On Line Hints and Tips

[RusRob]

To get the most out of on line racing there are a few things that
you can do to ensure you have the best connection and setup
for racing on line with others.

First I will explain what the symptoms of having a mis-configured
system or a bad connection are.

Warp - Warp is when you see other cars jumping around and doing
very strange things. It is caused by the lag in data flow between
the Host and Client.

What is exactly happening is that the Host PC is the one that
transfers data from your PC to all other players. You can see that
the more players the harder the host machine has to work.

If you have a bad connection or a 56K modem you may be causing warp.

If one connection is having a problem with warp the other players will
see the results (jumping cars) as well as slow their game play down.

It is common courtesy when you are the one causing the warp, to retire
from the race. In most Leagues if you are having a warp problem it is
usually up to the players to identify the warpers, and then the host will
ask that person to retire, It is looked on in the sim world as a mechanical
problem.

Things to do to help eliminate warp.

1. defrag, defrag, defrag, Defraging your hard drive is one of the biggest
things you can do to keep your hard drive humming along. It will make the game
run smoother as well as your PC.

2. Establish a new connection before going on line to race.
This means if you have a cable modem, unplug your modem, and disconnect
your cable. This will establish a new connection with your provider and
will make sure you do not have any persistent connections left over from a
web page.

3. Shut down all extra programs. Mail, Internet Explorer, Virus scanners,
firewalls and any other apps that may be running. You can (ctrl) (alt) (del) to see if you have any other programs up and running in the task bar. (DO NOT shut down the (systray) and (explorer) from the task manager you will crash your system)

4. Reboot your PC just before going on line to race. Do not open Internet Explorer and go surfing before hand, some web pages will hold your connection even after you close your browser. A clean reboot is always good.

5 Lower the Details. Of you have a slower PC turn down as much of the details as you can to make on line game play smoother. It will not effect others PC’s but it will effect yours. If you drop below 25 or 30 frames a second you will always be ahead of your PC and the car will not be responsive. (it will feel as though you forgot how to drive, and your responses are just not there or are just a bit late)

There is a great little program that you can get for free called Fraps
It will display your real time framerate. You can get it here:
http://www.fraps.com
Do not use this program while on line. Use it for testing your system and what the best setting for Heat. You should strive for 28 to 35 FPS when you are in a pack of 5 or more cars. I always test my mods using this and
I usually test at a track like A1 Ring where all the cars get bunched up in the first corner. (I always test running a (off line) race where I can get all the cars bunched up)

I hope all these tips will help you get the most from your machine, and the most fun in your on line racing.

There are a lot more things that will help on line racing and I will put together another set of hints and tips later.

Enjoy

[size="1"][ December 30, 2002, 12:21 PM: Message edited by: RusRob ][/size]

[ajs]

Now I am concerned with slowing you guys down and making the game crappy. As you know I do not have a cable modem. Let me know if I am making everyone warp. How do you know if you are the one causing it?

[Dave]

I didn't notice anything strange when we were having our little scrap. Your car never jumped from one spot on track to another.

There were a couple of other cars that warped when I was up close to them and i know I smacked one of them because the car jumped about 3 feet.

[RusRob]

I am sure I was one of the warpers.

I had a bad connection for about 2 days, and I suspected I would warp,,, lol

A big clue when you suspect you may have a connection problem is when you are in the lobby, and you try to chat, after you hit enter if there is a lag in the time it takes for your message to pop up.

I was seeing a lag of about 1 to 2 seconds before my message popped up.

While racing when you are the warper you will not see yourself warp,,, it will look like YOU are fine but everyone else is warping,,, [img]smile.gif[/img]

That is why guys need to call out who they see warping.

If you are the warper, you can try to reboot and reconnect to see if it clears up.

The guys on 56K modems will probably have the most problems with warp but anyone can get a bad connection.

One other thing that you may think about is having the race on an "off peak" internet time.
A bodgged down internet can lead to a lot of warp and really mess up a good race!

[rickb99]

Funny thing about Saturday night.

The only cars on my computer that had minimum warp were Tony's and RAY-DAVE's.

[dc]

I saw warpage from Rick and Tony, and I didn't see too many other cars doing it too badly.

The really strange one though, was that blue and white car that rode the wall on every start. We didn't even know who that was... mystery mobile.

Also, this happened twice to me Saturday night, I was up in the lead and pulling away, and when I got about 12 seconds up, the server kicked me off and made me a spectator. I know this happened to someone else once, too. Wat's up wit dat?

I will love this game so much more when the wheel damage is gone... online racing with warping cars can ruin your whole race in seconds, for no good reason.

d

[RusRob]

Here is a bit of info that I found on Team Players Forum.

It is from Andy G, he has a on line league that runs in England called Briska Cars, (a bit like our Outlaws)
Here is what he had to say about warp.
______________________________________________

Apologies for going slightly off topic here - but about the method of creating "mod specific AI" described above - this is cool because it means existing tracks don't have to be changed, but has it been confirmed that this works OK online?

In the early days of Heat I found that people running with different GCF files (which they would be using Maxx's method of course), caused warp problems online, especially during the rolling starts.

I hope that the Zippy patch and later has fixed this, but would like to know before releasing GCFs for some of the BriSCA mods (the last thing I want to do is improve offline play at the expense of breaking online play!).

Cheers,
Andy

____________________________________________

I think it is worth some investigation.

Also we might talk to someone and see if IRF (Internet Race Finder) may be more stable than direct IP. I am not sure how it functions and if it would be better or not, but would be worth checking into.

[MoonNerd]

I also make my own AI ghostlaps. Is the easieat solution to delete them before the online race? Also is there a target framerate that if you achieve it offline you probably won't be warping online even with a 56k modem?

[rickb99]

Moon,
If this proves to be an improvement, I don't delete them. Nor have I deleted the ovals to get all the road courses to show up.

I just add an X at the start of the file extension. Program won't see file but you still have it.

[rickb99]

Rob or Rus...

Good point about that post you found. What he's refering to here is if you've made ghostcar files and put them in your F2000 root directory to act as guides for AI cars. Don't know if what he's saying is true but it could be a factor.

I DO have some of those and meant to disable them before the race. Some of them came with the original mod and others I made. I'll make sure the Sebring one is off next weekend on my computer.

BACKGROUND THINGS:
I found two more things running in the background on my computer that weren't showing in the task bar.

1. My "date and time" in the control panel had a box checked to look for a time update on the internet about every 20 minutes. That caused a video 'blip' on my screen. So it was tasking the CPU.

2. Although I didn't have McAfee virus stuff running, it was showing in the Windows 'task menu'. It too was checking the internet for updates several times an hour.

Darn Windows seems to think it owns this machine and not me! Too bad we can't connect to the internet and run NH directly from DOS.

DOUG.. leading and punted:
Yup, the one time I wasn't thrashed into the forest at the first turn, I managed to build up a 10 second lead pretty quick. The moment it hit 11 seconds I was punted off the server. It didn't happen at Watkins the previous week. Ray-Dave and Tony didn't seem to have the problem.

[size="1"][ December 31, 2002, 01:11 AM: Message edited by: rickb99 ][/size]