Our solution was to tell Jack to disconnect. Which he did, twice, when the problem became apparent. It took us some time to come to this decision, however.
edit: and the types of lag involved in the two situations you mentioned were quite different and required different responses.
As for Ventrilo/TS/IRC causing lag... I don't know about TS because I don't have much experience with it, but in the case of Ventrilo and IRC that's pretty laughable. I've never seen either contribute to lag the way that down/uploading files can. Never seen them contribute at all, to be honest.
Well you're mistaken about Ventrilo I think... Talking on Ventrilo really makes my connection suffer, so i tend not to talk too much That's probably because of my terrible upload rate though...
Ventrillo uses so little bandwidth it's hardly noticeable.
I only have 288kbps upstream (which is what? ..40kB/s ish) and i have no problem at all.
I believe Teamspeak is a little worse bandwidth wise (correct me if im wrong) but you have to have a pretty stone age connection for either of these to affect you whilst racing.
Yeah, I guess I'm pretty lucky in terms of the connection I have.
Anyway, the point is that all teams should be using some kind of voice communication, which should enable them to inform their teammates of a situation, and those non-driving teammates should be able to use one of the three or four methods available to inform the marshals.
But Benji and I will be discussing means for drivers to alert marshals directly, and you can expect some kind of statement from us on it soon.
If you have more suggestions, please keep voicing them. We're always open to ideas. What we're not open to are conspiracy theories, insinuations of bias, and general bashing.
Believe me, I do My team-mates we're saying I was lagging a lot on remote when i was talking, so I kept quiet for most of the race. Same with OLFSL, after the race I started talking and promptly I timed out...
Have you tried different codecs/audio bit rates in Ventrillo setup? some of them are incredibly low on bandwidth (obviously not the best sound quality but its better than nothing )
I've been talking with Starblue, and our idea is to create an insim command that's basically a "panic button" for drivers. Using it would send an alert message to all connected admins, containing the car number/driver name and sector. In essence, any driver that feels like a situation needs attention could press this button and an admin would see the message and investigate.
This could be used for all sorts of circumstances aside from SC-causing crashes, including cars out of fuel/stuck in sand, cars being blocked, etc. Theoretically, we could even create separate versions for each circumstance.
As for how it would be implemented, the best option we've discussed is to have them as text commands that drivers would bind to wheel buttons or ALT/CTRL-F# binds.
edit: after talking a little bit more, we realized it's possible for these alerts to even focus an admin's camera on the car in question, which would be just brilliant, IMO.
My opinion is.. it's a top-notch idea! I can't poke any holes in it.. it sounds like an ideal solution. Using a $command, you can also prevent the text spamming up the server too. It just does what it says on the tin!
The driver controlled alert sounds promising conceptually. It would be terrific if it can get implemented effectively while maintaining K.I.S.S.
As this is unquestionably directed at me, I will just leave a few points I'd like addressed for future races:
A) Talking Is Clearly against the rules in Qualifying/Race, And alternative methods of communications to the admins are available. It is unacceptable that arbitrarily (and against the currently written rules) the admins allow conversations to occur because people don't know the rules. Either change the rules or vow to enforce them. Ignorance has never been an excuse, but seemed to be so this past round. This ties into below.
B) Currently the pentalty for not running the correct ballast (while assuredly accidental is still cheating), is far less than that of a qualifier's errant finger while attempting a fuel fill change (and not knowing the rules goes unpunished). The discrepancies are boggling, and my suggestion is that the rules be not loosened, but revised for qualifying in that:
ANY infraction taking place Pre-Race Start (confimation thread, qualifying, ballast, blocking, etc) results in starting the race at the tail of the field.
C) Lag - There are no concrete rules written regarding what you did this past race parking a driver. I suggest adding something where if dangerous individual or server-wide lag becomes apparent, that you have 3 laps to get a driver change in there or black flag.
D) While it is admirable that you handled the my3id lag issue in-house, AFAIK nothing was mentioned about it on these forums. My team was struggling to figure out what was going wrong, and preparing to do a driver take-over in confusion. If you guys knew what the problem was, letting us know you were working on it would have been a great help.
In addition, it was discussed pretty thoroughly on IRC. During the race, we consider IRC/TS/Ventrilo to be the primary modes of communication between teams and marshals. Though we also use the forums, responding there takes an unwieldy amount of time in comparison.
edit: furthermore, you could have asked, yourselves, via any of the four communication methods available.
OK we get it. We need to have one non-driving team member on both the team ventrilo and admin teamspeak channels, or vis-a-versa. As all team should from this point on.
Lets move on now.
The button bind to "Admin Alert" sounds feasible. I wonder if it could open a button bind snafu can of worms. I think it is important to remember that an endurance race is a team event. As such as team members either driving or not need to keep in constant contact, and the team needs put themselves in a position to contact the race admins as situations warrant it, by whatever means they are comfortable with.
Between watching the racers, communicating amongst themselves, the tracker, and the pit lane applications the admins have an ever growing list of things that need to be done to keep this league running smoothly. I'd be very cautious in adding to that list without making sure that everything has adequate coverage. It is still early in the season, a few wrinkles need to be worked out, as they always do. We as drivers and the league orgainizers/admins will never be able to cover 100% of the issues that will arise over the course of a season. The best we all can hope for is to learn from each experience make adjustments and move on, and hope the adjustments made are appropriate.
Well, my feeling is that all an admin alert would do is bring our attention to a certain car, if our attention is available at that moment. And since the alert would be given to all admins simultaneously, if one admin is busy he would tell the others on Vent that someone else should address it.
Even if the system were "abused," all that would do is make us see more of the track. I don't really see any potential harm from it. And hopefully driver will be too busy driving to try to mess with admins by hitting extraneous key combos.
I think, that the "Panic button" idea is great. It's the best way to deal crashes and problems on track without having to write something and interrupting other racers.
I was watching on LFS remote of the start, and saw the bingle happen though hard to tell at the time, i think the admins did what they felt was right at the time.
You have to ask yourself if you were thrown in their position and doing the exact same thing they were doing getting ready for the green, would you have time to notice the bingle at the back, by the time the Green flag dropped even though it was before it, you couldnt call the safety car out just after the green it seems unreasonable.
Just my oppinion many other factors come into my mind of what could have been and what else could have been done, but im not going to write some lengthy thing about it, if i were an admin maybe a diffrent story *hint* lol.
Anyway was still a ripper of a race. And good job to Core.
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Dimitry Gerards (srdsprinter)
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by DeadWolfBones : No need for that kind of bickering.
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(Dimitry Gerards)
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by DeadWolfBones : No need for that kind of bickering.
My main goal in stirring the pot on the race start is to ensure that ALL the teams get a clean start at the beginning, during or at the end of an event.
I know the admins had their hands full and in my teams case (#30 car) it didn't make as large a difference since we're slower than most teams. We can only try to be consistent to gain positions. I do however, think the right decision was not made and that's ok as we all learn from it.
I cannot and will not devote several hundreds of laps practicing for an event if I feel that I cannot get a fair start or restart in just because we're at the back of the grid.
I have no doubt that with the efforts of the admins and staff in developing and improving the tools they plan to use things will get better and stay fun.
That's probably because of my terrible upload rate though...
My team-mates we're saying I was lagging a lot on remote when i was talking, so I kept quiet for most of the race. Same with OLFSL, after the race I started talking and promptly I timed out...
, i thought i had it bad 
