LAN gaming for school

[Oops_my_bad]

i am looking at the possibility of setting up a "breakfast" or afterschool club at the college I work at to get some of the kids more engaged with IT (as part of something wider). i would like to set aside an entire computer lab of say 20 PC's.

 

Can anyone recommend a decent LAN based multiplayer game which could have this many PC's playing together? I was looking at Linux based games that are open source because we can't afford the multiple copies of softare, and one that looked quite good was America's Army. I have a spare server which is running Ubuntu server and is a good spec (quad xeon, 2GB RAM) and the PC's are pentium 4's 3.2GHz (not sure about the graphics but I think they are 128meg add-on ATI's)

[Ric_]

Check out Alien Arena 2007... based originally on the GPLed Quake 3 source.

[webman]

Second vote for Alien Arena! I installed it for my brother on his PC after reading about it in LXF and he loves it. We used to play Halo, UT2003/4 and QIII a couple of years ago so I think I'll be having a bash at Alien Arena myself

[Oops_my_bad]

This looks really good.. have any of you experience of setting the server up? I've downloaded and installed packages alien-arena-server, alien-arena, libc6 and ruby however but can't find any config files for the server to edit. It's installed in usr/games and seems to be just the one executable?

[Ric_]

@TeddyKGB: I haven't looked into it but there is a dedicated server mode... Did you download from their website or just grab the packages? The download of 2007 is far nicer

[Geoff]

Install 'alien-arena-data' and edit 'usr/share/games/alien-arena/arena/server.cfg'

[gwendes]

Starcraft! It'll run on anything

 

(I know it's limited to 8 players but you'll soon get a tornament going if they find it nearly as addictive as I did!)

[Geoff]

If you want to play RPG's consider one of the Stratagus games.

 

http://www.stratagus.org/games.shtml

[ICT_GUY]

Quake 2!

 

Still plays well today, it will run of a network share and plays well on anything built the past decade.

[tomscaper]

How about Wolfenstein: Enemy Territory

 

http://www.splashdamage.com/?page_id=14

[MkII]

Trackmania Nations is free, suitable for minors, and works well on a LAN if ya want a racing game.

[ChrisH]

Trackmania Nations is free, suitable for minors, and works well on a LAN if ya want a racing game.

 

I would like to hear about more games like this as I dont think the violent games would go down too well at our Catholic school

[K.C.Leblanc]

If your students are as sad as me, try OpenTransportTycoonDeluxe. It runs on a P3-500.

[Oops_my_bad]

Thanks for all the input chaps, im going to try setting some of those up once i get to grips with this one - i managed to get the alien 2007 server going an im a total linux noobie so thanks Geoff

[Scotmk]

Paintball2 is a kid friendly no blood gore First person shooter (like quake) runs great on lan.

[OutToLunch]

BomberClone, Scorched3D, Sauerbraten (typo?), GLTron and go down well here... Turbo Sliders, which my ex boss mocked went down a storm - top down single screen 2D racing a la the old Supersprint series but with more technique. Had a whole room playing tournaments on it, great fun - not very high resource requirements either. If you have higher specced machines, Gene Rally is very similar but with much better 3D style graphics...

 

There's also Kumoon which is very kiddie friendly but not multiplayer - strangely addictive. Worth a look even if it's just for you to kill time at breaks

 

Thanks for the heads up on the paintball - may go down better with staff than kids running round with shotguns and rocket launchers!