multiplayer stutter- settings or limitation??

Hi,

Firstly before I start, I just like to say how damn kewl this page is.

Anyway, I've just had a multiplayer session with 5 mates over and cram into a tiny room.. but we managed.. :P
It performance was painfully slow and it keep stuttering, occasionally locking up and had to retore to the old 3 finger salute...

We tried reducing the resolution with everyone set to 800x600 and seems to have minimal improvement.

In the end we had 3 PCs connected and it was only then that it was acceptable.

Platforms
Not real games machine 2 desktops & 3 notebooks.
-2xDesktop (P3@500-w2k) (P3@450-w9
-3notebooks (P2-500-w2k, P3@700-w2k,P3@1.3G-me)

Environment:
10/100M switch LAN

Software:
GP3 Season 2000, with GP3 running patch 1.1.3

Has anyone had any success in hosting a session with
4-5 or more?

Can anyone give me some tips or pointers to help fix this?

Would it also help if I get a dedicated server to do hosting?

Just that I don't want to host another session, unless I'm confident it will work, otherwise it will be too frustrating..

We didn't get the chance to test GP3 without Season2000.


Thanks,
Jason.

Hi Jason

I'd say that it might not be multiplayer networking thats your problem.

Some of those PCs would struggle with gp3 2000 in single player. GP3 is very proccessor hungry, and a p2 500 would struggle, unles you have a powerful graphics card in it.

When I played gp3 on lan it ran like you say, stuttery. But that's the same thing, my pc is only 350mhz.

Chris J


Also was everyone using EXACTLY the same settings (in every respect)?



'I reserve the right to contradict myself' - Richey Edwards, 1994.

Hi Qwerty,

thanks for your reply..

As mentioned, when we were running this with 3 players.. it seems to run ok and that was with:

2xDesktop (P3@500-w2k) & (P3@450-w98)
1xnotebooks (P3@1.3G-me)

We had to send the 2 guyswith the notebooks home
(P2-500-w2k, P3@700-w2k).

So its not neccessary the removing the weakest link from the equation.

All was set to 800x600, but we didn't go in and check or tweak the detail graphic settings and fps, etc.. We just ran the optimisation on each one and left it at that.

In hindsight I guess more testing and experiments could have been carried out to isolate it more.

So how many players did you have?

and wondering if there is any quick fixes??


Cheers,
Jason.

There isn't really any quick fixes on this, qwerty is correct in saying gp3 is processor hungry, that is an understatement, we are all eagerly awaiting gp4 which may do it better (we hope) I've sent you a faq on multiplayer although I suspect you may or should already know most of it. I've heard claims of 6 players but I've never been able to duplicate it, more than 3 and it struggles, which makes decent gameplay impossible.



the artist formerly known as

Hi Gusto,

thanks for the response, I've also heard about the max of 4 players or so.. but fail to find anything on any forums..

To be honest, I've posted this onto 3 diff forums and the fish isn't biting..

hmm.. thinking of getting the gang over this weekend.. if I do, will try more and let you guys know..

Cheers,
Jase.

Let us know if ya catch anything decent, the fishing is crap here in Port Phillip Bay, unless you have a boat of course



the artist formerly known as

Some mates and I linked GP3 a few weeks ago with terrible results at first.

We had 5 PC's involved. Slowest was a P366 (but with 256mb RAM), others were 800mhz and above.

One thing we found was running GPX made it slower. Not using that made a significant improvement, but even still it was not good.

In the end, the only way it was playable was when we downloaded a couple of oval tracks (which was good cause one guy was a newbie), and ran it with just player cars. Then it ran sweet.

I must say as well, it was damn fun. It's just out and out fast racing (we had all cars at the same level). Most of the time there were 3 of us in a lead group swapping the lead like those cyclists in velodromes.... once you get into the slipstream of a car you can really nail em... we kept the races nice and short to about 20 laps (with a lap taking only 30 seconds or less), so no pits were invovled, but if you incorporate that, well could be even better... add rain to it etc etc.... one mistake though in a short race can kill you....

I would suggest try a small track if you don't like ovals.... not sure what else is around, but certainly a small track.

Maybe you could also try just shutting down all the crap trackside objects and stuff..... and don't run it with GPX (although I haven't tried it with the latest GPX).

Hi All,

Did a multiplayer in the weekend with four players.

Initially we had the same problems as previous, where it was unbearable.

In the end we found what the problem is.

Basically, it was down to the network configuration on the 10/100M of the network settings on the NIC (LAN card).

With the NIC, they are default to autonegotiation and depending on the driver and the NIC the result can vary.

So we set the NIC to disable autonegotiation and hard code this to 100M full for every machine.

There was 1 machine which its driver didn't have this in the NIC config, so its probably setting this to 10M half-duplex, being the lowest common denominator, so all machine will run at that speed, hence lots of throttleback for the machines running at 100M to synchronise (stuttering) with the 10M-half machine.

In the end we've remove this machine and used a notebook instead and set it to 100M full.. it did the trick!!

We did the whole season, yes all 18 tracks of Season2000 (although at 10%).. so it was really fun and worthwhile. The performance is still not like in a single player mode, but hey there's more fun over taking each other and especially at start where everyone takes one another out!!


At the moment, I'm organising another session to do 5 players for this weekend...

so watch this space.


Cheers,
Jase.

Well done! Good to hear someone has been able to play multiplayer...however good the AI is, its just nothing compared to other people driving.

Chris J



'I reserve the right to contradict myself' - Richey Edwards, 1994.