Hi fellow racers,
a couple of nights back I gave the 1.1 patch a thorough workout
saying I am a bit disappointed is an euphemism. Sadly there are hardly
any 1.0.0 servers left, but online racing *over the internet* seems to
be unreliable at best. Qualifying works ok (both in relative network
neighbourhood and up to 20-30 hops away), but the old "Alt-L" curse
still seems to be there, i.e. pressing alt-L in order to determine
latency just after practise has finished gets you booted from the race
3 out of four times. It's probably not an Alt-L issue because it
happened a couple of times without pressing anything at the end of
practise, too.
Another thing is the irregular fps slowdown which feels like you're
driving through a bowl of jelly in the denser parts of Jupiters
atmosphere: I tried both the sync=1 / adj_delay=4 and the sync=0 /
adj_delay=8 as suggested on Alison's site, but these fps slowdowns
still occured no matter what the settings in core.ini were.
Upon installation of the patch GPL takes nearly half a minute to
start, and this is with both ipx and modems disabled (my machine is
connected to the 10Base2 home lan behind a Linux firewall /
gateway). Takes about 15 seconds for the CD-ROM to come on, then
another 10-20 seconds until the gpl screen gets fired up.
Speaking of installation, after installing the patch GPL worked for a
quick test race session, exiting it gave me the "this thing performed
an illegal operation that windows yours truly is sort of unhappy with,
but I will crash anyway" message box, then when I went back the next
morning nothing 3dfx-related would work any more. I completely had to
re-install the drivers and the V2 card until I even got to the splash
3dfx screen again (Diamonds drivers for the DM3DV2 seem to work better
here than the new reference drivers for what it's worth). I am not
blaming this on GPL (just like the recent Kosovo crisis ;-), but it
might be worth to note that several of "the patched" mentioned such
troubles.
To conclude, currently a patched GPL seems to suffer from more
problems than were fixed in the first place, at least speaking for the
German version. Especially the online section of the game (for all its
newly-won flexibility) seems to have taken some critical hits. Maybe
I'm blaming internet bottlenecks on GPL here, but note that most of
online races went pretty smoothly with the old version which sort of
makes you think (plus the slew of complaints of other gpl ***s).
I think a good approach to fix these problems and give us a reliable
server platform might be porting the core of GPL to linux, then
open-sourcing the network part in the form of a kernel module and have
it go through the eternal fire of peer review on the net. Both
products (Linux and GPL) would greatly benefit in this
partnership. (Then again maybe I should check the ashes in the last
pipe I smoked, but you never know ;-)
Thanks again to Alison and all the others for doing their best to help
people out in the first 48 hours of the release of the long awaited
beast, and I'm sure that given time it will eventually return into the
(mostly ;-) reliable multiplayer game that we knew and loved so well.
All the best & cheers for now,
Uwe
--
Uwe Schuerkamp, Telemedia ////////////// Phone: +49 5241 80 10 66
Carl-Bertelsmann-Str. 161 I \\\\\\\\\\ uwe.schuerkamp at telemedia.de
33311 Guetersloh \\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\\ http://www.racesimcentral.net/
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