For some reason my quality was bad during tonight's Lites races. It was around 95-97 most of the time, and the racing was rather jerky to say the least and this made it very difficult to avoid an incident (luckily I did!)

Does anyone know what might have caused this? I mean it was fine last season...

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vMaxBen #47
Velocity Maximum Simulation Racing
www.vMaxSR.com

Only thing I know is that I had it like this one time. But it was fine again the next time, without me doing anything. You could try to do a restart of your modem/router.

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If this is an intermittent problem, then it is normally caused by the route that your ISP choose to take across the Atlantic Ocean, hence there is nothing that you can do about it. My connection quality alternated between "great" and "rubbish" last season so I spent quite a bit of time looking into it. My ISP is Orange, and if a company called Sprintlink were involved in the routing on the US side, particularly their servers in Renton, then the connection would usually be poor.
Neither Orange nor Sprintlink were interested in addressing the problem (surprise, surprise) so one has to simply ride it out and hope that their network upgrades have the necessary effect.
Alternatively, change ISP. But, this is not a panacea - other ISPs could be worse.

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Derek Howe #144

There's a neat program where you can see the route of the ISP when connection to various places, you got a map with each location marked. Think you can do it in command as well.

Yep, the command-line tool is called tracert.

In the "Start" menu select "Run...", then type "cmd" (without the quotes).
That will open a DOS command window.

You then type "tracert xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx" (where the xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx is the IP address of the computer you want to reach) and you will see through how many servers your request goes to get there, with the latency for each hop.

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Folco Banfi
#17 Pepsi X / Top Gear Chevrolet

i had the same problem aswell yesterday

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Team Shark - #31

The "tracert" command doesn't work with the default firewall settings on some routers (particularly the Orange Livebox which is quite popular in the UK), however, it is possible to temporarily loosen it up a bit so that the servers on the route can respond.

You can also run "ping -t 69.28.242.213" (v8 server) from the command line to measure packet loss (the usual reason for poor quality).

Leave it running for about half an hour before you race, then hit CTRL-C to stop it (or CTRL-Break will show the current stats without stopping).

Have a look at the packet loss %age:

If it is 1% or less then you'll be OK.

Between 2% - 4% then there will be a noticeable effect, and others will probably tell you that you are warping.

Greater than 4% - don't get close to anyone (like 10 metres).

Of course the packet loss can change during the course of the race and suddenly get much better or worse. But I usually find that it is fairly static between 6pm and 11pm.

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Derek Howe #144