Hi all! I wanted to suggest about allowing servers to have more players because you have leagues like UXRL and OWRL especially where there are more than just 20 drivers (OWRL MRT: 64!!! ) so would it be possible to maybe allow 32 players? Hope you devs can consider the idea.

ok should be nice when all play together, but you have seen the last race of mrt cup:
in so town every grid were full of crashes....

-1

-1

+1

40 cars is a minimum for me. Though I'm willing to make a compromise for now.

Vain

+1

+1 although could get very laggy, i would be happy to race 40 on ky1

would be good to have the option for more people on a server but for pick up and play cant see it being really used only for league uses.

Quote from kirmy :

+1 although could get very laggy

,

For a full grid of 40 cars, not only would you be backing the grid up around corners but T1 would degenerate into gridlock. By the time the last people get through T1 the people who were in front of the accident could well be around half the track!

In addition, it would take probably (based on really rough calculations) a 10Mbit upstream connection on the server end and a pretty large bandwidth bill to go with it.
The actual speed I calculated was 577KB/s (I did say roughly didn't I? :P) which works out at 4.6Mbit in PERFECT conditions and totally excludes protocol overheads. Given that this will be done over the internet, you can guaruntee you wont get that from a 5Mbit pipe.

I'm not sure how much on the client end but given the availability of high speed broadband these days that shouldn't be so much of an issue.

*edit*
Just to clarify, the purpose of this post is to point out that this would only be available from home users with a super fast connection or from paid for hosts in data centers that can afford the extra bandwidth.

+1 Definitely more cars would be nice. Like in NASCAR Racing 2003 with 43 cars at Watkins Glen or the Nurburgring. It sometimes get a Mess in Public Races but its not that big of deal and good to have for League Events

+1 :color:

30 instead of 18 cars for my LeMans League would be nice.

Agreed, but it should only be possible on the larger tracks. 20 is crowded enough on some tracks already. It's nice that sprint 1 & 2 are already limited to 16 for a similar reason.

It useless to ask this. It will come when it will come and when Scawen decides this. And I think it can be in an incompatible patch only, so if you don't see the car number increase in patch W - you won't see it for a long time.

Quote :

In addition, it would take probably (based on really rough calculations) a 10Mbit upstream connection on the server end and a pretty large bandwidth bill to go with it.

Lots of people have servers who can handle this. The UKCT servers that I have my LFS servers on ticks over on idle.

I would like to see 40 car grids, but I think the number of cars in each grid is a feature of each license step, so in S3 we'll get more. I dont know how many more, but I should think some tracks will have limited slots.

One thing i'd like to see is lots more spectator slots.

Quote from Becky Rose :

Lots of people have servers who can handle this. The UKCT servers that I have my LFS servers on ticks over on idle.

Cool; Then I see no reason why not as long as (like Bob said) it's only available on sensible sized tracks.

A bit OT: @Becky; What sort of bandwidth usage do you typically see from your servers? If possible, could you PM me a bandwidth log or stats to that effect?
I'm quite interested in hosting my own server, mainly for testing mods on real racers but I'm not sure how expensive it would be.

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+1, but should be scaled on the size of the track, smaller tracks allowing less cars than bigger ones.

40 drivers on a track like Fern Bay Club or Aston Cadet is asking for trouble.

i should be worked out by track length, similar to real life. say 1 car per 50 metres or something (not sure what the real life value is). so if your track was 2km you could have 40 cars.

+1 for more racers. Absolutely.

I do see one problem with this in the future though, related to automatic track rotation (which I'm assuming will be added in the future).

Imagine you're on a server running new track Blackwood Grand Touring, which supports 40 players. Everyone's happy, race ends. Next track up is Fern Bay Club which supports 23. What happens to the 17 people who don't get to join? They get pissed off, among other things.

I know the obvious response to that is "don't have smaller tracks in rotation with the larger ones" but that'd mean either ignoring the rotation feature or adding a range of large tracks and adding a whole load more work for the team.
I know that the longer Aston tracks would probably support a few more drivers as they are, but not as many as 17.

+1

When the track changes don't you all have to re-join the race, so everyone is kicked to spectator anyway? IIRC that's how Becky's thing does it. So if the car limit is lower, press join before everyone else does. The number of total connections should not change, so everyone can still hang around as spectators.

+1 totally! (including the scaling according to track length)

How anyone could be against this is really beyond me. It means more possibilities. Each server admin can already decide how many connections he wants to allow - so if your server is not capable of handling 42 slots, then set a lower number. And if you don't want to race with more people online (why would you not, though? :really, join a server that only allows fewer racers.

Hasn't this been discussed before somewhere? Maybe someone even got a link to a post by scawen commenting on this?

Anyway, I'm sure it will come -- probably somewhere on the road to S3, but who knows.

Quote from Bob Smith :

When the track changes don't you all have to re-join the race, so everyone is kicked to spectator anyway? IIRC that's how Becky's thing does it. So if the car limit is lower, press join before everyone else does. The number of total connections should not change, so everyone can still hang around as spectators.

You do, but that assumes you manage to load before everyone else does, which isn't always the case. And we don't have room to have those 17 people spectate either

I like the map scaling system that Battlefield 2 uses, but I'm not sure that kind of thing would work without some serious jiggery-pokery.

Maybe it wouldn't be all that hard to just stretch the home stretch to fit more people in

+1./

The track rotation thing can be managed by the players by voting for a new track that supports more players. Voting for an actual track and not just to end race would be another thing I'd like to see.