Gaming News

The latest in the Battlefield franchise was announced this week. Battlefield V will take place in WWII and feature a 64 player multiplayer mode. Theatres vary from snowy Norwegian mountains to the deserts of North Africa. The expected release date is 19th October this year, so in time for BobLAN 2018.2!

Here are a few links:

• PC GamesN
• IGN
• Games Radar
• Polygon

LAN 2018.1 Review

And there we have it - another BobLAN sadly comes to an end, and what a few days it has been!

There were an amazing number of people from early on Thursday (when we found a new "devil-may-care" attitude to bed allocation) through to Sunday afternoon, when the regulars (Al, Bean, Rich and Dan) were helping Bob with the initial cleanup. Numbers good enough to allow a near constant ability to have 5 on 5 matches.

Games wise - more new games than we've had in the last few meets and some real successes...

• Unreal Tournament was surprisingly good - with lots of built in LAN support, a great engine that played well on all machines, and a zero cost to play. The variety of game modes from standard individual and team death match, capture the flag, Blitz and PvE Siege was a real winner. Slight risk this game may die, as the Epic developers have been focusing on Fortnite from what I've read, but hopefully will be around for a couple of years.
• Darwin Project was another class free addition to the line up. Again a big draw was the support for private matches with a decent number of people. 10 people includes most players at any time. Interesting to see the direction of travel over the next year from the devs. And I'm guessing there's a few of us who will put the time in to get to level 10 so we can have a broad range of Directors by the next LAN.
• Titanfall 2 - always good fun. First time I've played the Horde mode (protect he harvester), which I thought was quite fun.
• Grid - still the go-to race game.
• Rocket league - enjoyed, but was personally black and white in terms of form - from scoring last second winners one day, to losing 7-0 the next. More practice required perhaps?!!
• PUBG - couple of games played. Restricted by the cap on 4 player teams.
• CS:GO - standard
• Day of Defeat - a few rounds played. Perhaps time to put this to bed? The look and feel of the game are getting a bit old, and I didn’t really enjoy it compared to some of the others played
• VR - a fair amount of VR games were played. But although the hardware is getting better, I think this is difficult to fit into a LAN mainly due to space. Even with just 2 players in the main room, it is pretty restrictive (as I found to personal cost as George stabbed an enemy, only to find the back of my head in the way). One to think about. Might be more inclusive for sit down games like project cars. Guess we'll see.

A few games we didn't play:

• Battlefield 1 - given the size of the maps, just feels difficult in a LAN environment. That said, I'm sure we'll give BF2 a try when it comes out.
• Battlefield 3 - maybe time to put to bed with some of the newer alternatives. Although we are missing a good war game
• Board games - a spattering over the weekend.

In hardware news - Alistair's PC woes of the last fortnight fixed simply in the end, by using the other DisplayPort on his new Corsair PC. And apart from some light humour with regards to the speed of game loads - an absolutely beautiful, impressively powerful and whisper quiet new machine. A new benchmark.

Food - think everyone enjoyed the homemade curry on the Thursday, followed by pulled pork sandwiches on Friday, standard awesome breakfasts (including some superb black pudding), and then a mixture of Chinese/India/Kebabs on Fri/Sat.

Chat was varied - enjoyed the tech talk; all things DevOps, Agile, slack, ms teams, JIRA, Rally, kubernetes, cloud, GDPR, media playlist histories, and the rest! Although I did forgot to ask Bob what the hell he is doing in the back garden, with what looked like a stone wall in bits.

And as always - a HUGE THANK YOU - to Bob and Lynda for organising the event, and letting us have the run of their house for a weekend. It is very, very much appreciated!!

Don't forget folks - the festivities begin tomorrow lunchtime for the first BobLAN of 2018. As always, the webcam and game updates will be available all weekend on the LAN Party page.

Bluehole have released a couple of announcements of things to be coming our way in the near future:

• Map Selection - the ability to let you choose which map you want to play on ahead of match-making


• Weapons Balance - various new attachments, and moving some of the better items from random loot locations to the care packages

There are no dates on these new features - hopefully soon though, particularly for map selection!

Today marks 20 years since we decided to form a clan and have a go in the QuakeWorld leagues. I think that's worth a beer or two at BobLAN in a couple of weeks' time :)

As previously mentioned, Asus have moved to a new base firmware and Merlin has followed with the 384 versions. However, older models of router are not compatible with the 384 firmware (eg the RT-AC66U). 380.70 is the final Merlin firmware to be released using the old Asus base code - you can read full details here on the SNBForums post:

• Merlin 380.70.Firmware

The article does refer to a forked version that will continue support for the older routers for the time being - this may be worth pursuing if you have a router in the RT-AC66 family.

The dates for the first BobLAN of 2018 have been announced. The LAN will take place from Thursday 10th until Sunday 13th May. The LAN Party page and Forums Topic are up and available - what do we fancy playing this time?!

ShackNews have published a couple more good PUBG articles covering recent developments:

• Battle Royale Juggernaut


• Bullet Penetration


• How to Stay Alive in PUBG

The producers of Playerunknown's Battlegrounds have started to fight back against the heavy cheating that seems to be blighting the game. Whilst some of the measures they are taking could inconvenience some players, most regular players would be unaffected.

Read the press release on Steam

Another sort of guide from Shacknews covers reported crashes following the Windows 10 Fall Creators Update. The developers are aware of it, but no fix is imminent at this time.

In addition, at the bottom of the page there's an interview with the PUBG developer. This was recorded prior to the full 1.0 release - some interesting stuff in it.

Bad Module Error

More from Shacknews' series of PUBG guides. These two cover weapon muzzles and improving your FPS:

• Weapon Muzzles


• Improve your FPS

Shacknews have started posting a series of PUBG guides. The first two cover weapon attachments:

• Sights and Grips


• Magazines and Stocks

Hopefully more to follow soon...

This last year saw a couple of great BobLAN events, and the switch of this site to SSL. PUBG was a big hit at the last LAN, and now that it is in full release, it should be improving steadily in the runup to the Spring BobLAN!

Thanks for the past year go to:

• [DFC]Lynx for hosting the best LAN parties ever
• Pup and Trebz for sending in the photos from November - it's great to capture the group at the LANs, and to see how little the line-up has actually changed over the years
• }data{ for continuing to host this site, and enabling the Let's Encrypt auto-renew functionality
• Let's Encrypt for providing free SSL certificates to hobbyist sites like ours, who otherwise would not be able to afford one
• @Scott_Helme for providing his securityheaders.io site, where we were able to go from an F security rating to A+ with a few simple tweaks to the site's header information

All in all, a pretty good year. Here's to an even better 2018...

Eric Sauvageau, the developer behind the Merlin firmware for Asus routers, has published his plans for 2018. This is largely focussed on moving to the new codebase that more recent Asus routers use, and taking advantage of any opportunties that may bring.

Some older router models, such as the RT-N66U and RT-AC66U, may lose the ability to update to the latest firmware versions. Some models already have the new version, with the popular RT-AC68U due to receive its update early in the new year.

Read the full readmap on SNB Forums

The annual Steam Holiday Sale is now on, running into early January. Visit the Steam Store to pickup a bargain, or at least something costing a little less than usual!

Independent driver developer Merlin has released version 380.69 for all supported models of Asus router. The update includes various fixes and security enhancements, plus the ability to disable Asus NAT tunnelling (a CPU and memory hog)

Read the full changelog on Merlin's site

The much anticipated full release of what is the world's most popular game is scheduled for 20th December 2017. The full version will bring several new features, including the new desert map Miramar, new vehicles (the jetski sounds fun) and some new weapons, for example a sawn off shotgun to occupy a sidearm slot, and a Winchester rifle. The ability to jump over small obstacles will also make its debut.

You can read plenty about it on pcgamesn and also on Gamespot

Highlights...

• Thembot PC!
• Wij Racing board game win
• Mes - CS killing room
• Thembot PUBG parachute death
• Pup's 0.002 second win against Dan in Grid

Great gaming...

• Loving the PUBG, a fantastic concept - let's hope they tidy up some of the rough edges. Great tactics by Thembot. But need microphones, even in same room - so you can hear footsteps and team chatter.
• Battlefront II a bit of a mixed bag. Some great potential - but you're essentially just running in for kills until you get able to play as a special (AT-AT, BobbaFett, A-Wing, etc) which is where the real fun seems to be. And not good for groups - no one likes spending 15 minutes in a queue
• CS - standard. A couple of tweaks for next time - would nice to be able to play dust 1. Would like grenades included (or the ability to do so) in gun game
• Grid - standard. Very inclusive.
• Rock Band - standard
• Rocket league - standard. Always enjoy. Could probably have played more of it
• Doom - great fun for a blast
• battleborn - doesn't even boot. Couldn't get working. Shame - might have been fun (and free)
• Overwatch - still a bit too expensive for wide spread play - maybe one to try next time as a TF2 style game
• Fuzz ball - had a game with Shane. Seems to get neglected these days
• Battlefield 1 - enjoyed, but we didn't seem to play much?

Other bits...

• Graphics - anything in the 10x0 range of cards will rock any game at the moment
• Hardware - ASUS ROG 27 monitor continues to be the monitor of the Lanners... 1440p is a great Res without impacting frame rate too much
• Network - killed a few times by big install copies - let's try and get the game list circulated and agree a little sooner next time
• People - would be completely remiss not to say that the real highlight of every LAN is the people... awesome to see you all

And finally, how could we forget Rockband Bohemian Rhapsody - view the evidence on youtube

The Autumn 2017 BobLAN is well underway. Games played so far include CS:GO, PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds, Battlefield 1 and GRiD Autosport. We're averaging 6-a-side, which is great fun. More updates to follow...

It's BobLAN 2017.2 eve, so make sure you have all updated your PCs and all games that we are likely to play. Don't forget to start all the game managers - Steam, Origin, Uplay, Bethesda.net etc, and let them do all their heavy lifting before you set off.

As always, the LAN schedule and webcam will be available on our dedicated BobLAN page. We tested the webcam yesterday, and these was around 7 seconds of delay, so not too bad. The camera will be enabled for general viewing tomorrow.