How do I setup a small LAN party?

[swanepoellukas5]

[moved to Networking (LAN)]

Hi, there. I'm going to help my cousin build his first gaming PC in about 2 months, and to celebrate the ocation, we thought we might host a small LAN "party" just for fun. Now I only just realized that I don't have clue how LANs work. Now, I did look up how to do it, but all the results I found seemed like they were meant for bigger, full on LAN parties, where we just want some casual fun. Do I need a seperate computer for a server? Do I have to install special software? Can I just make my pc a server while playing? Are all online games LAN compatible? What's the difference between a LAN and just sending them an invite in steam and playing in the same lobby. Can we just simply plug our PCs into EACHOTHER? If it helps, we mostly plan on playing non-competetive games like RUST, The Forest, justcause 3 with multiplayer mod, that sort of thing.And the hardware we already have are >2 gaming PCs, a couple of older unused PCs, ethernet cables and a wifi router(not ADSL or fibre, it's just a 4g LTE router, but there's a tower like 300m away from their home so the signal's great. And the thing has a ton of ethernet ports). There probably won't be >6 peaple(my cousin and I included) Also, can you have consoles at a LAN?

 

[bill001g]

It greatly depends on the games for most your questions.

A lan is simple just hook the devices to your router. It does not matter if there is even internet....but this depends on the game. A true lan game does not need internet. Many games are not actual lan games. They want you to connect to some server on the game company site either so they get money or enforce license resrtictions.

If you do not have enough ports on your router buy a small switch. The only real purpose of the router is to provide ip addresses via DHCP. You can just use a switch if you wanted to do something like assign IP addresses manually.

 

[swanepoellukas5]

It greatly depends on the games for most your questions.

A lan is simple just hook the devices to your router. It does not matter if there is even internet....but this depends on the game. A true lan game does not need internet. Many games are not actual lan games. They want you to connect to some server on the game company site either so they get money or enforce license resrtictions.

If you do not have enough ports on your router buy a small switch. The only real purpose of the router is to provide ip addresses via DHCP. You can just use a switch if you wanted to do something like assign IP addresses manually.

Sooo, how does that work? Let's assume we're playing a proper LAN game, do we simply just hook up all the PCs to the router, boot the game and start playing? Or is there something else? And if the game is a proper LAN game, and doesn't requier anything else, can a friend with a console join? Plus do I simply google if the game we want to play supports LAN? Also, what if we want to play an online game together, against other players, like for instance CSGO or ring of elysium(basiclly PUBG clone, as much I hate to admit it)? Do I send an invite to them via steam to join my lobby? And yes, I am aware if that's the case console buddies are out of the question _ _
\(©¬©)/

 

[bill001g]

Steam is a online service so you would need internet.

You can for some games have multiple people at the same location playing internet based games. Anything that uses a central server will work.

What most people call lan games the sever and all the machines are on the lan with no connection to the internet. Many times you must key in the ip address of the server to join.

I suspect you need to start much smaller and figure out how to make 1 particular game work. There are way too many difference. Some are trivial and some are impossible because the game companies did not design it to allow multiple people to connect from one location

 

[swanepoellukas5]

Steam is a online service so you would need internet.

You can for some games have multiple people at the same location playing internet based games. Anything that uses a central server will work.

What most people call lan games the sever and all the machines are on the lan with no connection to the internet. Many times you must key in the ip address of the server to join.

I suspect you need to start much smaller and figure out how to make 1 particular game work. There are way too many difference. Some are trivial and some are impossible because the game companies did not design it to allow multiple people to connect from one location

Do I need a seperate pc to act as a server? Or just a switch? Plus, how do see the IP adress of the server?

 

[bill001g]

Depends on the game. Some games it is just a matter of setting it to be the "server" host. Some games say ARK or other large games need a separate server.

How you find the IP requires you to learn things about network settings on your machines and many of the command like ipconfig.

 

[nobspls]

I doubt you need a actual physical LAN to have LAN party especially for less than 10 people. You can easily share your WIFI (so technically wireless LAN or WLAN) and assuming your internet access/speed is decent, it should all work great. So you got a WLAN party with some LAN participants, for those that must use the wired ports.


There are very few games nowadays that will allow LAN only operational modes. So without internet I bet most of the games you want to play won't even work. And something WoW or LoL you can all connect, but you will need to go the servers hosted on the internet. I don't know where you get the idea that there is even a proper "LAN" game in this "current" era. And if you were to consider some consoles, especially the current gen PS4 and Xbox etc. they'll demand the internet to do practically anything, if nothing else just to check the DRM permissions etc.

The whole idea that you need to have your own hosting server is from a bygone era, since these servers are all being controlled by their corporate overlords, be it EA, ActivisionBlizzard, Steam, etc. And even back in the day when you could LAN up Diablo or Command and Conquer, you didn't need a dedicated server, and if the LAN was setup properly, they did not even need IP address, after all it is a LAN, the machine should be able to discover each other with just MAC addresses. I even recall doing old Doom2 and Quake back in the day with just serial cable and a null modem between two machines. And for thing like Unreal Tournament 2 that had dedicated servers you can start up and actually made use of IP networking over LAN, a proper game will generally have mechanism built in to discover each other.

The fact that you are asking about "how to see the IP address of the server" means that you are just better off assuming that everything much connect to the internet and deal with the servers hosted out there. There is little value in finding the IP address of those, unless you are having network problems and must diagnose something and so you can go yell at your ISP, or more nefariously looking to make trouble, like DDOS-ing one of the services.

In any case, any modern/current OS is going to have an integrated IP stack built-in be it Android, Windows, Linux, MacOsX etc. There are common CLI commands for those to locate their IP address. So as long as you have access to them you can easily find the IP address. Common commands are ifconfig, ipconfig, and ip address etc. And if any one of those machine is the server than that is the ip address of your server.