rec.autos.simulators

: My excuses that I wasn't clear in my first reply. What I meant to say
: was, after the discussion you had with others, you still would keep
: telling people that in your experience racing with a ping of 650 ms is
: not doable. (Yes, you also said others don't agree with you)

  OK - a possible reason for all this...  

  In general, higher ping times mean higher numbers of hops which means
lower quality.  Even with 100% quality, 600ms ping is going to affect
you badly.

  However, thinking about the situation with australia, it's wholly
possible that they have single hops which themselves have long ping
times therefore, for traffic to/from australia a 600ms ping time may
have much better quality than a 600ms ping time across europe or from
europe to america.

  This might well explain why people are saying "I'm in Europe/America
and I find 600ms unusable" and "I'm in Australia and I find 600ms fine
for F2/F3"...  600ms from Australia could be indicating a good
connection for a long journey whereas between the US and Europe it
indicates a dreadful connection for a not-so-long journey.

--
Richard G. Clegg       Only the mind is waving
    Networks and Non-Linear Dynamics Group
      Dept. of Mathematics, Uni. of York
    www:  http://www.racesimcentral.net/

Hi Richard,
I just wanted to say that what you are suggesting here is certainly a
major contributing factor to why some people find .600 and above pings
bad, where as others find them good to excellent.
I race on-line to the USA, where my on-line league is based, from
Australia every day and have done so ever since the very first day that
GPL was released.
The guys and myself in the GMSS league have done extensive testing with
GPL connection issues, and quite often, as Mike said earlier in this
thread, my jumps nearly always go through less routers than the guys
who live 500 miles away from the host.
As far as warping goes, i very rarely, if ever warp at all, but i do
suffer discoes slightly more than some of the guys based in the USA,
not all of them, but that is probably the most frustrating factor for
me in GPL on-line, as warping has never been an issue for me at all,
except for the first few times i was on-line, and that soon made me
attempt to start tuning DUNS and experimenting with different ISP
providers, and since then, apart form obviously bad net days, i have
never had a warping problem with any host that has a reasonable idea on
how to set up a hosting server..
I know with the testing i did myself personally in Australia that the
ISP provider is a major factor for Australians wanting to run overseas
races, with BigPond winning the race by a huge margin in providing
quality and warp free races in GPL to overseas hosts.
Hoepfully, as Phillip said, that will change for the better soon with
broadband connections soon to be affordable and available for the city
slickers here in Australia (no such luck for us bush boys though) so
hopefully the guys that do not have good ISP providers, or seem to
suffer more problems than others will soon be able to enjoy the quality
of overseas racing in GPL that some of us already do enjoy..
Incidentally, it works both ways, as after we managed to sort our
connections out, i tried hosting 3 clients from the USA on my 56k
modem, capped at 26400 baud on numerous occasions over the following
year or so with only very occasional warping, and usually none at all.
The guys pings that joined my test sessions were usually in the .500 to
.650 area as well, so it is possible to have fun, even with a dial-up
connection..

Finally, i will comment on this piece i cut from your post..  :)

From my experiences with GPL on-line, this is not a factor at all.
I am not just disagreeing with you for the sake of disagreeing :) but
honestly, speaking from my own personal experience with .600 and higher
pings, i know that it is totally possible to have excellent warp free
races at those ping levels, with absolutely no bad effects at all....
I know it goes against all we have learned and all we have read, but
pings for me of up to .600 are absolutely perfect, warp free racing in
F2 & F3 (where even higher pings can be just as good) and i have had
numerous races in F1 with pings up to and slightly higher then .600 in
the GMSS F1 league, where i have raced entire league races with pings
of around .625 in F1 without a single warp, spatial displacement or any
untoward behaviour at all, and that is racing in very close proximity
to other members of our league, without having to allow for lag in any
way.
The reason i am replying to you Richard, is to let you know that it is
possible to race with pings of up to .600 in F1 and even a lot higher
in F2/F3 without a single problem, so it is possible...
Also, like i said earlier, the lower the ping the better, you will
never get an argument with me there, but GPL does an excellent job of
latency calculation with .660 pings with a good quality connection,
just a damn shame that N3/NL wasn't as good in the on-line department
as GPL is, because in N3 i have had a few good races at pings of up to
.350, but usually i find that pings over .300 in N3/NL are next to
useless for close, warp free racing, anyway i transgress..

Like i said, i think you are on the right track with the ammount of
jumps verses quality of connection at high ping levels, as each and
every router our signal goes through is a potential trouble spot, so
lets just enjoy what we have at the moment and make the most of it..

Cheers,
Ron Ayton
Melbourne, Australia

My excuses that I wasn't clear in my first reply. What I meant to say
was, after the discussion you had with others, you still would keep
telling people that in your experience racing with a ping of 650 ms is
not doable. (Yes, you also said others don't agree with you)

I would expect, after you clearly showed you know your stuff, that you
would tell this people the real story, like you did in your last post,
which is a very fine explanation about the matter. Tell people the
facts, and let them decide...don't spoonfeed them with your experience
alone.

It is ok to express your experience...

So, not the high latency is the reason of your bad experience, but a
certain router?

I've raced on Austalian servers, with pings lower then 500ms....those
races were fine.

I hope this will work out for you, but don't forget that the demand is
rising faster as they can  add bandwidth :-(

Looking forward to it... <g>

Remco

I think everyone will try themselves in any case no matter what they
read. There's a certain attraction to racing with people from overseas
if possiable. Sort of a pen-friend thing. International camaraderie
and all that.

My replay was in direct response to a simple statement and I thought a
short quick answer that didn't go into anything in particular would be
OK - in that it carried the gest of the conclusion of the matter - at
least as far as I've found it to be.

So OK. I should have either not been so lazy and explained the whole
thing or bit my tongue and let someone else who was feeling less lazy
at the time do the talking.

And if someone else says they have had a rather different experience
than I have had then it is of course most appropriate and desirable
for them to step in and add their views. Good for them.

So what can I do now. I APPOLAGISE. ( Are you listening RA ). If
feeling keyboard lazy in the future I'll just bit my tongue, or
fingertips as the case may be, and not give a single syllable reply "
can't be done" when a more elaborate reply of " can be done if the
following factors line up ..., which in my experience isn't very often
".

Hang. A little bit of laziness early on has resulted in having to type
5 times the amount any reasonable reply would have required in the
first place. That'll learn me.

Cheers

Phillip McNelley