Multiplayer question...

[madcrow]

At my job there's a LOT of downtime and me and a few co-workers are interested in playing some Quake to fill it (It's just about the best game that runs on the crappy i865 graphics decelerators in the crap Dells we have in the office). I was wondering if it makes more sense to host games locally behind the router or to invade some empty quakeworld servers.

[Canadian*Sniper]

I prefer LAN if that's what you mean by local. But others will say join the servers too.

Play normal quake, not quake world

[Teck071]

LAN works great, did it when i was 15 at school, was great !

[Mr.Burns]

I'd probably have to agree with C*S. Start on a LAN, get familiar with quake and accessing it over a network and see how you go from there. Although we'd all like to see new players out on the servers, the response time on your LAN will almost undoubtedly be much better than you would receive from a server out on the net and you would be less likely to have to overcome any potential routing issues. Maybe try a few mods to retain the players interest, perhaps try some of the newer engines like Qrack or Darkplaces if any of the machines have enough 'grunt' to run them, and possibly consider a few texture sets such as the one by Yellow No 5 to give the maps a little bit more appeal.

I had a similar situation some years back when I used to manage a technical team out in the middle of nowhere and we used to run a quake server during the lunchtimes running Quake Painkeep servers as a team building exercise to "break down the barriers" (or at least that was excuse we used :d ). It worked well, was extremely well received and I would recommend it as long as those playing don't take it too seriously .

Have fun :d

Kind regards


Monty

[madcrow]

Hmm. The LAN advice is good, but 3rd party engines are out... I think we may even have to stick with software rendering as the only engine that works at all "correctly" with 3d acceleration is on these systems is Darkplaces, which gets like 15 fps or less. Vanilla GLquake and friends have strange blending problems where the startup console never really disappears...