Unreal Tournament/ games club

[mark]

A Teacher has asked to have Unreal Tournament installed on the PCs for After School IT Club.

He is suggesting kids pay £5 (to buy a licence from play.com) as a membership fee.

We've tested and the users can play on the network with their limited accounts.

What are the pitfalls of this?

Does that licence cover us? Is there an age limit?

This hasn't been raised to SMT yet - just want to check it out properly so I can offer best advice.

Ta!

[kerrymoralee9280]

Well put aside all the licensing issues, how do you feel about your network being thrashed? 20 kids were playing it on ours (unofficially) and it just killed the network. Wouldn't let any other infrastructure through.

[beast_gts]

Unreal Tournament 2004 is rated 16+

The biggest problem would be stopping them playing during lessions.

[Geoff]

Well put aside all the licensing issues, how do you feel about your network being thrashed? 20 kids were playing it on ours (unofficially) and it just killed the network. Wouldn't let any other infrastructure through.

Then your network sucks. Even a 100mbit (never mind 1Gbit Fibre backbones) switched network should be able to cope with a modest sized after school Lan party. Even in the worst case scenario, these games are client server based and you can control how much bandwidth each client uses with server configuration options.

If you want something you can use for 'free' look at Enemy Territory. You also might want to grab the ET:Fortress mod too while your at it.

[ChrisH]

Hmm I find it strange to believe it took up so much bandwidth on the network. Was it going over a slow link to a server or something?
As for stopping them playing during lessons you could use a temporary software restrictriction policy or have a set of strtup scripts that deletes the main game exe during the day then replaces it when needed.

[ChrisC]

There is the age thing....

Make sure Jack Thompson doesn't find out about students in schools playing violent video games

Used to play doom at lunch when i was younger.

Chris

[webman]

If you can play UT over a 512k DSL internet connection, I dare say your average LAN will cope with half a dozen kids

[Geoff]

Another Freebie you can get is Starsiege Tribes.

http://liberatedgames.com/game.php?game_id=32

Make sure you patch it though.

http://www.planettribes.com/tribes/files.shtml

[mark]

Network speed is no problem.

We have a redirected start menu, so it's easy to remove the link during school times.

Aren't the age ratings voluntary/ advisory and not compulsory?

(tho' sounds dodgy if you were to claim that for a school environment)

[Disease]

We tried to do that here, but instead they went with a 1980's style computer geek club to work on databases and such, only 1 person turned up for that though.

[Geoff]

Aren't the age ratings voluntary/ advisory and not compulsory?

Indeed, however just to cover ones back, I'd send a letter out to parents explaining the nature of the 'IT Club' and have them sign that it's ok for their child to turn up.

[CyberNerd]

my fave free FPS (I think they will run on windows, I'm a Linux gamer now ):

http://www.urbanterror.net/news.php

http://www.truecombatelite.net/

http://padworld.myexp.de/index.php?news

http://www.warsow.net/

[Jake]

Is Americas Army still free? Used to quite enjoy that

[Disease]

I'm a Linux gamer now ):

You obviously don't play many games now then

[Geoff]

I'm a Linux gamer now ):

You obviously don't play many games now then

To be fair, more games work on Linux under Cedega than they do on Vista...