rec.autos.simulators

Last night, I counted 58 people racing and 8 people in the chat at one
point.  The number is obviously very fluid.  At that point, there was a
full slate of races being hosted in Open Room 1, and two races in Open
Room 2, for a total of eleven races hosted on VROC.  

All evening, about half the races available were Ultra connections,
meaning cable modems, ADSL, or T1/T3, capable of hosting a dozen or more
players.  

All this on a Thursday night!  Almost 70 people (that we know of) on a
weeknight!  I believe this compares very favorably with commercial sites
hosting other racing games and simulations, sites which have been
promoted heavily by large corporations.

This morning, VROC's hit counter stands at 13,680 hits, almost all of
which are since it went live on October 18.  That's over a thousand hits
a day on a site which is publicised only through r.a.s. and notices on
friendly Web sites.

All of this is pretty solid evidence of some serious interest in racing
GPL online!

I've raced on VROC almost every night since it went live, and have had
some fantastic, wheel to wheel, nose to tail battles for the entire
duration of Long races.  It's some of the best racing I've had in my
life, including real life races in sports cars, formula cars, and karts.

Actually, I consider racing other people in GPL to be real racing, in
simulated cars.  It's just as real as racing an RX-7 or a Formula Ford,
IMHO.

If you're a would-be racer, and you're looking for someone to race with,
check out VROC!

  http://www.racesimcentral.net/

Alison

I've had a blast since VROC went public, hosting and joining a ton
of races and getting to do some excellent wheel to wheel battles with
lots of the people I've met on VROC. I agree that it compares very
well to the e***ment of racing real karts wheel to wheel, without
the aches and pains on my back the next day :-)

Thanks for making it all possible Alison and John.

(Also thanks to Papyrus for the excellent online playability in GPL, and
to all the people who participate in the great atmosphere I've seen on VROC.)

Seeyas on the track.

--John (Joao) Silva

I have a GLP online racing question: Will installing Win98 improve my
Ping times? (I already have installed DUN 1.3). Most races show a Ping
time of 600-700, which is too high to be usable isn't it? I'm
connecting from the west coast of Canada, on a 33K modem connection.

Joe

Are you showing 600+ pings even to VROC hosts on cable or ADSL??

I'm just down the coast from you in Seattle, if you see me hosting you
should get a ping of not more than 350ms or so from my ADSL connection.

If you are seeing pings higher than that then your ISP might have a poor
link to the Net backbone, have you done much online *** in other games
like Quake/2? Did you get the same high pings?

I'm asking because I had to try a few ISP's before I found one with good
enough connection for online ***, even ISP's where downloads looked fine
sometimes had problems in Quake2 because their route into the Internet
backbone had too many router hops along the way. Packet loss is also another
thing to check, most of the disconnects I've seen in GPL seem to be caused
not by latency but by packet loss. This was when I was using a 33.6 modem.
(Luckily I don't have to worry about that anymore with my ADSL conn)

You can take advantage of most ISP's 30 day free trial/money back policy
to test their out online *** performance until you find a decent one,

Hope you get your connection working and can join us for some racing soon.

--John (Joao) Silva