Brabham Forever?

[akamal]

As some of you may have noticed, my second attempt to start Div1 S15 failed last night. As at the Kyalami race a fortnight ago, no matter what I did, or what car I selected in WinVROC, on joining the server I'd always find my self at the wheel of a Brabham. Being a newly recruited Cooperman this simply wouldn't do - not to mention the fact that I'm even slower in the Brab than I am in the Cooper!

The problem was a strange one, I've never seen anything like it before. I had no problems in Clubmans last season, or with the Historic Division, and joining races on the majority of servers listed in WinVroc also worked fine. But joining 1.UKGPL (or EOLC2 for that matter) would always put me in a Brabham. I'd tried pretty much everything I could think of: starting WinVROC from GEM+ (as I usually do); rebuilding the .exes; starting WinVROC directly; joining the race directly from GPL; trying a different player; resetting the players default car; creating a brand new player; and all sorts of combinations of these things - but nothing made any difference: 1.UKGPL was still insistent that I drive the Brabham.

To make things even stranger Phil noticed that when I had connected, WinVROC would show my driver as being in a Cooper, despite my game showing me in a Brabham on the entry list and giving me a Brabham on the track.

So, this evening I did a clean install of GPL using the All-In-One installer, copied my old player folder over, fired up WinVroc and joined EOLC2 and got a Cooper! Woohoo!

Eventually, after much comparing of installations, I finally tracked the problem to one line in my core.ini: If I have net_use_mdm_bandwidth_for_tcp_ip=0 I get a Brabham. If I have it set to 1 I get the car I actually selected.  So, it would seem that the problem is probably some sort of subtle bandwidth mismatch, but why this should be manifest itself by getting the car selection wrong I haven't the faintest idea.

Phil very kindly brought 1.UKGPL up for me to test against, and I found that it re-acted to this setting in exactly the way.

I can't remember the last time I touched these settings so guess I've had this set since I last re-installed GPL last summer, and I've not noticed any problems until now, many servers seem to have no problem with it (including whichever server S14 Clubmans was run on). 1.UKGPL and EOLC2 definitely do have a problem with it.

On the off chance someone can tell what exactly causes this, or if anyones interested, the relevant parts of the core.ini are as follows:

net_lan_client_send_every=2                 ; Client packet freq on LAN
net_lan_client_send_size=132                ; Client packet size on LAN
net_lan_server_send_every=2                 ; Server packet freq on LAN
net_lan_server_send_size=388                ; Server packet size on LAN
net_mdm_client_send_every = 3                ; Client packet freq on dialup
net_mdm_client_send_size = 84                ; Client packet size on dialup
net_mdm_server_send_every = 3                 ; Server packet freq on dialup
net_mdm_server_send_size = 384               ; Server packet size on dialup
net_server_port=0                             ; Server port number (0 = default)
net_use_mdm_bandwidth_for_tcp_ip=1            ; Use modem bandwidthfor TCP/IP - 1 = Use net_mdm_ settings *
;net_use_mdm_bandwidth_for_tcp_ip=0            ;  Doesn't work with 1.UKGPL


Hopefully this will help anyone else that may get caught out by this in future.
Cheers, and see you for round three!

ak

[Brendan]

Glad you finally sorted it, Amir.  Perhaps now we'll have a full squad for the trip to Rouen. 

[Steven Foster]

Seconded - can't be having any of this nasty Brabby nonsense.....see you on the track soon