I'm not sure who to give credit to, but Ian Lake and Darren Marsh seem to be very proactive at running an Australian league. They all get together and run a specific series at a set time when its really only Aussies running. Now you have your own server farm to run at like 30 ping. I can't wait for a west coast server, I'm 120 ping to the US server! Something in Washington would feed the BC and the west coast of the US extremely well.

Quote :

Since iRacing.com’s Sydney-based server farm was activated this week, there’s been a steady stream of comments about the new service in the forum. Although the response has been generally positive, a number of members have questioned how the new server farm is being integrated into our existing system of parsing run-groups.

Here’s how the new system works:

Users can see their connection quality (latency and packet loss) to our race server farms by hovering their cursor over the PING widget, near the calendar and the MPR indicator. It could take as much as a minute after logging into the site before the connection data is collected. We now have two server farms: US-MA, located in the US state of Massachusetts (near Boston), and AU-Syd, located in Sydney, Australia. If no server farms are listed, the user probably needs to configure their antivirus/firewall software to allow the iRacingService program to access the Internet.

So which server farm will a customer race on? It depends.

Each Qualify/Time Trial/Race session is broken up into run-groups, where the size of each run-group is limited to (at most) the number of drivers allowed by the series. Each Open Practice session is its own run-group.

Each run-group is hosted by a single race server located on a particular server farm. The iRacingSim for all drivers in a run-group communicates directly with the race server that is hosting that group. Drivers only see, and are only competing against, drivers in their same run-group.

For Open Practice sessions, race servers are made available on each server farm, with each server hosting one run-group. A driver may join any session that is still allowing connections. Note that the Ping time from the driver's computer to each open practice server is listed. (Ping time is the amount of time it takes for information to travel round-trip from your computer to the race server and back. Measured in milliseconds, the lower the ping time the better. Also, test sessions are not affected by Ping time.)

For all other types of sessions, the user registers for the session, but the system forms the run-groups. As the system is forming the run-groups for the session, it first assigns each user to the server farm to which they have the best connection. Then, within each server farm, the system forms run-groups using factors such as iRating and mutual friends.

For Race sessions, there is the additional consideration that a minimum number of drivers are required for the session to be considered official. It is possible that too few drivers have been assigned to a particular server farm to form an official run-group, but there are enough drivers registered for the session in total to form an official run-group. In this case, the system will exclude the server farm that has the worst average connection for the registrants, assign each user to their best (remaining) server farm, and try again.

Adding the Australian server is part of our ongoing effort to provide the highest quality service to the greatest number of people at all times. Given all the possible permutations of series, tracks, cars, number of participants and their geographical location, under some circumstances a member not located in Australia or New Zealand may experience a high Ping time as a result of racing on the AU-Syd server farm. That will only be the case if the majority of the racers in that particular run-group are from Australia and New Zealand. Bear in mind that, absent our new AuSyd server farm, those Australians and New Zealanders would have been racing on the US-MA server farm and, therefore, experiencing a similarly high Ping time. Not only would their racing experience have been diminished, so would that of their US-based competitors. Put another way, in a race with ten people, it’s better to have nine people with a low Ping time competing against one driver with a high Ping time, than to have one person with a low Ping time racing against nine people with high Ping times. Either way, the driver with the “variant” Ping time would have an imperfect experience, but with the new system nine people will have a good experience -- and the tenth will have a safer experience than he would have previously.

If you have any additional questions, please post them here on the forum and we will do our best to answer them.

Quote from DeadWolfBones :

Looks like Atom's back to his old self again. This should get interesting.

Is that a problem for you, or was that just a dig.

Really,

Quote from AtomAnt :

I'm Canadian..

I'm sure Canada is very proud of you.

thread 184 I will go read..


CORE RACING no bones about it. Core racing will find something with that...

An y H ow

Quote from sil3ntwar :

Does this aussie server mean australasians racer each other now with low pings (im guessing everyone raced on US servers before hand?).

Yes. There is a minimum amount of racers required to make a race official. As long as the number of Australasians registered for a particular race is above that number, they will always race each other on the Sydney servers with low pings. With practice sessions you can always choose whether you join a US or AU server.

just reading about it in the paper actually today...

Great reviews but id never pay that much, im not tight pocketed but its a mixture of i doubt its worth it and its not really for me due to nascar.

Is iRacing support closed on weekends? I'm trying to take advantage of the 3 months offer before it expires. Tried to pay with my Visa, but it didn't seem to accept it for some reason. So I tried PayPal, but got some error message when paying. So I tried once more, and the same error came up. Now I see 2 payments that are pending and I can't cancel any of them. I sent iRacing support an email yesterday, but haven't heard anything back yet. And the 3 months offer expires today.

Quote from arco :

Is iRacing support closed on weekends? I'm trying to take advantage of the 3 months offer before it expires. Tried to pay with my Visa, but it didn't seem to accept it for some reason. So I tried PayPal, but got some error message when paying. So I tried once more, and the same error came up. Now I see 2 payments that are pending and I can't cancel any of them. I sent iRacing support an email yesterday, but haven't heard anything back yet. And the 3 months offer expires today.

I'm sure they'll get back to you and see what you're trying to do... they are usually prompt in replying..... Hope to see you in the solstice races. Limerock starting tonight I'm going to make Moose look noob this week

Where did you get the 3 month offer from arco? Id love to try iRacing even though this thread wants to make me jump of a cliff with my LFS hardrive

Quote from pearcy_2k7 :

Where did you get the 3 month offer from arco? Id love to try iRacing even though this thread wants to make me jump of a cliff with my LFS hardrive

This promo code is still working. PR-3MONTHOFFER-MAY2009

Today is the last day i believe.

https://members.iracing.com/me ... te/SubscriptionChoices.do

Got in contact with support now, and they're looking in to it. Hopefully they can sort it.

Sorted!

I transferred the PayPal funds from Euro to USD, and then did the payment. Thought it did it's own conversion, but anyway, the payment went through this time.

Urgh.

Got a friend of mine to email me a $25 voucher (because i dont have a credit card), then when i fill everything on the iracing page... surprise, surprise

You must have $1 on your paypal account so they can see if your personal info is legit. Crap****.

Can anyone spare $1 on paypal plz?

Anyone know where i can find a program to see my PC specs? Need to know if it will run before i think about paying the $25

I can't really give a program or anything, but:

Quote :

The following minimum requirements are necessary to access the iRacing.com service, including the simulation software and member website.

System Requirements
Windows XP or Windows Vista
Hyperthreaded Intel CPU, AMD Athlon 64 CPU, or any dual-core CPU
128MB Pixel Shader 2.0 (ATI 9700Pro or nVidia 6600 or better); 256 MB Pixel Shader 3.0 (ATI X1600 or nVidia 6800 GT/GS or better recommended) graphics adapter
1 GB system RAM
3Gb free hard disk space
Steering wheel and pedals required
Microphone optional, required for voice chat

Internet Browser Requirements
Firefox 1.5, Internet Explorer 6, or newer
Javascript enabled
Cookies enabled
Flash Player

Internet Connection Speed
56K dial-up at a minimum, Broadband (DSL or Cable) highly recommended. Satellite broadband excluded.

Well i have a DELL from 2003 i think, its says intel platinum 4 on the outside and plays LFS on lowish graphics at about 60 FPS fine. Will it be good enough?

Quote from Bumpdrafter :

Urgh.

Got a friend of mine to email me a $25 voucher (because i dont have a credit card), then when i fill everything on the iracing page... surprise, surprise

You must have $1 on your paypal account so they can see if your personal info is legit. Crap****.

Can anyone spare $1 on paypal plz?

What's your paypal address?

Quote from UncleBenny :

What's your paypal address?

You have a PM

Should be sent, have fun.

Oh my god, thank you thank you thank you

Quote from pearcy_2k7 :

Well i have a DELL from 2003 i think, its says intel platinum 4 on the outside and plays LFS on lowish graphics at about 60 FPS fine. Will it be good enough?

To be honest i don't think that's going to cut it.

Quote from The Moose :

To be honest i don't think that's going to cut it.

Yeah, I had a Dimension 4550 (2003 model) from Dell prior to my current machine. P4 2.53ghz, 1gb PC2700 RAM, Radeon 9600XT. iRacing ran like crap. Time to upgrade, Pearcy.

Since you asked me in msn but i was playing a game so i could not reply to message so you blocked me again Pearcy, here is what you can use to check your pc specs.

http://www.cpuid.com/pcwizard.php

Not good enough then?

I won't be upgrading for a long time, im not into computers at all so don't have that big of a desire to upgrade plus im skint atm.

Pecky, ive never blocked you

Quote from pearcy_2k7 :

im skint atm.

Not a good thing to be if you want to play iracing.