As the former proprietor of LanParty.com (which I mistakenly included in a sale to IGN) I must salute you. The absolute genius of the provided lan equipment and particularly the management thereof is an inspiration.
I think the lack of any standing offerings of variations of Quake is a glaring mistake but easily rectified. :)
It's really heartening to see lan gaming continued and offered in such a way that the amount of hassle and setup is minimized and the gaming is maximized. We spent far too much time in the 90's and 2000's dealing with driver issues, etc etc. Bravo.
This is so cool. But the keyboard disturbed me, wouldn’t you at least want a mechanical keyboard?
> Keyboard: Logitech K120 Wired — The world's cheapest keyboard at $13 a pop. Works perfectly fine for all gaming needs.
I can’t imagine playing stuff like overwatch on a membrane office keyboard for $13 when having spent more than 100k on the setup. Especially when cheap mechanical keyboards are not that much more expensive either.
Honestly I've never felt it made any difference to me when gaming. I would never code on such a keyboard but for the old WASD it seems fine.
That said, guests are welcome to bring any peripherals they want. There's a USB hub at each station to plug stuff in.
Wow, this is beyond badass. Not only is the LAN and home network setup top-notch, that location is excellent too - what a view! Congrats on the amazing LAN setup and such a fun place to enjoy some gaming with your friends & family. Truly worthy of some envy, that's for sure :) Looks like it was a good chunk of work, but 110% worth it!
> I've never heard of anyone else having done anything like this. This surprises me! But, surely, if someone else did it, someone would have told me about it? If you know of another, please let me know!
I never had the tenacity to consider my build "finished," and definitely didn't have your budget, but I built a 5-player room[1] for DotA 2 back in 2013.
I got really lucky with hardware selection and ended up fighting with various bugs over the years... diagnosing a broken video card was an exercise in frustration because the virtualization layer made BSODs impossible to see.
I went with local disk-per-VM because latency matters more than throughput, and I'd been doing iSCSI boot for such a long time that I was intimately familiar with the downsides.
I love your setup (thanks for taking the time to share this BTW) and would love to know if you ever get the local CoW working.
My only tech-related comment is that I will also confirm that those 10G cards are indeed trash, and would humbly suggest an Intel-based eBay special. You could still load iPXE (I assume you're using it) from the onboard NIC, continue using it for WoL, but shift the netboot over to the add-in card via a script, and probably get better stability and performance.
Hah, you really did the VM thing? A lot of people have suggested that to me but I didn't think it'd actually work. Pretty cool!
Yeah I'm pretty sure my onboard 10G Marvell AQtion ethernet is the source of most of my stability woes. About half the time any of these machines boot up, Windows bluescreens within the first couple minutes, and I think it has something to do with the iSCSI service crashing. Never had trouble in the old house where the machines had 1G network -- but load times were painful.
Luckily if the machines don't crash in the first couple minutes, then they settle down and work fine...
Yeah I could get higher-quality 10G cards and put them in all the machines but they seem expensive...
This is super freaking cool. I'm curious how you feel about Austin vs Bay Area in terms of general quality of life, culture, things like that?
It feels pretty similar, but more chill. Distances are shorter. The sky doesn't fill with smoke for a week every year. The weather is much more interesting -- honestly I got really bored with Bay Area weather after 15 years. I even like the heat in the summer, in short intervals. There are enough tech people here to be interesting, but not enough that a random person you meet on the street is likely to be in tech.
One thing I appreciate is that there is tons of building happening. Housing prices went up during the pandemic, but there is new housing being built everywhere you look, and as a result the prices are now going down quite a bit! (Which I'm fine with, even as a homeowner, because I wasn't planning to sell anytime soon anyway and I like to see problems getting solved.) The downtown skyline keeps changing -- the tallest tower when I arrived is now hardly notable!
All that said I'm not sure I personally am very affected by where I live. When I moved from Minneapolis to the Bay Area, people asked me if it was a culture shock, but all I really noticed was less snow and more left turn lanes...
Having lived in the Midwest, Texas and Bay Area I can soundly say there is no comparison which can be made about the natural splendor. Bay Area, even with smoke in the air for a week, is orders of magnitude more comfortable and interesting. In Texas people cloister into giant houses and say goodbye to enjoying nature, it’s really sad that people prefer such a reality. It lets them forget just how grand a world there is worth saving and fighting for instead of letting it all become privatized and exploited unsustainably.
> Jade and I needed a bigger house, but we really could not afford to buy (much less build) anything bigger in Palo Alto.
I’m really surprised about this, really shows how ludicrous the housing market is in the Bay Area. How high does your income need to be to afford a bigger house?!
Also considering 1400 sq ft (130 sq m) too small to raise a family is peak American... That's bigger than 99.9% of apartments people live in in Europe and raise a family just fine.
This is truely living the dream, well done mate! It is indeed crazy that cabinetry costs the same as the technology.
How does the cat restroom exhaust work? Always on or does it have a sensor?
Do the cat doors prevent sound getting into the kids' rooms from the living room?
The cat room fans are standard bathroom fans. At present we just leave them on all the time -- you can see the switches taped down in the photos. I suppose it might be a good idea to rig up a sensor...
Might be able to use a flipper zero as the sensor, if the cats are chipped. Then you'll have data to catch any unusual usage, like a urinary blockage, before it becomes a serious problem! At that point you're a smart switch and Home Assistant script away from fan control.
Garply had a blockage once and he did a remarkably good job of communicating the problem to us directly!
> [High AC cost.] Perhaps we have too many windows letting in too much sunlight...
My office has automatic blinds that open and close according to some climate control system. The blinds are within the double glazing, so they can't be damaged by weather (or cats). The nice version for a home would be something like [1].
I'm sure the owner could program the automation so they only change position if no-one is in the room. There's no point having sunlight streaming into an empty room.
Yeah good idea. We do have electric shades on many of the windows... I just need to rig up some software control of them. I suppose as an experiment I could leave them all down for a day and see how much power it saves. The shades are on the inside of the glass, but light-colored, so should reflect back a fair amount of light.
I’m surprised people still have LAN parties.
My lan parties were more adhoc. Plan to play at some dudes/gals house, bring pcs/laptops/consoles and other gear, run cat5 cable between rooms, hook them up to some shitty switch and go to town. Many hours of sweaty gameplay. Piss off the neighbors. Trip a few circuit breakers.
This “lan party” has such a corporate feel to it. Almost reminds me of a typical work office. Just what I need after grinding it for 5 hrs and commuting home for another 1-2 hr — to experience the work environment again!
I’m actually more interested in the dedicated cat walk and doors that lead into various rooms.
> Normally, maintaining twelve machines used by random guests would have two huge problems:
Maybe you did this with your other house but I would have thought guests would bring their own computer to a LAN party. All you have to do is provide the space and network capability?
The biggest surprise for me was seeing the desks with no mouse pads (or if you wanted to build it into the cabinet you'd probably want to stick down a desk pad).
But I also in my circles everyone takes their own keyboard/mouse/pad/headphones as those are the things it's hard to adjust to - admittedly my priorities could be completely different.
I mostly haven't used a mouse pad in decades... until recently. I now have a mouse pad on my main work desk because the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots. They were easy to clean off but weirded me out. And I guess it would be sad if I ended up with a permanent wear spot...
But I think the LAN parties don't really happen often enough to cause much wear. In 10 years at the old place no one used mouse pads and it was never an issue.
May I recommend the 3M Precise Mouse Pad with Repositionable Adhesive Backing? Dumb name, good product.
https://www.amazon.com/3M-Precise-Repositionable-Adhesive-MP...
> the wood where my mouse was kept attracting weird black spots
Have the same issue, but can't subscribe to mousepads. I believe that's dust getting in the crevices of the wood.
Or oils from your hand, perhaps?
I think these are cool and seeing the NetBoot + CoW setup for gaming is fun.
Thanks for sharing!
LAN party game room by night, Cybersyn II by day?
But where are the ceiling duct tape hammocks? http://octanecreative.com/ducttape/walltapings/images/german...
Awesome! The fold up mechanism is a great idea to make it look clean, when there is no party and it also saves the hardware from dust :D
Such a cool house, too bad it’s in Texas
It’s one thing to build a house like this, if you can actually host a LAN party with friends and max out occupancy at every game station you are rich in life.
What DDR pads are those? Are they custom made?
They are L-TEK Ex Pro X. Shipped all the way from Poland!
They seem to work pretty well. Have been using them frequently for more than a year with no issues yet.
Thanks, those were the main recommendation the last time I looked into it (a few years ago), good to hear you recommend them too!
Wait, why do you have the same living room as Bojack Horseman?
Lol, never seen it before, but looking now, yeah it looks kinda similar!
I assume this is also a CF PoP?
Love the creativity and dedication to the project. And really cool house.
Hahaha, the anecdote about the subcontractor is great.
What a thoughtfully designed space for your family and friends! I feel like going this custom is pretty rare, and you’re clearly getting the value out of it. I also love that you did the math on the cable runs making essentially no difference.
Thanks for sharing :)
So we have an ongoing debate in the white collar world - work in the office or work at home. I am firmly on the “teams work better in physical proximity camp” but there are still many better ways to arrange that physical space
And this - the hideaway desks that fold down to become a table top gaming session, well that could make much more flexible office spaces. (Don’t get me started on offices with one or two desks and doors that shut !)
But yeah, I like it, even if my house has that many people in I would probably just hide in the kitchen all night
You're living the dream, man.
Beautiful house, great ideas, love the stow-away workstations -- no patch panel in the network rack facepalm
This is super awesome, congrats!
Do you run Linux or Windows?
The server is Linux but the game machines are Windows.
But I am going to try switching the game machines to Linux at some point. I can't tell you how many times I've run into what were almost showstopper problems with the whole iSCSI netboot thing with Windows, only to get really lucky with some registry hack that worked around it. I'm sure it's going to just stop working at some point. Whereas with Linux I can dig into the stack and make things work however I want.
In fact, in the old Palo Alto house, when I first completed it in 2011, the game stations were Linux for the first six months. In theory it was a better setup because the machines were able to use their local disks for the copy-on-write overlay (this was easy to set up with an initrd script and Device Mapper). With Windows, I haven't figured out how to utilize the local disk at all -- so all the copy-on-write overlays are on the server side, which of course wastes server resources.
Of course, the problem with Linux is game support. We got a long way with WINE in 2011 but there were just a few too many issues. Here in 2024, Linux is ostensibly a much more capable gaming platform, with Steam support, Proton, etc. So maybe it'll work better this time?
Anyway, just another project on the todo list...
Extraordinary home! Great design. Especially love the cat stuff. I have to say, it’s wild that something “moderate” like an i5 / 4070 build is so powerful these days. It’s middle of the line in this era but it’s enough to play practically anything.
Also, this is a classic example of the power of leverage. $200k down on a $1m home, home goes to $2m gives you a $1m profit on ~$240k. Accidental, in this case, but nice.
to see that upside on a home requires you 1. sell and 2. buy somewhere cheaper (or not buy at all) ... Otherwise it's a zero sum game. Home for a home.
Indeed that’s what OP did. Bought in the Bay low, then sold high and moved to Austin, where presumably the increase in value is again sufficiently high because Austin prices skyrocketed in the last 5 years.
I wish I was rich too.
He seems like he has a really good attitude about it.
How much does it cost? Probably can only be pay be Musk, Wall and Gates
Not just those, but probably not too far off, either.
Nope, USD 150k (for stations & cabinetry): https://lanparty.house/#cost
Fake news.
> The house overall was a 7-digit number. Sorry, I'm not comfortable being any more specific than that.
You can get that size of home for 2 million in Austin. The work to make it a LAN party home is not that expensive in comparison. The magic for him is that his dad is an architect. The home is very well designed and if you want that kind of design you’ll be paying more. Especially if you want the whole thing ready built.
> The magic for him is that his dad is an architect.
Yes. I could never have done any of this without that fact. When you hire an architect, especially for a high-end house, they are incentivized to make expensive design decisions in order to make the house more impressive for their portfolio, and of course the contractor is not going to stop them because they want the money. And if you're just a normal person not experienced in homebuilding, you will not be able to spot what they're doing. I'm sure I would have been taken advantage of if the architect wasn't a family member.
