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Show HN: I built a(nother) house optimized for LAN parties

(lanparty.house)
1071 points kentonv | 4 comments | 16 Nov 24 15:52 UTC | HN request time: 0.66s | source

I wasn't quite sure if this qualified as "Show HN" given you can't really download it and try it out. However, dang said[0]:

> If it's hardware or something that's not so easy to try out over the internet, find a different way to show how it actually works—a video, for example, or a detailed post with photos.

Hopefully I did that?

Additionally, I've put code and a detailed guide for the netboot computer management setup on GitHub:

https://github.com/kentonv/lanparty

Anyway, if this shouldn't have been Show HN, I apologize!

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22336638

1. XCSme ◴[17 Nov 24 00:55 UTC] No.42161008[source]▶
Random thought: would a gaming streaming service like GeForce Now achieve a similar result for a lan party? Assuming you have the network bandwidth, I am curious what the difference in input lag/quality would be, and if, when doing a blind test, anyone would notice.

I guess you could even test this, by running GeForce Now on all computers vs native.

replies(2): >>42161014 #>>42161057 #
2. XCSme ◴[17 Nov 24 00:56 UTC] No.42161014[source]▶
That could be the poor's man, on-demand, lan party.

If not for the PCs, you would still need some devices to run the games.

3. kentonv ◴[17 Nov 24 01:03 UTC] No.42161057[source]▶
Ehh... I'm very skeptical of those streaming services.

I tried Stadia once. Played Celeste. The results were very interesting. I didn't exactly perceive latency, but I did perceive that the game felt wrong. As a result, my favorite game of all time was not fun when playing on Stadia. If I didn't have the local version of the game to compare against, I would probably have blamed the game, because again, it didn't feel like latency was the problem.

I dunno, maybe that experience was skewed by the fact that Celeste is probably one of the most timing-sensitive games out there and I'd played it a lot... but now I'm worried that anything played via one of these streaming services is just going to be subtly less fun. I think I'll stick to local gaming.

replies(1): >>42161466 #
4. digitaltensor ◴[17 Nov 24 02:20 UTC] No.42161466[source]▶
You're missing out, definitely give it a go! GeforceNow is a staggering leap over all the other previous cloud streaming services imo. The experience in Austin specifically is amazing, I get ~5ms (!) RTT latency to their datacenter in Dallas. Combine that with h/w AV1 decoding, the difference versus local is almost unperceivable.