rec.autos.simulators

GPL is an excellent sim and I enjoy it a lot, but the multiplayer feature is
bordering on awful. I honestly expected something far better than this. I
thought that the GPL multiplay would surpass CPR's, and at least equal
MTM2's, and probably be better. I don't claim to be an expert on this
subject, but I've easily had over 1,000 online races in the past year and a
half with three of the four sims to provide TCP/IP racing. Starting with
POD, and then CPR and MTM2. That experience gives me a pretty clear idea of
what can be expected in just about all situations (connections, locations,
ping times, # of players, warping, stability, etc.) of current online play
in racing games. The past two weeks has been one failure after another.

Bad warping, and massive disconnects of opponents and myself. I'm unable to
race the same exact people I've raced regularly for the past year. I either
can't even connect with them, or we get disconnected after a fairly short
amount of time. While connected, the warping and overall performance is
simply poor. I've chatted with a number of online racing vets with probably
as much netplay racing experience as me and we are all encountering the same
problems. It's not just me. In almost every race that I've finally been able
to join, I see players constantly being disconnected, and then rejoining.
Same reports in the chat rooms. The other problems like the inability to set
the number of opponents or incorrect qualifying times are minor
inconveniences compared to the overall performance.

A racing friend in Hungary (who I've raced many times in the other sims) has
been having trouble racing just within his own country, and hasn't even been
able to race his U.S. GPL teammates yet due to it's problems. A racing buddy
in the U.K and I have had many, many races together in the past, but with
GPL, it's been a failure every time. Since online racing is what I've
enjoyed most about sims, this is very disappointing.

In recent months, there's been debate about how important online racing in
sims is to the general public. The people who said it wasn't important cited
the inconvenience of online play as the major reason. If they thought that
the way it is with GPL is normal, then I now understand their point. The
problem is GPL is not the norm and is far from the current standard. Not
even close. It's not close to CPR in convenience and performance. Since MTM2
significantly improved on the netplay performance over CPR, GPL is even
farther behind. NROS is even better than these (although a different setup)
and as an example my racing friend in Hungary can join a full 22 field of a
game in the U.S. and says the play is close to perfect. As I said before,
his GPL performance has been bad.

There really has only been three other racing games to provide TCP/IP online
play besides NROS. I think there are a number of people here at r.a.s. who
are experiencing online racing for the first time with GPL, and think that
this is just the way it is. Trust me, it's not. I'm in the U.S. Those online
races I've had in the past include hundreds of smooth races with people all
over the world (even Australia), with all different kinds of connections
(mostly 33.6 and 56k modems), and various combinations of locations of my
competitators (such as Germany, UK, California, and NJ all in the same
race).  To have to find a host (impossible to host myself in GPL) with a
P450, and a T1 or cable modem in order to have a game with massive
disconnects, and warping, which some international competitors can't even
connect to is ridiculous. GPL's multiplay is not the way a game released in
late 1998 is supposed to perform on the net. The other games I mentioned
(CPR,MTM2 and N2) are at least 6 months, a year old, or even older and their
multiplay is far, far better in quality and convenience.

I'm sure GPL runs great on a LAN, but, no kidding. I can't imagine many
games released today that wouldn't. Also, if Jeff Vincent's discoveries are
true, then that's another serious problem.

I don't know what the reasons are for GPL's multiplay performance, but can
assume that either it was coded poorly for netplay, or GPL sends far too
much unnecessary info over the net during a race, clogging things up.
Upgrading my hardware to run the newest software is something I have no
problem accepting. It's impossible for me though to upgrade the net, or to
force my cable company to make a cable modem available to me before they are
able.

Since reports were that Papyrus wasn't interested in net play and had to be
pushed by the beta testers for it, then maybe that's the simple answer for
all this.

I'll keep it simple and say that when even one publisher is able to do
something correctly and set a standard, then there's no excuse for another
to not at least equal it. Actually, the standard should be constantly
raised, not just equaled. GPL multiplay is far from the standard.

David G Fisher
DmndDave

Dave you must be having some kind of problems on your end. I too hard
problems at first, disconnctions. But using the core.ini file and adjusting
modem setting fixed everything. I've got into races with 20 drivers when a
cable modem was hosting. Very little lag, less then any other online racing
sim I have raced. Take a look at the GPL Online FAQ on Eagle Women's site
http://www.racesimcentral.net/~alison/gpl/ on how to tweak the modem setting to
suite GPL.

Arthur
Stealth Racing
http://www.***sys.com/stealthracing.html

On Tue, 20 Oct 1998 16:23:46 -0400, "David G Fisher"

You must have a different GPL then I have because the one I have is by
far the best online multiplayer game I'ver seen so far. I have been in
several races on the net with 15-20 players and found it to be great.

                        Mickey Kerkes

Here Here.
I too have been having all of these problems, and have had it up to here
<reaches for forehead> I will not be wasting any more money paying for phone
time playing this on-line till it gets better (some hope). A Great game
ruined.

Andrew Thatcher

www.f1onehitwonders.ndirect.co.uk
"In a gold-rush it's not the people who dig that get rich, its the people
that sell the pick's"

I have to agree with the first post... my experience with GPL online wasn't
that great. My ping was about 278 ms, which is not that bad. I play Nascar
Racing 2 on TEN, and connection is a lot more stable, plus there is less
warping (could not imagine me saying that of TEN in the past...). The race
was hosted by someone with a cable modem, so this is not the issue. Problem
is that once you catch another car, it becomes a guessing game as to where
the car really is: onscree, you see the car waltzing from one side of the
road to the other. If you get hit, then you wreck. It's very hard and
frustrating to race under those conditions... Of course, going back to
playing Nascar Racing 2 on TEN, I find that those graphics are ***ubly
compared to GPL ;) but that's another story!

Philippe Sergerie

It seems that some people have no problems at all whilst others get nowhere!

I've visited the VROC site every day since it went live but I can never get
a connection - even to a cable modem with one other player.

I tried hosting races (pretty pointless with a 56k modem!) but everyone who
attempted to connect was disconnected immediately.

I've read every on-line FAQ I can find, tweaked modem settings, DUN settings
and CORE.INI, but no luck.

Any ideas?  Anyone?!

David G Fisher wrote

Ok.. let's get ready to rumble !!!... ;-)       (joking)

It's clearly higher IMHO. Achieving a 20 driver race with 2-3 person booted
from Fresh "out-of-the-box" GPL is incredible. Especially considering the
complexity of the game engine and how each AI is just replaced by human
inputs. It's about the same client/server than offline racing. So you still
need to model those 288hz for every human on the track.

It's the best multiplayer racing out-of-the-box ever I say.

No NROS ? No Hawaii ? That would had been really good to compare a Papy
multiplayer coding with another...

Im sorry for you. On a simple 28.8 modem, I got a perfect quality with no
boots never, and restricted warps compared to what I saw on the Zone with
C:PR and MTM1/2. Of course this is not the NROS.  You might have a router
that is unstable near you for a couple of weeks, etc... The internet isn't
perfectly reliable.

Of course, that could be addressed in a patch that would solidify the
multiplayer client/server. I somehow agree it could had been better, but
it's still way ahead of everything I tried. And I tried about all of them.

So why am I able to race with 20 people around the world, and that
independant of the locality of the server, the localities of the clients,
and their connection quality ? Why ? Remember, the ISP is really what makes
a good quality for online ***. I learned that from the NROS. I tried
about half a dozen ISP in 1 year before I settled on Concentric for it.

Of course, IMHO online racing is very important, but as a "company" point of
view, it is not really. As a company point of view, they don't see the need
for all those working hours spent on the online multiplayer coding when it
will finally won't sell more copies for the cost of all the humans you put
into that.

"if" the title sells well, and that they see that multiplayer racing is
frequent, they will address a patch for it, be sure. Or  I will be the first
to yell with you Dave, I promess ;-)

I wasn't impressed at all by MTM2 on the Zone, but of course Im a little bit
biased from Hawaii/NROS.  With just another driver he was lagging everywhere
with those simple physics of the Monster truck.  Still I raced with Gp2 via
modem, F1RS in IPX and N2 in IPX, and I found that N2 was a little bit worse
than MTM2.  But that's 1996 vs 1998.

The NROS is a whole different deal. It's all because of the great prediction
code that you have on the system.

It's not my first step, but I agree on that it's the first step for 90% of
the SimRacing community.

But you can understand that the actual game engine is the big reason of that
?? That those arcade racing games such as POD, MTM1/2 and C:PR have probably
10time less the number of input per seconds for the racing physics ? And
that's really easier for the packets since they can add more information and
also the clients can receive more information at the same time ?

This I agree...  they could easily take off unnecessary information and have
a more accuracy information output to the server. I mean.. what's the point
of the arm, suspension travel, etc...  Put up a solid prediction code and
cut back on the physics for online racing over the Internet. Im not talking
about LAN racing in your Office.  Im talking about TCP/IP based racing.

Point taken.

I agree with you it's not what I would had expected from Papyrus, but it's
way ahead of past titles and also way ahead of those arcade racers over the
net. Did you see how crappy Need4Speed III is over the Internet ?? Trash on
that, not on GPL <g>.

As you can see. Im not shocked about GPL over the net. It's sure far from
perfect, but better than what I saw over the years. It's not the NROS, and I
understand that.  Still, Im worried about the NROS for Nascar Racing 3.

- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> Good race at the Brickyard!
- Official Mentally retarded guy of r.a.s.
- Excuse me for my English (I'm French speaking)
- Sponsored by http://www.racesimcentral.net/
- "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise
how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."--

Could be a lot of things- before my present apartment, I lived in an older
home(1930's) in an old part of town, now I live in a building which was just
built a year ago- and my connections have improved drastically. The
condition of the phone line is important. I think the traffic on the trunk
line that your telephone goes into may effect this some, too.

I have successfully had 4 or 5 drivers connected to my 56K, with pretty good
results- and I rarely have any bad problems connecting to a cable or ISDN
host. Sorry I can't help more, but those were a  couple ideas I had.

--
Scott Moore
Hoosier MotorSports
http://www.racesimcentral.net/
Sports *** Network
http://www.racesimcentral.net/***.com

Philippe Sergerie wrote

You can't compare the NROS to every multiplayer racing "out-of-the-box".
It's a whole different and independant system that works on a totally "made
for the Internet" multiplayer coding. It has the best prediction code I ever
saw and that's what make it so great compare to what you see with GPL.
That's why you pay 20$CAN per month for that ;-)

I found myself intentionally lifting the throttle when shifting on the NROS
! Ugh !!! Btw, I found that Formula Atlantic drivers need to lift the
throttle each time they shift. They use a similar system to a GPL car.
Clutch only for starts, and have a semi-automatic gearbox where you lift the
gas between gears.

- Fran?ois Mnard <ymenard> Good race at the Brickyard!
- Official Mentally retarded guy of r.a.s.
- Excuse me for my English (I'm French speaking)
- Sponsored by http://www.racesimcentral.net/
- "People think it must be fun to be a super genius, but they don't realise
how hard it is to put up with all the idiots in the world."--

Sorry to hear your poor experience.  So far, I have had a very good experience
with GPL online.  I have raced as many online races as anyone (Via NROS) and
have experience almost every type of boot warp etc...  So far (For me) GPL has
been a pleasant surprise.  I dont know if it is because I have tweeked my system
(All for NROS) and that carried over to GPL.

But either way... That doesn't help you now....  If you want --- Look me up on
NROS sometime and maybe I can help

Bill / Amish on TEN

Hi David,

Wow, you're experience with online GPL is much different from mine.
I hosted VROC sessions with up to 20 players, including modem connections
from as far as New Zealand and Norway and it all seems to work amazingly
well for MOST of the racers connected, but I do sometimes see the same one or
two names doing the repeated:
JohnDoe disconnected...
JohnDoe connected...
JohnDoe disconnected...

Although I do have an ADSL connection, I've had excellent "warp-free"
close racing with many other racers that were connected over modems, and
many of them even far away. I have seen on occasion some warping players
and when I've asked them their latency usually it is pretty high (like .750+)
and they are usually far away like on another continent.

I noticed that usually the racers experiencing connect/disconnect will be
the same one or two people in the session, I am guessing maybe their
connection speed is not good enough to maintain a steady connection and
so they experience this repeated drop/reconnect?!?

My guess for this is that part of the problems may be their ISP does not
have a fast enough connection to the Net backbone and so they either have
bandwidth problems, too many hops to the server or maybe the core.ini file
is not matching up well with their connection... I wish we could figure out
for sure what the problem is so these people wouldn't get these problems.

Although I've been avid auto racing sim fanatic for many years, I also play
online Quake/Quake2 a lot and went through many different ISP's until
finding one that had a good enough connection to the net to allow
for good Internet online ***. Two months ago, ADSL became available
in my area and being the Internet online *** nut I am, I of course
signed up right away, so I no longer have to worry about that, but previously
I went through the same frustration of trying to play games through this
aging Internet backbone that is all clogged up with the plague of Warez/***
data transfers. Most of the diehard Quake/Quake2 online gamers like me are
already pretty experienced with tweaking their system and searching around
for ISP's that provide the nirvana of online gamers - A LOW PING...
One thing that helped me was the following URL that has many tips and
tweaks on how to set up Windows DUN for optimal online ***, it is written
for Quake online gamers, but I think the same tweaks would help online
racers, it sounds like you also have a lot of experience racing online so maybe
this may not help you much, in which case I hope you don't take offense to
this post, but it might be worth taking a look especially for others out
there who are running Windows with DUN's inefficient default settings, I
know it definitely helped me when I was stuck online *** through my
28.8 modem.

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

Anyhow, I hope we can find a way to solve this connect/disconnect problems
for the folks unfortunate enough to be experiencing them, I can tell you
that there are a bunch of online racers not experiencing the same problems,
and it would be nice if everyone could enjoy the great GPL online racing
I've seen so far. I hope it is just some core.ini or Windows DUN problem.

I definitely agree with you that good online multiplayer racing is a
REQUIREMENT for any modern race sim, I hope the developers keep this
in mind. I haven't raced GPL "solo" since DoktorB put up his excellent
"Grandstand" GPL meeting place, and especially now with the awesome VROC,
I doubt I will race just against the AI ever again as long as there are humans
available to race. Non-multiplayer games just don't interest me any more.

Hope to see you on the track.

--John (Joao) Silva

GPL does seem to have better network connectability than most sims - far less
warping than any other I've tried over the internet, but the main problem here
is that the necessary communications infrastructure is just not up to what's
required. At long last computers have the power to run sims worthy of the name,
but the next and most important feature, IMO, is internet connectability which
needs to be running at something approach 1 mbs to acheive this. LAN play at 10
mbs is great on almost all sims - if only the internet could deliver this.
Paul

Hello Folks,

I think Joao is right.  Certain people/connections have some
characteristic that induces problems.  Last night I was in a couple of
races hosted by Rand Magruder (lives in my neighborhood, is on the

connection problems.  I have run other races hosted by Randy with a
full field of 20 cars that worked fine.  This was a completely
different story.  I couldn't even do a single lap without being booted
from the server with only 12 participants.  I happened to notice that
David Fisher was also participating in this event.  Eventually, some
of the people gave up and left, then the race worked fine.  I'm pretty
sure David is one of those that left.  After that race finished, more
people joined up and the trouble began again.  The exact same story
repeated, multiple disconnects, then everything fine with a subset of
the number of players.

Before last night, I'd never been booted from Randy's server.  I
certainly understand now why different people have such dramatically
differing satisfaction with the performance of GPL for internet play.

This all leads me to believe that a large number of players mostly
increases the likelihood of a "bad apple" (no disparagement intended),
rather than simply increasing the load on the server.

If papyrus spent some time investigating this problem, they could
probably find the root cause and fix it.  Any user with an
inconsistent connection will still cause warping etc., but the
disconnects ought to be correctable.

Speaking only for myself,
--
Scott Pritchett         Director of Engineering

415-933-3080            Silicon Graphics, Mountain View, CA

On Tue, 20 Oct 1998 16:23:46 -0400, "David G Fisher"

Given your experience with online racing the above is not a statement
I can reject out of hand - equally though I cannot remotely agree with
it given my excellent experience over the last few months.

Two comments I would make ;

1) GPL is more subject to quirks of the internet than other sims. I've
raced Marc Nelson and had perfect connection despite packets jumping
from Scotland to California - equally I've raced a couple of people in
London and had disconnects, warps, flashing cars etc. The common
factor in all of these was that someone involved had a poor
connection. Not necessarily the server or you, but just if someone is
connected and with a poor connection it can seem to cause problems.

2) A large factor of (1) is, IMO, that GPL does things without
compromise. It would be a relatively simple matter to make an online
sim with no warping at all. Whenever the sim lacks constant positional
information it smoothly substitutes AI lines or a fixed line to avoid
any jumps or warps - the player car is smoothly moved from one to the
other. The problem then is that you're not really racing - your
opponent can never know from one moment to the next if it's you, an AI
line, or a transition from one to the other that he's sharing the
track with. No sim "does it better" in terms of online racing, they
all share the delays, peaks and troughs inherent with the internet.
It's if and how they smooth these over that creates a better or worse
illusion. The ideal solution would be to have both, a GPL-like system
where players are always where they are, and another system which is
tolerant of high latency, warps but doesn't always mean you are seeing
the same thing as your opponent on your respective screens.

Cheers!
John

And this one is nowhere to be seen as well....

 This is a lot of what I see. The same names over and over. Tends
to make me think it's not so much host overload as someone with a
bad connection or ISP, too many hops to live, etc.

<snip>

 This advice applies to everyone on the net, be it gamers, web
page browsers, warez heads, or chatting. If everyone did these
things by default, there would be a bit less "wasted" bandwidth,
so there would be more open bandwidth for all.

 This site had excellent advice, but with one exception.

 The Max MTU size should always be set for the old "standard" of
576. The way they are instructing you to do it will work as long
as all the players involved are using the same ISP, but it gets a
bit trickier when you're trying to play nationally or
internationally.

 In this case (and ours), the Max MTU size should be the smallest
of the different sizes supported by any and all potential router
"hops" along the way. And since those hops are dynamic in nature,
576 is the smallest possible denominator, so it works no matter
where your packets end up going through. It's easier to send many
smaller packets than it is to send fewer larger ones and have to
have them chopped into smaller ones out there somewhere and have
them reassembled somewhere else.

 Here hardwired on the T-1, setting it to 576 (instead of the Win
default of God-knows-what), results in almost a 20% speed
increase in file transfers and web page loading.

 My recommended settings for online gameplay are:

MTU = 576
RWIN = 2144 (You don't need a large buffer with dynamically
changing data.)
TTL = 32 (Most places say set it to 64...this will get you
connected to more places when the net is busy, but if it's taking
64 hops, your ping time is shot anyway.)

 I suspect it's DUN settings and the stuff I've (and you've)
mentioned above. I still have yet to try using the setting
allowing IPX bandwidth over TCP/IP her...I don't know if it'll
overload the client connects...but I may give that a try tonight.

 Regards, and good racing to all,

Doc Wynne
Technical Support & Network Services
Support Engineering/dickson.net
http://www.racesimcentral.net/
--
Never a late apex, never a dull moment.