DOrset KHS erm... stock? Ahhh. As in BarnStock as in Woodstock. Probably as in something else, as well.
Anything written here may make the rest of the document obsolete, so be warned of contradictions:
OK. If we can't use ANY of their 108 free PC's that AREN'T OTHERWISE BEING USED, then we'll have to use our own, won't we? But we still need somewhere to put them, so how about using their space, since they're tight enough to deny us access to their PC's.
They are of course, KHS. We need their hall, and here's how it'd work.
First we need to find how many people are taking part. The playlist so far is about 8 people.
Assume we can get 16 players by June, a nice round number (round in terms of computers, anyway). That means we need two long tables, with 8 PC's on each. No problem. have them face alternate directions so that you can't peek at the person next to you. Now we need a dedicated server. Anybody want to volunteer a PC? Also, if we have any spare machines, we could upload all our Mp3z to it and have an 80 hour playlist for the whole tournament. Dave's old P100 springs to mind, as it has an 8.4Gb HD to store the Mp3's.
To play 16 player net games, you'll need a fairly fast machine. I reccomend at least a Pentium 166 with 32Mb RAM and a GL card. That is, any of the following graphics cards:
MMX probably won't make a difference. Cyrix chips are not good for playing FPS games. The minimum reccomended spec for these chips is 300Mhz. AMD chips are slightly better, but make sure you have a K6-2, K6-3 or a K7, which cane.
If you have a slow machine, get Q2Tweak.ZIP which should help you maximise your performance. If you have a keenin' machine, get this BestV2.zip which is a .cfg file which maximises your voodoo 2 quality, if you have a voodoo 2.
It's possible to play without a GL card, although you'll need a fast Pentium II and lots of RAM. You will be at a disadvantage playing without a GL card.
You need Windows 95 or 98, the latter being preferable, although it doesn't matter. No NT machines. They're freaky.
You need an Ethernet card installed in your machine that can use 10Base2 coaxial cable. For help with this, contact us.
You need Quake 2, with the v3.20 patch, CTF 1.5 and the Quick Start/Eraser pack. This all takes the best part of 250Mb. We can supply the v3.20 patch, the CTF 1.5 patch and Quick Start/Eraser, although you should buy Quake 2 yourself.
You need Half Life and the v1.0.0.8 patch. This takes up most of 400Mb. We can supply the patch and some extra maps.
If we play Team Fortress, you'll need that too, which will probably take up about 150Mb when it's released.
So if we leave room for your Mp3 collection, we're talking about a gigabyte of HD space needed.
17'' is the maximum monitor size because we probably won't have enough table space otherwise. Only one monitor per player, as well. TFT's are welcome ;-)
Make sure every piece of hardware your bring is tagged with your name. That includes case, monitors and especially cables.
Make a directory on your hard drive called Shared and make sure it's shared for everybody to have read access to. Make another directory called uploads, and give everybody write access. This way, everybody can give and leech all they want. Uploading viruses or stupidly large files will get you kicked, by the way.
Oh yeah - you've got to be good at DM! Get all the games above and try playing against some Eraser bots on Medium difficulty. If you get kicked by them, you're going to get kicked by everybody else, so just come to watch.
Most will be Quake 2 and Half Life games. We might play some Team Fortress 2 if it's out/have enough players/can be bothered. I'm considering other games such as Carmageddon 2 and Total Annihilation, but these probably wouldn't work as not everybody is too keen on them. Even thought they keen.
With 16 players, we can have 4 teams of 4, which always works well for Quake 2 team play and, I assume, Half Life. CTF teams will be 8-on-8. We'll play on all 8 CTF maps, for 15 mintues each. That's 2 hours of CTF. The winner should be obvious by then.
There'll also be pure carnage deathmatch as well. 16 player every man for himself. We could organise some kind of tournament along the lines of 16 players for 30 minutes, then the top 8 for the next 25 minutes, then the top 4 for the next 20 minutes, then the top 2 for a 10 minute final.
We WON'T be playing Quake 3: Arena as it will either not have been released by then, or nobody will have a good enough PC to run it.
We will be located in the Main Hall (hopefully). Problem: I don't know how many power outlets there are. I reckon the ABSOLUTE maximum we could have is 4 PC's off one socket, so we'd need at least 5 sockets, preferably more. Creative use of extension cables should sort this out, though.
You need to arrive at about 8:00 on the Saturday morning. It should take a couple of hours to set the machines up, which leaves an hour or two for testing, Mp3 transfers and other file leeching. Remeber, we're only playing 128Kb 44Khz Mp3's! Actually, I'll bet there aren't any Mp3's Dave doesn't already have.
It's the school's building and power, so we should thank them for it, and be prepared to pay for it. 18 PC's all with 200W power supplies will draw about 3.2kW/h, and at 6.2 pence per unit, and for the whole day we're going to be there, plus lighting etc., that's a fiver just in electricity costs, not to mention the cost of opening up the school (which'll be pretty big). If this is the case, we might ask you donate £5 to the school, half of which could go to charity, or su'ink. This is a tiny price to pay for a day of pure fun, though, wouldn't you agree?
How feasible would spectators be? Would it be interesting to watch? How would we project the action onto a screen? Do the school have a projector we could use? How much would it cost to watch the games? This money could be donated to charity, which'd make the school happy.
Could we have 32 players? Do we have the hubs? In fact, do we have a 16-way hub?
Can we convince the school to keep the ISDN connection on?
This is mainly for 11th years, as we're holding it on the Saturday after the last day of term, sometime in June. Term ends later for other years, though. Be there at 8:00am and be ready to get a lift home at about 6:00pm - unless you want to carry your PC home.