Seafaring Fibbage
I don't know about the rest of you, but Fibbage is quickly becoming a favorite party game for my circle-of-friends. It's competing with (gasp!) CAH for playtime. Unfortunately, playing Fibbage aboard the ship presents some problems... but I am here to attempt to solve them!
I've gotten in contact with Jackbox Games and they sound willing. How do I get information about our custom seafaring intranet that Royal Caribbean gracefully allows us? For instance: can we use a DNS override to reroute console traffic to a custom IP? Or will we need a custom client build that knows to talk to our infrastructure? And are things easier if I get the game's server running on the same box as other things or would we want a separate box for Fibbage?
Yeah, questions...time I get to know some of you. :]
Comments
The most sensible approach if they don't have a self hosted version is the self contained LAN. They deliver their web server, which we hook up to our own WiFi router. Console and clients hook up to that router, and the router is configured such that fibbage.com requests are given the local web server's IP. Some routers have this feature built in, such as DD-WRT routers.
Obviously if they do have a self hosted version, that would be best.
That also saves you from issues where the ship wi-fi gets crushed by all the monkeys in one place.
The setup for the Twittarrr server is a Linux guest running on a Windows Server 2012 R2 host. If the setup is the same as we got last time, we will have static addresses for both the host and server as well as entry into the ship's DNS. If, and it's a huge if, they could get us a custom build that could be pointed at our hostname, I'd be happy to set you up on our box. The laptop is a quad core with 24GB of RAM, and we never even came close to taxing it last year.
That being said, having a separate laptop connected with a physical cable might be wise for infrastructure purposes. If you were planning to run this in the game room, the wifi was virtually always crushed down there.
If you were planning to set it up elsewhere, running it on the Twittarrr server would save you a fair amount of infrastructure getting your network running. Whether or not that is offset by the amount of configuration needed to get it to run is another story.