rec.autos.simulators

vroc hosting advice?

Simon Brow

vroc hosting advice?

by Simon Brow » Wed, 26 Sep 2001 07:00:30

Does anyone know of any articles or info regarding hosting GPL races on
WinVroc?

I'm on cable modem, and I also race myself on the same machine (so it's not
a dedicated server). Two other racers connect through 56k dial-up with quite
low (i think) pings.

I noticed there's loads of settings when hosting a race, but little
description of what they do. And Vroc doesn't seem to have a readme file.

I've already been to Alison Hine's site and the Vroc page, but the info
there is vague and doesn't explain exactly what the server settings do.

My PC is running a solid 36 fps, and I have my firewall disabled whilst
racing, yet we're still getting lag for the two anologue modem racers.

Any help would be much appreciated,
TIA,
Simon.

Ken MacKa

vroc hosting advice?

by Ken MacKa » Wed, 26 Sep 2001 21:44:45

You mention that they have low pings but that they are also getting lag?  They
can check their ping (latency) and quality by closing chat, press alt-L, and
then opening chat again.  Low pings are good but its more important to have
better quality. If the quality is low then data packets are being lost resulting
in warps.  Also get them to turn the meters on while driving, this will give
clues as to what's going depending how the meters are behaving (see 1.1 or 1.2
patch readme for an explanation of the meters).

Have the modem users tweaked their DUN settings? (FIFO, error correction,
lowering connect speed. etc, see Alisons site)  Do they have good connections to
other servers? Your PC may be fine but things will look strange if they aren't
setting their connection properly.

As far as I know there is little tweaking for cable modems, all these RWIN and
MTU settings only affect TCP which GPL doesn't use (GPL uses UDP).

The only setting to play with in the hosting option is the bandwidth settings.
Bandwidth can cause problems for the host.  If you were using 2/84 try using
3/84 or 4/84. You need to have enough upstream bandwidth to send data to the
clients (most are setup to maximize downstream and limit upstream), although a
cable modem should be able to easily handle 2 clients.  See Bart westra's site
for more on bandwidth and the effects of poor connections.
http://www.xs4all.nl/~westrab/gpl.htm#starts

Has everyone applied the disco patch from papy?

 I went through this awhile ago trying to host on my cable modem. For some
people it worked fine, for others it didn't. Turns out that if there is a poor
router in the network between you and the client then data gets lost or
delayed.  You can use a program such as pingplotter to see if there is a bad
router between you and the client. If there is, the only thing is to try
connecting again, or complain to the ISP with the bad router, or change ISPs.

Hope some of this helps.
Ken


> Does anyone know of any articles or info regarding hosting GPL races on
> WinVroc?

> I'm on cable modem, and I also race myself on the same machine (so it's not
> a dedicated server). Two other racers connect through 56k dial-up with quite
> low (i think) pings.

> I noticed there's loads of settings when hosting a race, but little
> description of what they do. And Vroc doesn't seem to have a readme file.

> I've already been to Alison Hine's site and the Vroc page, but the info
> there is vague and doesn't explain exactly what the server settings do.

> My PC is running a solid 36 fps, and I have my firewall disabled whilst
> racing, yet we're still getting lag for the two anologue modem racers.

> Any help would be much appreciated,
> TIA,
> Simon.


rec.autos.simulators is a usenet newsgroup formed in December, 1993. As this group was always unmoderated there may be some spam or off topic articles included. Some links do point back to racesimcentral.net as we could not validate the original address. Please report any pages that you believe warrant deletion from this archive (include the link in your email). RaceSimCentral.net is in no way responsible and does not endorse any of the content herein.