In light of the booboo I made last week opening a thread based on me mis-reading the connections list for the drivers list and in the end having the thread closed by scawen how embarrassing is that! I have a few questions that I never got the chance to ask.

What is maximum slots number? what would happen if one of our bigger hosts dedicated more bandwidth to one server, would the number of driver slots still be limited to 28 or does the speed of the hosts connection directly relate to how many cars it can host?

If not a big track, you could try it on a small map like car park, how fun would it be to have 60 or 70 cars having a laugh in the car park lol :munching_

What a scary idea

Although from a technical standpoint, it'd be interesting to see how many cars the software could take before just dying. Or the frame rate dropped so far it was unplayable.

Quote from Dajmin :

What a scary idea

Although from a technical standpoint, it'd be interesting to see how many cars the software could take before just dying. Or the frame rate dropped so far it was unplayable.

I wann do it PLEEEEEEEEASE?

We need three things.

1) A good host
2) lots of drivers
3) and it to be globally allowed.

Quote from CSU1 :

:munching_

For someone that posts so often on the forum you obviously don't read many of the threads as all the answers to your questions have been answered and answered by Scawen himself and probaly a dozen others

Moral of the story - Read more post less and you probably want get embarassed so easily next time

As to your question the max is about 28 the rest a just spectator slots, put there primarily for long races that require driver changes. The max number of cars is affected by the bandwidth of the server but its not sensed by LFS you have to set the max number of connections yourself, if you set it too high for your bandwidth the server will be laggy.

28 is the current max number of racers, but there can be a maximum of 48 connections.

Based on the figures for patch W9 (with a pps of 3);
23 connections, 23 racers = about 142.3KB/sec upload
48 connections, 23 racers = about 380KB/sec upload

Basically you need a decent upload to manage it, but there are lots of connections capable of doing this.

Clients would crap out long before decently connected servers.

Quote from Glenn67 :

For someone that posts so often on the forum you obviously don't read many of the threads as all the answers to your questions have been answered and answered by Scawen himself and probaly a dozen others

Moral of the story - Read more post less and you probably want get embarassed so easily next time

As to your question the max is about 28 the rest a just spectator slots, put there primarily for long races that require driver changes. The max number of cars is affected by the bandwidth of the server but its not sensed by LFS you have to set the max number of connections yourself, if you set it too high for your bandwidth the server will be laggy.

Hold on, I know the max is 28 and the rest being sepc. slots!
I though the rest of my post went on to explain that I was wondering if we did put 60 cars in the car park what would happen?

Would the host start to be overwhelmed by all those packets or would the users machine not be able to keep up? thus dropping FPS.

What I mean is. When for example one of the 500Servers is full with 28 drivers(48 connections) on-track(which it has been ) does the server cope or is there room for more?

E:
Ok, thanks Angry Angel, so it's mainly down to how fast the guests can upload their packets? But the host in theory, could cope.

Quote from CSU1 :

so it's mainly down to how fast the guests can upload their packets? But the host in theory, could cope.

The bandwidth requirements are high for hosts, for guests it is much much lower. Which is why some have managed to play LFS even on a 56k modem with 15 - 20 other drivers.

Dedicated hosts use very little PC resources but are very bandwidth hungry as for each connected active racer the number of packets it has to send increases exponentialy. So just a few more connections (cars in race) increases the ip traffic load alot - 60 active racer would require a minimum upload speed of around 880KB/sec for the host I'd estimate...and guestimate 17KB/sec for the guest PC thats with a PPS of 3.

As Glenn says, I meant graphically clients are more likely to bum out rather than in terms of internet connections

Hell, a decent specced PC starting from the back of the grid of a 23 racer server, with AA and AF enabled, running SO Classic might be struggling

Don't forget that the "smoothness" also affects the required bandwidth. 28 racers with a smoothness of 4 will need less upstream bandwidth than the same number of users with a smoothness of 6 or 9.

I thought 6 pps was the upper limit for Internet servers anyway? While 9 or so was for LAN play only, where bandwidth is unlikely to be an issue.

Quote from Bob Smith :

I thought 6 pps was the upper limit for Internet servers anyway? While 9 or so was for LAN play only, where bandwidth is unlikely to be an issue.

I don't recall of the top of my head, and I don't have LFS handy to check. I just remember it going up to at least 9, and down to at least 4.

Quote from Glenn67 :

for each connected active racer the number of packets it has to send increases exponentialy.
So just a few more connections (cars in race) increases the ip traffic load alot - 60 active racer would require a minimum upload speed of around 880KB/sec for the host I'd estimate...and guestimate 17KB/sec for the guest PC thats with a PPS of 3.

So 60 race slots require a minimum host upload speed of 880kb/s @ 3 pps.

What is max host upload speed with 60 race slots @ 3pps if 880k is minumum?
And what kind of upload speeds do fast servers run at?

just checked, LAN games go upto 12 PPS.