rec.autos.simulators

  I was getting ready for the upcoming NARS race at Mid Ohio, when I
found several other teams also sneaking in a test.
dave henrie

http://www.racesimcentral.net/

Wow, I'm impressed, killer looking track. And a road course even! Didn't
think anyone but me enjoyed road racing on road courses with Nascar 3.  :o)
Any hints on where I can get this track, whether it's a patch to convert an
existing track or whatever? Just as long as it's not a conversion from N1
and I'm ok, lol.

And this is used in a league race? Very cool if that's the case, hehe. I
been wanting to start up a "Trans Am" type of league thing using Nascar 3
and mostly road courses, with 2 or 3 ovals thrown in to keep any left
turners happy and a shot at scoring some points during the season, lol.
Basically call it "FN", which would be "Formula Nascar", lol, mix of F1 and
Nascar. That would go over like a lead balloon, but hey, creates a whole new
challenge when you gotta keep the big, huge cars on the track, hehe.

Anyways, great looking track!!

Destin

hehe, If I had a decent connection, I'd jump on it inna heartbeat... I
love slinging a stocker around the road coarses.... was in hog heaven
when the converter for IndyCar to NASCAR came out... Elkhart,
Cleveland, somebody say Vancouver..., Portland, I ran several custom
seasons with plenty of road course races...  Mid Ohio rocks, but it
was only good for practice - racing just wasn't happenin' - don't even
get me started on Laguna Seca....  

~hmmm, i wonder what partition i buried N1 on....

Notice in one shot the Dodge "test driver" is in the dirt. I wonder who that
is???
Al Stiff

You and me both on the "decent connection". I'm still making do with a 56k
for the time being. If I was rich I could get T1, or wireless T1 even, with
the local ISP in town, but that's megabucks and they cater to companies and
not really to individual users. However.....they did let the local Quake and
Quake2 clubs setup both a Quake and Quake2 server, the computer provided by
a local computer store, admin remotely alot by the club guys. Free to play
on, dunno about free to run like that. Basically the computer was placed in
the isp's building and connected via lan to their T1/T3 system. Talk about
low pings, best place for me to play for sure. Anyways....thinking about
asking them if I could do that for us Nascar 3, or any other racing sim,
racers to have a nice strong server to play on.  :o)  I'm late on a payment,
so might brown-nose them a bit when I go in to pay my dues this week, hehe.
Might frown on me otherwise, lol.

But yeah, if I can get them to do that, even if I have to pay extra per
month, if it's reasonable, I'll do it and invite everyone to race on that
server. Otherwise, I have to wait on the slow people over at Cox Cable to

Destin

p.s. I might even run a league too!  ;o)

  Hey if you choose your hosts carefully and try and get the pings down
under 150 to 200 you can easily run well with a 56k.  One thing about
online roadracing.  The pack tends to string out fairly quickly so the
full field warping is reduced.
dave henrie

  The tracks are from ICR2/CART Racing.  There is a free demo convertor
available
at the usPits that converts Cleveland, Portland, and I "think" Long
Beach.
CART is out of print but can be had in discount racks fairly cheaply.
and
in a Sierra combo pack or two.  The Convertor was originally for N2/99
but
the Pits also have a N3 patch that will bring in the N99 tracks into the
N3
family.

  Hey there are a couple of leagues out there.  The NARS league is
currently running
N3 online with about 10  to 15 drivers.  I don't know if the host can
support
any more but you can check it out at...

http://members.home.net/alstiff/Nars.htm

and the Biggie, an Offline Touring Car league has been using these
tracks for 3 years.
They too plan on migrating to N3 for Aussie V8 type Touring car online
competition.

check 'em out at...

http://www.tptcc.com/

dave henrie

  err, the 'un-named' driver was obviously showing the Cup drivers that
the shortest distance through a turn is a straight line.  Yeah, dats it,
dats da ticket!

    Yeah, I guess you got a good point there. When I was taking part in a
TEN league, in the free demo area, hehe. That left us with Atlanta and the
Glen. Deal was, run on the Glen every 5th race or something to that effect.
So was 4 atlanta races, then a glen, 4 more atlanta, etc... Anyways, the
league boss was so scared of seeing half the field sitting in the pits as
first lap wreck victims, that he turned off pace, yellows and damage. More
like an arcade race, hehe. All this, by the way, in an effort to cut down
the time needed to hold the race. We was running all races at 25% which
would make for at least 1 pit stop at atlanta mandatory. But nobody ever
raced that far at the glen, and nobody realized, that a 100% race on the
Glen is quite a bit shorter in distance and lap count (only 82 in 100%),
that when it did come time for the Glen, not a single person had to make any
pit stops. Pretty much a long sprint race. Quickest time for us to run an
Atlanta at 25% with yellows? 1 hour and 3 minutes, with a season low of 3
cautions. Most took around 1 hour 20 minutes. The Glen races? Only ran two,
both finished in less than 35 minutes, lol. The thing that bugged me about
all this was the "no damage" ruling. Heck, I was counting on winning by
being the only survivor, lol. I was pretty good at the Glen, so was eager to
see the oval kings get their "just desserts" handed to them when they tried
to blast their way around the track like it was an oval, hehe. I always run
my Nascar road races with the F1 style rules. Which is how it should be,
hehe. No need to bring the whole field to a stop simply cause one driver
spun off into the grass or two cars tangled in a curve. Just use the spotter
as a sectional yellow type thing, similar to the F1 rules where you have to
drive careful through a wreck area and no passing allowed, all in the name
of safety pretty much.

Anyways.... would be nice to find a group of modem racers who all have good
enough pings to allow us to have fun racing together. I've hosted upwards of
6 or 8 people in N3 with minimal lag. But then the next night I might not
can host 3 or 4 cause of warp problems, lol.

While I'm thinking of it, me coming back to racing from the flight sim
community, and dealing with lag and warping probs in those various games. If
people would use a little common sense, and internet etiquette, they could
eliminate quite a bit of lag/warping in racing. Everyone seems to have just
discovered Roger Wilco or Battlefield Communicator yesterday, lol. I been
using RW myself for well over a year, mainly with flight sims in cooperative
missions. I don't use them in competition type flying, such as 1v1 or 2v2,
etc, simply because it will cause lag and then it turns out more as a "blind
luck" competition and "least lag" competition, rather than a dogfight skill
thing. I've even seen some "squads/clans" use voice chat as a tactic, ROFL.
I'd get on their tail and open up with the guns to shoot them down, and all
of a sudden, big warp, they are gone and the next thing i know, I'm the one
getting shot down. The culprit? Well, my getting on his six brings out
everything from the innocent "I've got a bandit on my ass, come help me!!"
to the blatant (cheating) "AAAAARRRGGGHH" (screaming into the mic using RW
while in a game will cause a warp).

Just so people know what I"m talking about...consider this.... if you got a
computer that's doing good to give you smooth framerate offline, then it
sometimes gets choppy playing online. Well, reason is, the cpu has to do
alot more work when online, runs the bloated tcp/ip stack and socket
connections, has to handle and interpret all the incoming/outgoing data
packets (too many and you'll be lagged cause your computer can't handle it),
all that is in addition to handling the game with the sounds and graphics
work going on. Then when you add in real-time, streaming voice chat to all
that workload the computer has, something has got to give. Guess what? Alot
of times it's your connection. I know Unix/Linux has "task scheduling"
incorporated into the OS, not sure Windows does. Task scheduling is really
task prioritizing when it's cut n dried. When I used to hang with the hacker
crowds on IRC that loved electronic attack contests, my Amiga with it's unix
core OS, i could set my tcp stack and irc chat program to have the highest
priority, therefore it got all the cpu time it wanted, all other programs
had to share any free time available. So all the PC/Mac/Unix/Linux freaks
that would try and flood me off the net, they'd be left to wonder why I
wasn't going anywhere, lol. Me and my "bad-ass" 14mhz Amiga 500 with 9 megs
of memory, ROFLMAO.

Anyways, if you wanna see what RW does to your online *** whenever
someone has their mouth open instead of concentrating on the race....go to a
cam site and have it stream the video to you while you race online, or fire
up RealAudio and listen to streaming audio from your fave online radio
station, or just download something and then get online and race, hehe. Same
effect.

Anyways, enough preaching, but the point is, and an example. I connect to a
Dega race to work on my drafting skills, hehe. There was about 11 other
racers there besides me. Had excellent latency, ping of less than 100 also,
guy hosting had a cable modem. I think this is gonna be great racing with
little to no warp at all. Well, I was sadly wrong. Warpy the entire first
race. I was shocked. Couldn't even draft off the pack, because the pack was
warping. I began to wonder if it was my connection, and if everyone else was
seeing the same thing I was. Well, after the race, several commented on how
warpy it was. Wished the internet was more stable and all that jazz. This
race was like at 1am also, lol. But then the host horrifies me with "For any
of you guys not in RW with us, here's the IP, hop in and chat with us while
we race". ARGH!! I was mad. I told him that was what was causing the
warping. Hosting a race and community free-for-all streaming voice chat. I
stuck around for the second race, which I preluded with "watch out for the
warping". yep, warps and wrecks all over like the first race, was plain
horrible. I left without saying a word, honorable intentions ground to dust
beneath my boots. But hopefully, they learned something about streaming
audio and racing online.

I'm off the soap box, lol, sorry!!

  Destin

Yeah, i been trying to use some convertors lately, seeing as I've had CART
for a while and recently bought a used copy of ICR2 from the local
Electronic Boutique for $7.99, hehe. But still, only full convertor I've
seen is for ICR2 to N1. Doh. Been thinking about getting hold of the Pits
site about getting a full version of the convertor, which would mean payment
I guess the way it sounds. Not bad really. Which brings up the Touring Car
stuff, hehe, I been looking at that site alot and downloaded the N99 version
of the patch to run the Touring Cars. It's pretty fun and in alot of ways,
alot like TOCA2, except graphics in N99 aren't as good as TOCA2 in my
opinion, plus other differences like damage modelling, etc.... but still,
patch is great and been thinking about joining the TPTCC thing, probably as
a privateer until I can hook up with a team, hehe. But was kinda worried
about not being able to run all the tracks, except the ones I can convert
myself using the free stuff. I guess I could always sign on and run the
races I can to gain experience, then when I can get a full convertor, can
run a full season with them, hehe. But thanks for the feedback and the info,
didn't realize that track was in ICR2, lol. Guess I need to play that game
more, at least look at what's in it.  :o)

Destin