Let me see how well my grey cells are serving me..... During
development there was not much belief by the most the folks involved in
GPL that they could make it work over the Internet. However a core
group of beta testers (Alison Hine being one of them) kept pushing for
and help steer coding specifically to handle Internet racing. Randy
Cassidy basically took it upon himself to make it work. And it did out
of the box very well I might add considering the depth of the data GPL
likes to send back and forth.
The core.ini had settings that greatly curtailed the amount of data
being sent via TCP/IP vs. IPX (LAN). The reason being was that TCP/IP
was designed for Internet play not LAN play.
Another clue in the core.ini file that GPL out-of-the-box was intended
for Internet play was the ability to broadcast and receive info from a
server that only contained information on available hosts and their
conditions. If it was only designed for LAN play, I doubt that all of
this code would have been loaded into the original release of GPL.
Knowing that things could be better, Randy Cassidy took it upon himself
to fine-tune the network play for better Internet performance (thus
patches 1.1 & 1.2).
% GPL was released with unintended online support. From it's first release
% it supported TCP/IP, although intended for LAN use. But since TCP/IP is
% the internet protocol, people started to use it for online racing.
% Only when the online GPL community was grown to a reasonable extend (but
% still in the pre 3rd party util stage), I decided to buy GPL. Before that
% I couldn't be bothered about "GPL's oldtimers", although the Ring being
% in it _did make me a bit itchy for it :).
% So, online racing was the only reason for me to switch from GP2 to GPL (
% despite it's physics engine). And hence, I will only buy a new sim if it
% supports online racing. Which, btw, cannot be reversed into "it has
% online support, so I buy it".
% The current GP3 specs report IPX support, but not TCP/IP, thus no online
% support.
% Ren van Lobberegt, The Netherlands.
% http://www.racesimcentral.net/
% AMCA Web Master : http://www.racesimcentral.net/
--
**************************** Michael E. Carver *************************
Upside out, or inside down...False alarm the only game in town.
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