Computer network monitoring… Quake style!

Officially, Quake III Arena has no place in a corporate IT support department. In other words, unofficially, it’s what they play all day, instead of fixing your computer. Possibly. However, that’s not the case at the Swinburne University of Technology in Australia, which has got together with Cisco to turn Quake III Arena into a computer network monitoring tool.

It involved modifying an open-source game called Open Arena, which is based on the Quake engine. The result visualises network activity within the 3D game-world, with nodes on the network represented as small pyramids which change shape, colour, movement and orientation according to what’s happening on the network.

And yes, sysadmins can shoot them. With a big laser gun. Although given that their fellow admins are also running round as characters, I can’t see how it wouldn’t descend into a fragfest, with work forgotten. Anyway, the application is called L3DGEWorld 2.2: you can find all the technical bumph via the link below, or watch the video demo above.

L3DGEWorld 2.2 website (via New Scientist)

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