i34 and it’s someone literally shouting at you “Door 9″. undercover parking was OK, but I understand it filled up quickly and people then had to resort to parking far away. I managed to get into the mess of parking that was outside the main building and left my car there (nicely parked) for the duration of the LAN.

On arrival, myself and boxowin put up our party tent. The idea of this tent was that in the evenings, we could retire to the tent for a few hours before going our separate ways at about midnight.

As has been mentioned on the forums, the tent was broken. Several poles have been sheared in two and many more bent. I do not think the weather could have done this, so it was either accidental or on purpose. The mess of feedback in the other thread about had people raging about the space we took up with our tent, well here’s the thing – We were there from 4PM setting up the tent.

More camping space was opened up and the entire site either side from the entrance until the outdoor activities could be used for camping if needed (It is for other weekend events I’ve attended at Stoneleigh Park).

The queue for checkin was a good 45mins-1hr, despite having about 6 checkin desks. I’m unsure what was taking the time, or if there’s even any way to speed this up. I think it’s just a side effect of having ‘EAS’. ‘Fast Pass’ is a bit of a joke. It does speed up checkin ever slightly, but even then, it’s the difference between scanning a barcode or entering a 6 digit number that the attendee already has.

Finally, walking into the main hall was somewhat impressive, although a little bland. In the ‘M Festival’ hall, there were huge WCG banners. Things like that add a bit of colour and liven up the place.

The LAN

Technically the LAN seemed to work from my perspective. A few network issues ironed out within minutes by the blue shirt team. The internet was very slow until Saturday morning when the Steam content server at the LAN started working. It was so slow at one point that to browse MPUK’s Flickr gallery, it was quicker to use HSDPA do for most of Friday routed my internet traffic via my vodafone USB adapter. 100mbps isn’t enough for a LAN this size and it does need to have MOAR bandwidth.

As usual, there was a lack of gaming organised for casual/social gamers. I know we’re now in the very small minority at the i-Series as the majority of attendees are for tournaments and they don’t care about big games, but possibly a token effort. I know how hard it can be to organise big games, having tried at i32, but some good run publics would be appreciated.

On the topic of servers – UDP forwarder seemed to be working excellently, with the new approach of essentially using a blacklist instead of a whitelist making it much better – even to the extent of Steam listing LAN games from outside of my subnet – well done! First event in quite a few that I’ve seen the UDP forwarder working properly!

Great customer service from the MPUK staff, although I know most of them, so it’s a bit of a moot point. Was hearing a lot from other people that it was very confusing as there were no longer the normal staff shirt colours. I know some of the reasons for it, but it makes identification of staff or telling people – speak to someone in a red shirt, very difficult.

I’d like to thank boxowin for providing a great set of people to sit with, some witty banter and just being great, fun people.

The atmosphere on the last night was really good and somewhat reminiscent of DreamHack which has an atmosphere so thick, you can cut it with a knife. I’d like the event to be like that all the way through, maybe wi bth the addition of music in the gaming hall. The only downside being the amount of stuff being thrown, with glasses being bent, drinks being spilt and even garlic mayo showering down on about 3 desks on row V. Not funny.

There weren’t enough toilets (stalls moreso than anything else) and the state of the toilets was at times horrendous with vomit in the sinks. The cleaners also need to clean the venue more often as the bins were overflowing and the floor in the central aisle was stupidly sticky on Saturday as the cleaners had been dragging leaking bins and binbags along. It was worse than a cinema carpet at points!

Our row (row V) seemed very close together in comparison to other rows. Some rows, like AH – the ones near the main door, you could comfortably walk down with people sat in their seats both sides. Our row you had to struggle to get down and had to ask people to move in their chairs, so maybe a slight problem with measuring out the distances there, but it definitely wasn’t 1.8m – it was least 20-30cm narrower.

The temperature. It was warm, maybe slightly more so than DreamHack. Luckily the weather was relatively cool and not in the 30s outside, so we were spared being in an oven. Realistically there’s not much that can be done. Possibly work out how to get air flowing through the room and how to protect people near the doors from cold/rain/glare.

Food/Drink/Social

I only tried the pizza and the breakfast. The pizza was VERY nice, but this is because they’re freshly made and cooked to perfection, not overcooked like most pizzas are. Although nice – they, like the rest of the food, is overpriced. You should be able to buy one of the whole trays of pizza (4 slices) for about £12-13. It currently works out at £18 which is expensive.

The breakfast was nice, although not really enough to justify the £5.50 pricetag. More variety and toast included would be nice for that price. Or maybe just a lower price.

The eventbar deserve an award for great service. Never had to queue more than 2 minutes, the prices were great and the actual customer service was good. The drawback is, there needs to be more of an actual bar. More tables, a more bar/pub-like atmosphere would be good, as it felt a bit cold. The other bar near the hostel was deserted when we went there with just the MtG crowd playing, the prices were high and the range worse than the event bar.

The pub quiz was good, although as probably the second or third biggest tournament, it should again deserve a bit more consideration with regards to arena/stage design. Although the all-round boxing ring style seating layout was good for WCG matches, it doesn’t work well for presentations and the LCD TVs blocked the view of the stage. Most of the presentations ended up with being presented to people sat at the West end of the stage – some consideration for this in the plans in future, as well as planning for decent round tables and more room for a nice pub quiz layout.

Security

Security this time, although most of them were a lot more polite and friendly than previously seemed a lot more incompetent. I didn’t have anything stolen, so I can’t comment on that, however, I will mention the few incidents that have concerned me:

• Multiple times myself and others were able to walk out of the gaming hall with laptop bags and rucksacks without being challenged by anyone.
• On Monday when leaving, being asked ‘Is that box empty?’ when leaving with my 24″ Dell TFT box. This is after the security lockdown. I said yes. I think anyone taking something might have said ‘No’.
• After this point a small ‘disagreement’ happened as security had been told not to let anyone through the main door with computer equipment (contrary to the details on the big screen and the tannoy announcements at the time). I then had to leave my monitor with the staff, move my car round to the other entrance and then collect my monitor. More co-ordination between MPUK and the security company needed. Although the guard wouldn’t even let me out the door when accompanied by SquireMuldoon, so maybe some flexibility also needed.
• On the Friday, I observed many people entering and leaving through the fence opposite the ‘East’ door of the building. They weren’t being challenged by anyone and most of event management were in the outside bit by the bar, less than 50m away.
• On Monday after the crackdown on security was able to walk past with my laptop in my laptop bag and wasn’t checked, except by a random MPUK staff member who was just in the area (I don’t think they were there permanently as when I came back in a minute later, he was gone) – well done that person for taking the initiative to check.
• As mentioned in the other thread as well, when leaving by the east door and having a box of random cables and other stuff checked. The guard pointed to my PS3 and asked what it was, when I said “A PS3″ I was told to carry on. Now in the past MPUK have issued stickers for consoles and are encouraging people with just TVs/consoles to attend events. Surely that should mean £300 consoles should be checked for stickers too? As they are essentially another PC.

I think the fence didn’t work because it was policed wrong. Security were inside the building all the time, the fence was useless. At Newbury, the security were on the outside of the building on the entry points through the fence. They had almost full visibility of the perimeter 24/7. This also helped the atmosphere inside the fence as you felt more relaxed and didn’t have the continual hassle every time you walked out to get a drink, etc.

With all the petty theft of peripherals, it makes me wonder what happened to the CCTV MPUK used to use at Newbury. It was lots of IP cameras with output to a monitor on reception and saved to a server in the server area – it seems this was not in use at Stoneleigh. With MPUK already owning the equipment, software and infrastructure for it, why was this not used?

Sleeping

I was in the Travelodge with 3 other people. Nice hot showers, room service, en-suite, comfortable bed. All for £30/night. Taxis when we used them were about £10. 2 minute walk from a Tesco Metro in the morning and plenty of cashpoints.

M Festival

Again this seemed mixed. Some exhibitors had gone to great lengths to make their stands special, Scan/Intel, Samsung and EA spring to mind, although they probably had the largest budget. The retro zone and arcade games just looked tacky, as did the freeplay XBoxes. literally half of the festival looked good, half looked bad.

I don’t think there was enough there to keep people entertained for more than a couple of hours and I feel sorry for anyone who specifically came for the M Festival as I don’t think it offered enough.

The arena – technically gets better every event, this was no exception, although I don’t think the round stage worked for anything other than a few finals. The LCD TVs blocked the view and the presentations don’t work properly when there’s no focal point to perform to.

Summary

A very mixed event. It has become clear now that MPUK has nothing really to offer casual/social gamers as participants. The gameplay and social gaming side is much better at a smaller LAN like StratLAN or LeachLAN than it is at the i-Series. I’m sure if I were in one of the key tournaments, I’d love participating, but as it currently stands, it offers nothing for me.

I will be spectating i35 because of the above and also as I can’t see the point in spending money on participating where there’s a risk of theft of my PC/peripherals and a risk of damage from projectiles and flying condiments.

The pub quiz, the socialising with friends, etc. can all be done as a spectator and this is what I’ll be doing.

There’s PC Gamer Showdown in September and then i35 in October, so there’s one event for MPUK to iron out the rest of the teething issues. Don’t get me wrong, I think it’s great that the i-Series has moved and I like the idea of being one room, but these issues need sorting, which is something the 500 player PC Gamer event can do.

In closing – I’m sure MPUK know what they need to do, and they will take the steps needed to sort out these issues for next time, however, I’ll be spectating.

I’m here with Box ‘o’ Win and will be taking photos and putting them in the gallery. We’re on rows U and V on the far side of the hall so come and say hi! I arrived about 4PM and with the rest of the box, we set up the Tent ‘o’ Win – a 30ft x 10ft gazebo for drinking and general socialising. After that, Shazz and I went to Leamington and found our Travelodge with the largest room I’ve ever seen in a Travelodge, with room not just to swing a cat, but an entire zoo! We then went and joined the epic queue for checkin. It was only 30mins or so waiting when we queued, but there were people queuing for almost 2 hours to get checked in.

First thoughts on the event? It’s OK. Having everyone in one room is interesting and with the lights off there is a bit of atmosphere, but it’s not a patch on DreamHack. The trouble I think MPUK will have is that the tournament gamers will not want the lights off during their tournaments, and they definitely won’t want loud pounding music. Both of which are important in bringing the atmosphere to DreamHack.

The MFestival exhibition isn’t open yet, it’s scheduled to open at 9AM with all manner of exhibitors and an epic stage, that by all reports, dwarves anything attempted at a previous i-Series.

As always, photos and video can be found on the gallery as well as on YouTube.

• RED Shirt
• BLUE Shirt

Update!

I’ve had these shirts made and they’re great. The company I used was AKAK, however any T-Shirt printer should be able to do these. They worked out about £12.50 each ($20 or so) . I’ve also considered getting a Sandvich T-Shirt made:

• Sandvich Shirt