>> ... I did not have anything in my quality bar (is
>> this good or bad?) and the "s" bar would sometimes appear in the top
>> half (what ever that means).
>The smaller the bar in each of the three graphs, the better. An empty
>frame, as you describe for your quality bar, rocks.
>Under normal circumstances the S bar won't be any more than a few pixels
>big, and it ends up being a good indicator of how variable the latency is
>between you and the server. If you find that the S bar grows and grows
>until all the other cars disappear, and the bar continues to grow until it
>fills its frame, and then your screen flashes, and then the bar resets and
>you see the cars again, then that's, well, bad. This is generally an
>indication that
>(a) your net connection is quite bad (you have DSL, so that's not likely),
>or
>(b) your computer is too slow to run the game effectively (if your frame
>rate is in the ***s or less, that could well be the problem), or
>(c) the server computer is too slow to run the game effectively (not likely,
>but ya just never know), or
>(d) the server's net connection is overloaded. If it's on a cable modem and
>has more than about 12 or 13 people connected to it, that's probably the
>problem.
>The communication meters are described in reasonably***detail in the
>readme.txt.
Seriously, thanks for the great explanation. I have been having a lot
more luck by being more selective on the servers I play on. When I
play on Papy's dedicated and open servers I do not have any where near
the problems. Still have some problems with some cars, but I assume
those must be people connecting via modem. Guess I will have to join
a league or something...
Brian Oster