Converting ALP to work for NARPs too.
Wednesday, August 6th, 2008First off, a quick introduction to ALP:
ALP stands for ‘Autonomous LAN Party‘ and is an Intranet LAN Party Management Software Package written by LAN admins for LAN admins. The original website can be found on the nerdclub alp website.
As you will notice, development on the website has stopped a couple of years ago, but ALP is not dead. Since a couple of weeks ago, a small group of developers started on ALP2. You can find more information on ALP2 on the new forum and wiki. I’ll volunteer myself to help out once I finish off this project on the old alp.
And what the hell is a NARP?
A NARP (stands for Not Any specific Reason Party) is these days becoming more and more popular. It was invented by a gaming community called ‘Destructoid’ (homepage is – captain obvious speaks – http://www.destructoid.com/). The main difference with a LAN is that it can involve consoles. My friend Johan is organising a NARP this summer (end august) and we needed a decent system to handle all the consoles and people that are coming, so we looked into ALP but found there was a lot of functionality missing.
That is when I started converting the old ALP to work for NARPs too. I added a console list, console games and statistics about the lot of them. In the mean time, I also adjusted plenty of core files to be better, faster (errmmm not really, but it just sounds good) and stronger.
I’ll be posting a changelog about what I changed to the original ALP soon and I’ll also publish the source later on. I’ll have to convert the install to fit some extra tables I introduced and some have just changed a bit.
In the mean time…
While you are waiting for the source and you are interested in coming to this NARP (to game, slack or talk code), make sure you check the website here and here.
