X-Box 360

The third installment of 2 major gaming franchises in one week!?. This might be too much to handle.

So you’ve decided to stream on TwitchTV

Since you’re reading this on TeamLiquid (not really) you’re probably interested in streaming “VIDEO GAMES.” So let’s get started!

Later on I’ll be breaking down specifics for each genre of game (PC or Console; FPS, RTS, Fighter), but first let’s get down to the basics!

The Computer

So yeah, you will need one of these. Preferably a pretty speedy one, specifically talking about processor here (AKA the CPU).

The processor is the most important component in a streaming computer. The better the processor, the more you can do. This is especially true if you’re broadcasting PC titles such as StarCraft 2 and Battlefield 3 (CPU Hogs).

Recommended Processors:

• Intel Core i7-2600KSandy Bridge 3.4GHz LGA 1155 95WHyperthreading – Introduction of Virtual Processors (Utilized by XSplit)

  Minimizes in-game side effects (lag) caused by streaming

  TheGunrun Approved ®

• Intel Core i5-2500KSandy Bridge 3.3GHz LGA 1155 95WCost effective – Significantly smaller price point than the i7-2600k

  Sufficient for most streamers’ needs

  Eleine’s Seal of Recommendation™

• Intel Core i7-3930K/3960XLatest generation of Intel processors

  Extreme Hyperthreading usage – 6 cores/12 threads

  Absolute monsters for streaming demanding games with little to no impact on performance. Pricey so your wallet will cry.

  Trance’s Extreme Certification ©

As for the other components, get what’s “decent” these days: basically what normal people would have to run StarCraft 2 at Ultra settings.

Also for RAM, get DDR3-2133 if possible (slight advantage with encoding).

Basic XSplit Setup

This is a very basic and general guide to setting up XSplit.

You can download and register for XSplit here.

1. Adding your stream channel

• Go to Broadcast > Edit Channels
• On the right side click Add > Justin/TwitchTV
• Enter your TwitchTV username and password at the top- On the TwitchTV Website, be sure to have visited your broadcaster dashboard at least once!
• Quality – Set to 8
• Preset – Keep it at “XSplit Default.” Iif you have a very powerful CPU (inluding the recommended ones) you can try “faster” or “fast.”
• Max Bitrate – Keep this 500-600kbps below your max upload rate. (Going above 3000kbps may cause issues for viewers who do not have a sufficient Internet connection)
• VBV Buffer – The default 1:1 ratio is usually the best (same value for VBV buffer and bitrate).
• Resolution – Keep this at its default “Default Mixer Resolution.”
• Audio Encoding – 44.100 KHz Stereo with AAC LC as the codec (an audio bitrate around 96,000 is fine)
• Automatically Record Broadcast – Only to be enabled if you want XSplit to save recordings of your broadcasts locally.

2. Run location testing (very important before going live)

• Change the “Location” from “Default” to which ever is the closest region to where you are broadcasting from.
• Select “Test bandwidth” and let the test run
• If you’re green, you’re good to go! If not, modify your VBV Bitrate and/or Location until it is.
• Getting a red from this test may result in HEAVY LAG. Getting a yellow means things will run smooth overall, but some occasional hiccups might occur.

3. Click “Apply” to save settings.

4. Capture Settings

This is still very general, computers that do not have a powerful enough processor will have issues with these settings.

• ResolutionView > Resolution > 1280 x 720 (16) – HDTV (video)
• Frame RateView > Frame Rate > 30.00 fps
• XSplit Window SizeView > Scale viewpoint > 50%
• Capturing Your Desktop (this method does not support games in fullscreen only mode)(Also to be used with USB 2.0 Capture Devices)
  • Add (Bottom Left of XSplit) > Screen Region
    • Select part of the screen, click and drag the frame to capture the desired area to be streamed.
    • You may also click on your taskbar to capture the entire monitor.
    • Pressing “1” on your keyboard after selecting the Screen Region (or any object in XSplit) will maximize the size to fit the edges.

5.  Going Live

Broadcast > Justin/TwitchTV – *Insert Your TwitchTV ID Here*

6. Going Offline

Broadcast > Justin/TwitchTV – *Insert Your TwitchTV ID Here*

Note: This only works when you’re online, if you are offline you are actually Going Live

X-Box 360

Will Starhawk be the next big game on the PS3? If you’re a fan of the Empires HL2 MOD you might want to check out this trailer.

The State of the LAN address is a post-event retrospective examining many of the aspects of the event. I talk about the things that went well and areas we recognize that we still have room for improvement.

So, without further ado…

Registration and Attendance

From the time registration opened, we could tell this was going to be a large event. Our velocity of registrations was high enough at the start to carry us through to a grand finish, with more that 142 gamers pre-registered. That beat last year’s pre-registration by nine. We truly appreciate those who pre-register, because it helps us gauge our marketing efforts and adjust our budget to suit the number of people we expect.

Our attendees hailed primary from within a four hour drive of Pittsburgh, with a sizable contingent from the New York City area. We had a few Canadians, too. Our farthest attendee came from Houston, TX, with the second farthest coming from the Atlanta, GA area. Our staff member lanman came the farthest, though — he flew in from Colorado!

View Iron Storm XIII Attendees in a larger map

What really gave us a solid boost to our number of attendees was the abnormally high number of walk-ins: 17! We’ve previously had only three or four. We appreciate those who are walk-ins, because a large number of walk-ins shows that our local advertising works well. This year, we focused our flyering to just one or two neighborhoods with a goal of 100% coverage.

Actual check-in went great! We got everyone who showed up for 6 pm doors open checked in within an hour, most within 30 minutes. Our “Baller” VIPs were permitted to jump the line and claim their seat the table with gigabit Ethernet to the core. They also received great T-shirts and some other perks. Keep a look out in the future, because we’re definitely going to offering Baller tickets again at future events.

At the end of the event, we tallied all of the people who showed up for our event, from gamers to sponsors, press, staff, and spectators. Iron Storm XIII is officially Pittsburgh LAN Coalition’s largest event ever with a a total attendance of 186 people. This blows past the record of 167 set in 2008 at Iron Storm 8.

This record attendance shows that the LAN party community –especially in and around Pittsburgh — is not only strong, but growing as more and more gamers discover the awesome experience, knowledge, and pure fun of LAN parties.

Tournaments

Our tournaments ran wonderfully once they started (more regarding the delays in the section covering our Internet problems).

Our headlining tournament became the Counter-Strike: Global Offensive tournament, sponsored by Club Conflict in cooperation with Valve Software, for which we were able to offer beta keys to participants. Nine teams competed for bragging rights and prizes from Club Conflict, a great gaming league based in the Pittsburgh area (but with worldwide appeal!). We tremendously thank Ballistics, Virus, and XGen from Club Conflict for their role in securing this tournament and urge you to check out Club Conflict’s leagues.

Our largest tournament was the Team Fortress 2 tournament, in which 10 teams of 6 — 60 competitors – vied for the title. This tournament was by far the largest single tournament we’ve had in a few years. We have the folks over at natf2 to thank for the major push for this. Although participation in TF2 was dwindling at past events, this resurgence is inspiring. We will most definitely continue to hold TF2 tournaments after a response like this!

We also must certainly thank Antec for its sponsorship of our StarCraft 2 tournament, Kingston for its sponsorship of our League of Legends tournament, S2 Games for its sponsorship of its title Heroes of Newerth, Dark Threads for its CoD:MW3 sponsorship, GameOn Party Planners for Halo:Reach, and Gamers Mobile Party for Mortal Kombat.

Moreover, please take a moment to thank your tournament administrators: BigJ64 (TF2, SSBB), jungleralph (CS:GO, CS:S), Shinary (SC2), saberwolf (HoN), erad1cate (LoL, most of the jackass tournaments), and TheJAEffect, cHip, infinity, and Ace (all of the other console tournaments). If you see these guys in game, on Facebook, on Twitter, or anywhere else, thank them for running the tournament. Running a tournament usually means they don’t get to compete in it, even though it may be their favorite game.

We aim to post the full results of our tournaments this weekend or early next week. I apologize for the delay.

Sponsorship

Since I already touched on sponsors in the tournaments section, I’ll thank the balance of our sponsors now. We worked overtime this year to bring you a host of sponsors, some new and some long-time supporters of Pittco events. Iron Storm XII had 31 sponsors, and we though that was great. Iron Storm XIII had 42 sponsors. That’s 42 businesses believing in and supporting the LAN party community — especially Pittsburgh LAN Coalition — in a demonstrable way.

Here’s a roll call of our IS13 sponsors. Take a quick minute to look over this list and thank these sponsors on Twitter or Facebook for their continued support of our event and the LAN party community. More importantly, we ask you to consider supporting our sponsors with your money next time you’re in the market for the goods or services they sell.

If you represent a sponsor not listed here and you want to support Pittco for its future events, shoot an email to sponsorship@pittco.org. We would love to hear from you!

Things we could have done better: Internet

A common challenge that every LAN party faces is keeping up with the increasing demand for Internet-based gaming services as game developers centralize distribution and control of their games. Battle.net, Steam, and others are increasingly needy and games never cease to be bandwidth-hungry. The games that our gamers enjoy rely on these services for at least authentication, but often matchmaking and actual gameplay.

Remember that this is not a problem exclusive to Pittsburgh LAN Coalition events — every LAN party has Internet problems at some point, including big ones like PAX East and MillionManLAN and even large tournaments like MLG and IPL. It’s a challenge to provide connectivity to hundreds of computers; there’s a reason why companies have professional IT staff! The big difference is that we set up ours in a day when companies have weeks or months.

We had hoped that our 35 Mbps fiber connection would be sufficient for these needs with plenty left over for attendees to surf the ‘net during some downtime. We used this same connection at RetroLAN last August and experienced no problems. We were even able to stream the entire event live via our Twitch.tv channel.

However, it’s important to note that RetroLAN was ~35 people and Iron Storm XIII had more than 200 computers accessing the Internet simultaneously. The Internet connectivity problem at Iron Storm XIII was not something which manifested at RetroLAN, despite the very same hardware in use, because it was a problem of scale.

The firehall’s main gateway to the Internet was simply incapable of handling the explosion of Internet traffic. It was not a problem of inadequate traffic shaping or pipe saturation, but of a subpar router simply unable to track all of the outbound connections. Once we were able to access the closet where this router was located and replace it with one of our own, our connection was restored and once again healthy.

In order to reserve available bandwidth for the tournament games which needed it the most, we chose to keep in place our DNS filtering. This paid off — we had a sustained upload of more than 7 Mbps during Saturday afternoon into early Sunday morning and our download throughout was everywhere from 3 Mbps to the full 35 Mbps.

We’ll continue to investigate and employ more advanced traffic shaping. Some of the avenues we’re investigating include dual Internet pipes (one for all game traffic, one for web traffic) and application-level packet analysis on an enterprise-class server. We will from now on ensure that we have full access at all times to all network hardware from the line in from the ‘net to your computer at the LAN.

Looking to the future

Any person present for Iron Storm XIII can tell you that the place was packed during the height of the event on Saturday. There were certainly some seats available — and we’d have certainly welcomed a few more folks to come and game — but the Pittsburgh LAN Coalition is reaching the limits of our favorite Iron Storm venue, the Castle Shannon VFD Memorial Hall.

Moreover, throughout the process of troubleshooting and remedying the Internet connectivity problem, it became increasingly apparent that the Castle Shannon VFD is no longer able to suit our needs. We’ve simply outgrown the Memorial Hall facility, both in terms of physical space and bandwidth requirements for Iron Storm.

We thank the CSVFD for more than seven years of fantastic Iron Storm events. While we may return to the CSFVD Fireman’s Hall, where RetroLAN was held, for our smaller events, we do plan to seek a new, larger venue in order to keep up with our ever-growing community of gamers.

A call for staff

Running a LAN party is a rewarding experience in the end, but it’s a lot of hard work to manage the logistics of getting nearly 200 people into the same room, let alone getting their computers set up and talking to each other! We spend a lot of time talking to sponsors, gamers, past attendees, and lots and lots of other folks to build the most exciting and fun LAN parties we can.

We’re looking for hardworking folks who are willing to sacrifice some if not all of their gaming time at Pittco events to help build a better LAN party. We also need folks who are great with web development, graphic design, marketing, public relations, and anything else that can make Pittco events more awesome for attendees. Working for Pittco is unpaid, but may qualify for internship credit or community service hours. Most of us do it because it’s fun running a successful LAN party that’s working toward national recognition.

If you’re interested in joining our staff, let us know at joinstaff@pittco.org.

Last thanks

This is where I thank each and every one of my staff for their part in making Iron Storm XIII a success. I already listed many of them as tournament admins, but they do so much more than that.

Aalienator and p47r4ck are the guys in charge of running the power cables you may see everywhere under the tables. They also provide us with much needed A/V equipment. Shinary and jungleralph keep our Internet infrastructure up and running, while saberwolf and I, Rhettigan, handle the marketing of the event, writing most of the stuff you read at some point.

erad1cate is in charge of our entertainment and scheduling, and assists jungleralph, who is our main game server guy at the event. DJ Kyle “wildturkey” Turk doubles as both our lead network infrastructure architect and our hilarious, ever-entertaining DJ and announcer. lanman spends his time assisting just about everyone aforementioned, focusing primarily on network stuff with wildturkey.

TheJAEffect and cHip are our console section admins, with the newly inducted staff members infinity and Ace helping out.

TheJAEffect, erad1cate, and saberwolf assist me with soliciting sponsors and coordinating the logistics of getting more than $13,000 worth of prizes to the venue.

We also welcome mattyj and MasterRockstar, our newest staff members. They’ll be helping out where needed, and you can thank them for their initiative in coordinating the PTI computer giveaway!

Although they’ve moved away during the year, Taywin, SovietKitsch, and Synapse continue to contribute to our planning from afar. Stalker was also around, contributing where possible — congratulations to he and his new wife!

BobK and BigJ64 are my fellow Pittco board members — they make sure that we don’t spend too much money and make sure that everyone gets checked-in when they come to our events. They also fill in wherever there is a gap at the event – we three are the late night shift that makes sure the bad guys don’t steal your computer while you’re asleep!

I have one more person to thank. She puts up with me and my computers and helps keep me sane when I see no sanity around me. She knows who she is, and if you do, too, you should thank her for her patience.

Closing

Despite a few hiccups at the beginning of the event, Iron Storm XIII was our best event ever. We’ve set new records in almost every metric we track and raised the bar for ourselves for future events. We look forward to serving the LAN party video gaming community in the future and growing the Pittsburgh LAN Coalition and Iron Storm with you as a part of our community of gamers.

Frag excellently with each other, and game on, dudes.

- Colin “Rhettigan” Dean
President and Sponsor Coordinator
Pittsburgh LAN Coalition

This State of the LAN Address was one of the longest ever, so here’s some statistics to summarize:

• Attendees: 186  - our largest event ever!
• Pre-paid gamers: 142
• Walk-in gamers: 17
• Sponsor attendees: 11
• Others: 16
• Sponsors: 42
• Total prize value: ~$13,000
• Concessions
• Hot dogs sold: 130
• Cheese sticks sold: 250
• Milligrams of caffeine sold: 15,437
• Fun figures
• Largest individual DC++ share: ~12 TB at the start, ~16 TB by the end
• More than half a mile of Ethernet cable for more than 75 individual runs
• Average number of times someone had to say Club Conflict before not say “Club Clonflict”: 4
• Number of times we rebuilt our DNS server from scratch just to ensure that the Internet problem was not on our side: 4
• Max Internet throughput during the event when all bandwidth controls were disabled: 35 Mbps (on our 35 Mbps pipe!)
• Average sustained upload throughput during the event: 7 Mbps (roughly)
• More than 900 kWh of electricity in ~48 hours (the average house in the US uses ~950 kWh per month)

X-Box 360

Focus your scopes and get ready to pick off the enemy in the new shooter game Sniper Elite V2.

Antec, ThinkComputers, and Pittsburgh LAN Coalition are bringing you another great Facebook “Like” Contest!

Here’s what you need to do to be entered to win an Antec Eleven Hundred chassis, delivered to you direct from Antec:

1.) Like Pittsburgh LAN Coalition at https://facebook.com/pittco
2.) Like Antec, Inc. at https://facebook.com/AntecInc
3.) Like ThinkComputers.org at http://facebook.com/ThinkComputers
4.) Fill out this form.

This contest ends Friday, April 27, 2012 and winners will be notified by email by Pittco and/or Antec. No purchase is necessary. Many will enter, only one will win.

Before you leave for Iron Storm take a few minutes and ensure that all of your games are up to date and launch-able. Steam released an update last night so make sure you have it. Similarly an update to Modern Warfare III on the Xbox went out recently so if you are planning to bring your console please ensure that you have updated (if you can connect to Multiplayer that means you’re up to date). If you plan to compete in the StarCraft II tournament please take a few minutes to ensure you have all the required tournament maps.

Parking Details

Parking is free for events at Castle Shannon Firehall.

For those of you who have never been to Iron Storm before, please be aware that there is a sign near the entrence to the parking lot that indicates you have to pay for parking. This only applies to people who use that lot to commute downtown work and not to attendees of events at the firehall (there is a T stop right next to the firehall). If someone is at the both just tell them you’re here for an event at the firehall and they’ll let you through.

Setup

Late last night the Pittco staff made the journey to the Castle Shannon Firehall to begin preparations for Iron Storm XIII. There are still a few hours left before Pittco but we thought you guys would like to see a little taste of what to expect.

We’ll see you at Iron Storm everyone! Enjoy the photos.

Thanks to the generosity of Pittsburgh Technical Institute’s School of Technology, we’ll be raffling a gaming rig at Iron Storm XIII.

Here is the parts list: AMD FX-6200 3.8 GHz processor, ASUS M5A97 motherboard, MSI GeForce GTX 560 graphics card, Raidmax Smilodon case, 8 GB G.SKILL DDR3 1600 RAM, 2 TB Seagate hard drive, and a 22x Samsung DVD burner. It’ll be loaded with Windows 7 Home Premium, Corel VideoStudio Pro X4, and NBA2k11.

We’ll also be raffling off a Synology NAS and power supplies from ThinkComputers and a few other prizes. The only way to win is to be there and get a raffle ticket!

Raffle tickets will be sold for one for $1, six for $5, arms-length for $10, or armspan for $20.

TL;DR our Internet connection works and is much faster than previous events.

Get On With It

Those of you who have attended Pittco events in the past may remember that internet connectivity has been a slight issue for us. Our venue was never properly wired to handle the enormous bandwidth requirements that modern day LAN Parties require; thanks to services like Steam, XBox Live, and Battle.net.

If you haven’t noticed the Castle Shannon Fire Department actually have two event halls, a smaller hall in the fireman’s building and a larger hall, known as Memorial Hall. Due to Pittco’s size we have been holding our events in Memorial Hall (except for Retro LAN). Memorial Hall doesn’t have a dedicated internet connection, so the connection that is available to us comes in through the smaller hall and a directed wireless link provides connectivity.

This type of connection is intended for a few machines to do very light web browsing and other not-so-intense things. We have tried alternative solutions in the past, such as a commercial grade wireless link and running a network cable across the parking lot (going over the 100 meter maximum length of CAT5 cable). None of these solutions have worked and they have been flakey at best. There were plans at one point to have fiber run underground from the smaller hall to Memorial Hall but as far as we are aware those plans never materialized.

Talk Nerdy To Me Baby!

Fortunately thanks to Pittco’s network nerds we seem to have found a viable solution. Pittco recently came across a product manufactured by the uber-awesome nerds at Black Box. If you’ve never heard of them it’s because they generally sell products to businesses and governments (this isn’t stuff you can get at BestBuy). The particular product we are using is the High-Speed Ethernet Extender Kit and it is designed to solve the exact problem Pittco has been having.

This product works converting a 10/100 network connection over CAT5 to a twister pair copper line (the same one your home telephone uses). Luckily for us the two firehalls have an underground POTS (Plain Old Telephone System) link between them, so all we had to do was find an available twisted pair and setup these boxes on either end.

Thanks to the Fire Chief at the Castle Shannon Fire Department, Pat Degnan (p47r4ck) and I (Cleric) were able to come in Saturday morning to run some tests. We sacrificed our Saturday morning to run connectivity speeds tests to ensure this Iron Storm is the best we can possibly make it. <3

8:00 AM Networking Goodness

This is the point of presence in Memorial Hall and lucky for us we were able to find an unused pair of wires using one of p47r4ck’s magic network thingamagigs.

And here is p47r4ck wiring the pair on the fireman’s hall.

After we verified the link was in-fact working between the two building we ran a standard CAT5 cable from the POP in the fireman’s hall to their FIOS router. Then we went back to Memorial Hall to run some tests and here are the results.

I also tested playing StarCraft II while listening to Spotify (high quality mode enabled) while apache bench was running in the background (basically sucking up as much bandwidth as I could). While all this was going on we ran a second speed test and the results looked very promising.

The End and the Beginning

After today’s test we are pretty confident that the Ethernet Extender will be able to provide us with the bandwidth we need for Iron Storm XIII. We’ll see you guys there!

After much consideration Pittco has decided to move the start time of the StarCraft II tournament from 6:30PM to 3:00PM Saturday April 21st, 2012. This will allow us to run the tournament at a more relaxed pace and give games a chance to have a “cool down” period between matches.

Registration

If you have already paid for Pittco please register for the StarCraft II tournament on our LAN Party Management System. Tournament registration isn’t required but it will greatly help us ensure that the tournament is run smoothly. If you haven’t signed up for Pittco yet (and paid for your seat) you can do so at pittco.org/shop.

Call For Casters

Pittco would also like to put out a call for casters. If you are be interested in providing coverage for the tournament please e-mail jon [at] pittco [dot] org provide us with some example work. If we like you we’ll do our best to make something happen!