GPL - Tim's Mexico race

I have a cable modem and the core.ini for a cable modem. I have a Celeron 300A o/c'd to 374Mhz, 128Mb of Ram and a Monster 3dII(8Mb) using Diamond's original drivers, but have things a little tweaked with Tweakit. I have the game at 800x600 res so I get a pretty stable 36fps most of the time. I was getting a Latency reading of 167 most of the time to Tim's this afternoon (btw, does this mean a ping of 88 times two for each direction of travel, or 167 one way?). I kept getting disco'd (man I used to go through this playing Warbirds with a dial up connection) about every two or three laps. I noticed that a fair number reconnected every time I did. Was I getting pushed because too many people were on-line on Tim's server? I started the race and even had a half decent start before getting bounced by a Lotus that had started ahead of me on the grid but spun wildly across the track after hitting a wall. I went airborne and landed but continued. At this point there were no other cars and I kept the throttle pressed to go down the straight. No cars I figured to be a bad signal... in Warbirds loss of other planes meant a "yellow beacon" which indicated packets lost and an imminent disco unless things turned around quickly and packets started arriving. Sure enough, a few moments later I disco'd and couldn't get back in because the race was being run. Does it sound like the problem is on my end, the server's or just too many players? When the race started there shouldn't have been any more players joining so I thought that things would be pretty safe then. Is there anything I can adjust? I can't play with DUN to mess about with Fifo settings, compression and error control because I have a cable modem. It didn't give me any problems with Warbirds, and dial up settings had to be configured for that too (ie. the cable without any adjustments worked at least as well or better (certainly in terms of ping times) than the adjusted dial up settings). Can someone make a utility that measures packet loss? Thanks in advance for any help! Cheers, Gian Vitzthum. (remove "*no-spam*" from address to reply).

This could very well be a problem on my end as well. As you know, cable modem upload/download speeds are not constant and changes every minute as others on the same cable modem 'node' could be downloading a file which lessens the amount of bandwidth that I have for the server. Last I heard, there were 8 others on this same node as I am, and I really dont know thier downloading habits. It is possible that one of those people are doing something on the net and taking away from the allowed bandwidth, causing some packet loss and will make me stop. Each person connected to my server takes up 24k of bandwidth, or at least that is what the manual says. Times that by 20 players, and we have 480k transfer a second. That is a lot and it is easily cut into if someone else on the node starts downloading something. Keep trying, evening are better of course.

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>I have a cable modem and the core.ini for a cable modem. >I have a Celeron 300A o/c'd to 374Mhz, 128Mb of Ram and a Monster >3dII(8Mb) using Diamond's original drivers, but have things a little >tweaked with Tweakit. I have the game at 800x600 res so I get a pretty >stable 36fps most of the time. >I was getting a Latency reading of 167 most of the time to Tim's this >afternoon (btw, does this mean a ping of 88 times two for each direction >of travel, or 167 one way?). >I kept getting disco'd (man I used to go through this playing Warbirds >with a dial up connection) about every two or three laps. I noticed >that a fair number reconnected every time I did. Was I getting pushed >because too many people were on-line on Tim's server? >I started the race and even had a half decent start before getting >bounced by a Lotus that had started ahead of me on the grid but spun >wildly across the track after hitting a wall. I went airborne and >landed but continued. At this point there were no other cars and I kept >the throttle pressed to go down the straight. No cars I figured to be a >bad signal... in Warbirds loss of other planes meant a "yellow beacon" >which indicated packets lost and an imminent disco unless things turned >around quickly and packets started arriving. Sure enough, a few moments >later I disco'd and couldn't get back in because the race was being run. >Does it sound like the problem is on my end, the server's or just too >many players? When the race started there shouldn't have been any more >players joining so I thought that things would be pretty safe then. >Is there anything I can adjust? I can't play with DUN to mess about >with Fifo settings, compression and error control because I have a cable >modem. It didn't give me any problems with Warbirds, and dial up >settings had to be configured for that too (ie. the cable without any >adjustments worked at least as well or better (certainly in terms of >ping times) than the adjusted dial up settings). >Can someone make a utility that measures packet loss? >Thanks in advance for any help! >Cheers, >Gian Vitzthum. >(remove "*no-spam*" from address to reply).

[snip] That would be me :-( ... sorry about that ... Gotta keep practising those starts. I had no problems. I connected from Finland with 64k ISDN, got the pole but blew the start ... there was some warping with other cars but I've seen worse. Even the start was pretty fluid .. or would've been without me spoiling it. My latency reading was .333. Sorry i can't be more help to ya ... Hena

Hi Tim, Gotta congratulate you on having the busiest GPL server (that I know of :)

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> This could very well be a problem on my end as well. As you know, cable > modem upload/download speeds are not constant and changes every minute as > others on the same cable modem 'node' could be downloading a file which > lessens the amount of bandwidth that I have for the server. Last I heard, > there were 8 others on this same node as I am, and I really dont know thier > downloading habits. > It is possible that one of those people are doing something on the net and > taking away from the allowed bandwidth, causing some packet loss and > will make me stop. > Each person connected to my server takes up 24k of bandwidth, or at least > that is what the manual says. Times that by 20 players, and we have 480k > transfer a second.

Ummm. Its actually calculated in 24000bps <Bits per second>That would be 24000bps / 8 = 3000 characters/s which is 3k/s (Remember the 3.2k/s download speeds you would get when downloading files from the internet :) 3k * 20 people = 60k/s upload speeds required. My cable modem usually gets 20k/s upload speeds but is installed using Channel 0 on your TV dial -- not the entire bandwidth of the 'cabe' itself. I would think you have a dedicated 'cable' line for the modem to get such a fast upload rate (480k/s) WOW :)

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> That is a lot and it is easily cut into if someone else > on the node starts downloading something. > Keep trying, evening are better of course. > >I have a cable modem and the core.ini for a cable modem. > >I have a Celeron 300A o/c'd to 374Mhz, 128Mb of Ram and a Monster > >3dII(8Mb) using Diamond's original drivers, but have things a little > >tweaked with Tweakit. I have the game at 800x600 res so I get a pretty > >stable 36fps most of the time. > >I was getting a Latency reading of 167 most of the time to Tim's this > >afternoon (btw, does this mean a ping of 88 times two for each direction > >of travel, or 167 one way?).

88ms in each direction, for a total round trip of 167ms -- my best was 111msround trip :) I thinks it's Tim's connection -- lost packets and such. -- -------- Jason Monds (Please remove 'no extra spork' when replying)